Re: [GD-Design] Training Advice

[Brian H. <ho...@py...>]

> I'm currently writing the intro training level to our game.  I'm
> curious if anybody has any advice on how much to teach the player
> before the game starts in earnest.  

Nothing.  The game starts THEN you teach the player.  The last thing 
you want to do is sit a player down, tell them show to play, then have 
them go off and play.  

It aggravates impatient players.  It enforces a "I'm in school" mode 
of thinking.  And it has very low retention because typically a 
tutorial will overwhelm a player with a lot of information that they 
learn out of context and without enough repetition to internalize.

So what happens is that three hours into the game they go, "Shit, I 
need to do a scissors kick jump...how do I do that again?"  Or they 
simply forget that they had some facility that was mentioned in the 
tutorial but faded from memory.

> whereby the game starts immediately and the player advances to a
> new situation, the game stops and the player receives instructions
> on what to do, then waits for the player to perform the action and
> then continues.  This keeps the game moving, but there are a lot of
> things to know, and the intro level is getting longer and longer.

Right direction, just don't try to shove it all into one level.  
Advance Wars on the GBA easily takes the cake for best instructional 
system ever -- you "preplay" the game for 10 missions to learn the 
basics, then the REAL campaign starts up, but those first ten all feel 
like a real part of the game.

> Are there any rules of thumb besides the obvious: keep it minimal
> and don't show variations of the same thing.

As a rule people learn best by learning one new thing, practicing it 
in different situations, and then moving on.  Each time you move on to 
a new thing, remember to integrate the previous thing as much as 
possible so that they're constantly practicing old things.  It's a 
gradual learning curve with lots of remedial steps, but with something 
new all the time as well.

Brian