Tutorials can make or break a game: A brief analysis of the design of a tutorial for new players

The existence of tutorials makes players love and hate them, but it is undeniable that tutorials are an indispensable part of most games, especially those with innovative experiences. How to design a reasonable tutorial is not only related to whether players can play the game smoothly, but also the most important first impression of the game.

Game tutorials and interaction design

Various experiences in life will leave habits in the players' minds. By utilizing these habits, you can achieve twice the result with half the effort in game interactions. Red makes people nervous, blue makes people calm, and green makes people feel safe. These psychological studies are widely used in UI interaction design. In interaction design, only these appropriate visual cues can convey information that is enough for players to understand the game settings.

So some people say that a truly good interactive experience does not require a tutorial. The reason why Apple products are so popular is because of their excellent interactive design. Even the elderly and children who have no experience in operating electronic products can learn basic operations by instinct.

Fruit Ninja tutorial and UI interaction fusion

There are also many excellent examples of this in game products. Take the famous iOS original game "Fruit Ninja" as an example. Although mobile game users today are already accustomed to gesture operations on touch-screen devices, when the first version of "Fruit Ninja" was launched on the App Store, users had never played games in this interactive way. How to teach users to quickly get started with swiping the screen became a major problem faced by all touch-screen operation games at the time.

Most games solve this problem by abruptly informing users with pop-up images or text, but Fruit Ninja uses a more ingenious method. Fruit Ninja integrates gameplay into the UI, and changes the interaction of UI buttons from the traditional click method to the slicing operation that is consistent with the gameplay. Players need to cut through the many options on the game menu before officially entering the game - this means that any player who enters the official game must have learned the key operation of swiping the screen and are eager to try it out. The entire tutorial is completed in one go without the player noticing, which is amazing.

The role of game tutorials

Since excellent interactive design does not require tutorials, is a pure game tutorial necessary? To answer this question, I am afraid we must first define a game tutorial.

Judging from most of the bad player experiences, the game tutorial is just a process, which most of the time means compulsory choreography and performance. This compulsory process breaks the integrity and rhythm of the game experience.

From the designer's perspective, the tutorial should be considered as part of the overall game experience, in which players can continuously acquire new knowledge. Therefore, the tutorial should not be limited to a mandatory process, but should be presented comprehensively by various game systems such as UI interaction, task system, achievement system, prompt box, etc. Let players understand the game settings, logic and ideas in a simple and rhythmic way, laying the foundation for players to study the game more deeply and challenge the game.

So, generally speaking, the purpose of a tutorial is to help players get started with the game, but for an excellent game, a mandatory tutorial is not necessary. Because to achieve the purpose of a tutorial, as long as there is a comprehensive design that allows players to continue to have new understandings and new interests in the game, and the method is better.

The scale of the tutorial

The novice tutorial is a special game tutorial, especially in the field of mobile games. The mobile game market has a large and mixed user base, and the main audience is mostly users who lack basic game operation habits. Therefore, the novice tutorial is the most important part of mobile games, which can easily cause mobile game designers to fall into the trap of lengthy tutorials that cover every detail.

In fact, the role of the tutorial is very clear. The first and most basic role of the tutorial is to explain the basic game operations and ideas (this usually only requires a few mandatory steps to complete). The more important role is to stimulate the player's desire to actively explore the game system and gameplay - this requires designers to cleverly use the multiple game systems from the beginning of the game to "escort" the enthusiasm of new players. On the one hand, this is reflected in the mandatory process must be limited and reserved, and on the other hand, it is reflected in timely task goals and reward incentives to continuously allow users to be exposed to fresh elements of the game design.

Fallout Shelter's tutorial tends to let players explore on their own

At the recent E3 Expo, Fallout Shelter, released by veteran stand-alone game maker Bethesda, was a promotional game for Fallout 4, but it was made with great care in every detail. Like traditional business mobile games, Fallout Shelter uses a mandatory tutorial to explain basic game operations such as construction and assignment. However, the game abandons the usual practice of forcibly displaying every operation. After informing users of the basic game operations, the mandatory tutorial ends in a timely manner, and a text pop-up window is used to help players when they click on anything new. The entire tutorial ends within a few minutes, which not only explains the basic operations of the game, but also cultivates the habit of players trying to click on new things. It is concise and effective.

Common mistakes in tutorial design

As the first impression of players, errors in the novice tutorial may not only lead to user loss, but also have the adverse consequence of misleading users to develop wrong gaming habits, which in turn backfires on the freedom of game design. It can be said that there is no zuo no die.

1) Long-winded and unskippable dialogue

Even in classic RPG masterpieces, we always see players frantically pressing the A button just to quickly skip the dialogue. The boredom and embarrassment caused by the lack of literary literacy or aesthetic taste can be imagined. If the dialogue cannot be quickly skipped at this time, the consequences of the resulting bad experience are foreseeable and will definitely be devastating.

The copywriting in the tutorial should try to maintain an objective stance and tone, which can help players get the key information as quickly as possible to get through the mandatory process. When it comes to the statement of teaching functions, any modifiers, modifiers, and humorous witticisms are redundant, and their existence will only make impatient players angry.

2) Lengthy and uninterruptible

As mentioned above, the time and number of steps of the mandatory tutorial should be kept as small as possible. A lengthy and "detailed" mandatory tutorial will not only fail to capture the player's curiosity to explore the game's functions, but will also destroy the player's patience and make the player lose interest in the game quickly. If the entire tutorial cannot be interrupted or exited, then the user is likely to be lost before the end of the tutorial.

This is especially true for mobile games, where the characteristics of mobile devices dictate that being able to interrupt the game at any time is the minimum functional requirement for every game. If a game really needs a long mandatory tutorial step, then it must be ensured that the process can be archived at any time.

3) Misleading and vague terms

It is inevitable that there will be some complicated concepts in various systems of the game. The words (mostly nouns) used to define the concepts may be unfamiliar or easily ambiguous. The correspondence between these nouns and concepts may be clear to the game designer, but it is a completely unfamiliar definition to the user. In order to let the user quickly understand the game system, it is necessary to strictly define and distinguish these concepts and definitions. Imagine how much of a headache it is for users to understand and distinguish a game with similar categories such as decorations, collectibles, collections, and accessories.

4) Force players to make choices

If there are choices in the mandatory process, please give players real choices, unless the consequences of different options really have no impact on the subsequent game process.

Any choice that makes players feel disadvantaged should not be mandatory - this is mainly reflected in the IAP currency usage tutorials of many games. At the beginning of the game, users usually get a lot of initial IAP currency for free. On the one hand, these currencies are used as the user's game start-up funds, and on the other hand, they are usually consumed during the novice tutorial process. Although the number of currencies left by the user is pre-set by the game designer, the experience of being given first and then forcibly consumed in the tutorial will only make the player feel negative.

5) Cluttered visual guides

Dazzling light effects, flickering, and shaking. In order to highlight "important" functions, a large number of game designers, led by domestic online games, prefer to attract players' attention through simple and crude UI rather than delicate game experience. Abuse of visual guidance ultimately leads to a messy and crowded game interface.

The visual guidance of the game UI is like an ink dot on a white paper. Without any light or movement, one ink dot can attract the player's attention. But if there are 100 ink dots on the white paper, it will be difficult to make the player pay attention to one of them. Appropriately folding and merging game functions and streamlining the process can not only make the game tutorial look more friendly, but also be the intention of the game system design.

6) Disdain the IQ of players

This is the most frustrating aspect of most bad tutorials, and it stems from a widely circulated but misinterpreted interaction design principle: "Treat users as ***." The original meaning of this sentence is that designers should think about the game experience from the perspective of the broadest user group, without any understanding of the game details and in a non-professional way, rather than really treating players as unthinking ***.

This design obviously makes people feel that their IQ has been insulted many times.

This wrong design idea has led to a lot of overly "enthusiastic" forced tutorial experiences: the whole screen is blacked out because the player can't find the guide cursor; a dialog box is added to follow because the player doesn't know what the button means; full voice is added because the player is too lazy to read the text... The designer wants to get out of the screen and hold the player's finger to look at the screen. In such an experience, the player doesn't need to think, read, or even know what he is doing, just follow the instructions and click all the way, but this is useless! In fact, the player can't remember anything.

Conclusion

Hearthstone's excellent tutorial successfully brought a large number of players who had never played card games into the card game competition; however, the early version of Eve Online (EVE) had a poor tutorial, which made such an excellent MMORPG almost ignored in the first few years of operation in China. A game may become a classic because of its excellent tutorial, but it can also be obliterated and destroyed because of its failed tutorial. Paying attention to the design of the tutorial from the perspective of player experience is the key to the success of the tutorial.