Teaching Moments

How developers build the tutorials you skip.

- Xalavier Nelson Jr

Luca Redwood makes puzzle games. Quite good ones, if the reception of You Must Build a Boat and 10,000,000 are anything to go by. His new game, Photographs, is a narrative puzzle adventure that uses adaptive tutorials. Nothing is revealed about what you’re supposed to do or how you’re supposed to do it unless you trigger invisible code that reveals a specific bit of information. The vast majority of instruction doesn’t use text for a simple reason, “Some people will read your text,” Redwood says, “but most won’t.”

It’s a common piece of knowledge in development circles that no matter how important it is, many players will avoid or miss pieces of your tutorial. They clearly need to know how to play the game – how do you move past their natural reluctance with as much success as possible?

“A lot of designers talk about how certain types of tutorials don’t respect the player’s intelligence, but I think these designers work on games that can afford to leave a lot of players behind,” says Bobby Lockhart, who specialises in educational games and is the lead developer of indie game Codemancer. “As a designer of learning games I don’t really have that luxury, so I try to include as many ways of teaching as is feasible.” Lockhart identified a sequence necessary to bring players through a learning process successfully: teaching them why they’re doing things, what they’ll be doing, and