What Makes a Good Game Tutorial?

I hope you're all doing swell and are ready to dive into today's post with me! Buckle up, it's a long one.

"What makes a good game tutorial?" is a question we've had to answer while working on Vahrin's Call.

Our tutorial has changed many times over the game's development cycle and through much re-working and refinement, we now finally have a tutorial we are happy with.

Before we get to the current tutorial though, I want to talk about some of our older iterations. I think it would be interesting to discuss how the tutorial for Vahrin's Call has evolved over time and more importantly, why we believe the final version works much better than our previous ones.

So without any further ado, let's dive in!

The earliest tutorial we have footage of is one that you may recognise, as we talked about it almost 3 years ago now in one of our earliest dev logs: Vahrin's Call Dev Log #02

In this version, you found yourself in a small, isolated and overgrown area, alongside one of the main protagonists. This character served as your guide, teaching you the basic controls of the game.

As this tutorial was focused on 'learning-by-doing', this character would tell you how to do something and then you would be required to do that thing in order to progress to the next part of the tutorial.

We liked this approach, as it ensured you were being taught everything you needed to know, early on. We were focused on teaching you everything at the very beginning of the game, as we didn't want you to be confused about the controls mid-way through your adventure.

Additionally, we believed that forcing you to perform an action in order to move on was a good way of ensuring you knew what each button did moving foward.

"forcing" is an important word to remember as we continue..

While this tutorial functioned as intended and was successful at teaching you the basics of the game, it was incredibly hand-holdy. Slowly progressing through the tutorial and not being able to go at your own pace felt like you were being babied, resulting in quite the frustrating experience.

Moreover, we found that by having the tutorial take place in its own seperate area, we were taking too long to get you into the action. It reinforced the feeling of "Ugh okay, let's get this tutorial over and done with so I can move on and get started with the actual game."

Integrating the tutorial into the first area of the game (the Barathrum Forest), and having it flow smoothly with the gameplay was our next objective.

Introducing tutorial number 2!

This is the tutorial that stuck around for the longest time, as we found it to be a significant improvement from the previous iteration.

As I mentioned, we aimed to integrate this tutorial into the the Barathrum Forest. We used the same pop ups from the previous tutorial (after a visual upgrade) and set them to appear on screen as you progressed through the area.

This approach felt much smoother. You were no longer required to press a certain button or perform a specific action in order to move on, you could now progress at your own pace.

Having a much larger area to work with also meant we had more freedom to teach you everything you needed to know about the game, and adjust the pacing of