We have just released an update to improve the WarPath tutorial, here I’ll explain why our old tutorial was as stupid as the cast of Glee and how our new tutorial is the pinnacle of human achievement.
Our first mistake was to make the Tutorial an option on the Menu screen. I somehow managed to forget my entire history of playing games and assembling furniture (that would make a good game). Like most gamers, I never chose to do the tutorial or read instructions but because of some strange thought process of mine I expected WarPath players to do so.
To resolve this whoopsy, we changed it so the tutorial gets loaded the first time people load WarPath, HAHA! You have to play my tutorials now, I am victorious! This will be so until the tutorial is completed, or they quit to the main menu.
Now we have you trapped in our tutorial world, you will encounter the second boo boo.
As Mr. Know it All you don’t bother reading our carefully crafted text, so you hit the screen until something happens, maybe after a few minutes you give in to the madness of reading the instructions. I can’t blame you really, I don’t read instructions if I don’t have to, I count it as losing. So, rather than our literary excellence, we replace the tutorial with pointy fingers.
These pointy fingers move around guiding you to what you have to do, and when you follow them you realize how to control everything in the game, and maybe one day how to control the world.
So, what have we learned today?
1. Make tutorials happen at the start of the game, nobody chooses to load tutorials.
2. Make it more visual than text.
3. Make it interactive rather than a lecture.
Do you allow your players to skip the tutorial if they’ve done it before? Is the tutorial just part of playing your first move. I’d like to see a tutorial on how to skip the tutorial. :p