A couple of new players have played HATPC Reborn through CaveGen and have commented to me about how difficult it is. Hannah and the Pirate Caves is a pretty inaccessible game for those who aren't used to its quirks. The jump in difficulty from the HATPC tutorial to user levels is massive.

I'm challenging the Interguild community to work together to create a new tutorial for HATPC, one that teaches the basic mechanics and also help them build the skill set to deal with the complexities of user levels. These can be stored and curated on the CaveGen public level directory.

Tutorial messages and checkpoints will probably be useful, so these levels may need to be stored on the Interguild at first, or stored in CaveGen without events. Once I've implemented event support in CaveGen, they can be moved to the directory then. Or even, with Droid's consent, added to the Reborn game itself.

My goal is to ramp up the number of new players as Reborn and CaveGen grow. In order to do this, I need your help to make it easier for new players to learn the game.

I have actually been thinking about doing a remake of the HATPC main levels for a while now that would do a better job of introducing the various game mechanics. I'd be happy to participate in this. I have many ideas about what should be done differently.

One thing that I think would be a vast improvement over the HATPC main levels would be to slowly introduce each game mechanic rather than stuffing everything into a few tutorial levels. For example, the first five levels would only feature tiles like metal and wooden crates, then maybe after that boulders would be introduced, then several levels later arrows, etc. This would allow each tile and its functions to be introduced gradually and further in depth. It would also allow for a natural progression in difficulty. This is how most games introduce mechanics and the fact that the HATPC main levels do not do this and instead have tutorial levels is IMO one of the game's biggest flaws.

You're right about the gradual introduction of mechanics. The best tutorials present you with a new mechanic without telling you what to do with it, but make it really obvious how to use it to progress. Then you learn it without reading any text and feel smart for figuring it out yourself.

I'd like to see a discussion of what mechanics to introduce, in what order, and in what form.

Beyond basic mechanics, I feel there should also be some moderately difficult levels that combine multiple skills in one level. i.e. meta-mechanics that can be derived from combinations of basic ones. These levels should be easier than most of the user levels on the Interguild, but harder than the original HATPC tutorial. A stepping stone between basic understanding and the high level of mastery demanded by many of our levels (and the reason why I can hardly make any progress in them any more).

While discussing this, I encourage everyone to draft these caves in CaveGen and publish them to the public directory on there so they can be easily accessed and iterated on.

Gradually introducing mechanics sounds like a good idea. The order in which the mechanics are introduced is probably fine (with the possible exception of enemies which could be introduced much earlier), but giving the player time to actually play around with the mechanics before dumping more on them. Something like the single-portal gun section in Portal.

So... about this tutorial. Any ideas on how I can help facilitate the process of building it? Would it help if I outlined a set of basic mechanics and allocated people to building a tutorial level for each one? Ideally, the tutorial would be consistent in its design, so I feel like everyone should be involved in tweaking and refining them, rather than just one person. It should be a collaborative effort.

What if I made a special tutorial account on CaveGen, made a bunch of empty levels with leading placeholder names (e.g. Level 5 - Dynamite Chains) and gave access to a few level builders on here who want to contribute?

Outline is always the first move. Make a lost of the concelt you want to introduce and which level does that.

Tutorial 1 for example; moving, jumping, gravity, gold, ladders.

I think the first 6 tutorials are actually good. What we should do is an advanced tutorial. For example, one level to include a big SEEABLE dynamite chain and a small, easy puzzle with arrows going through each other. More tutorial messages are good, too.

So a list first.  

The thing about an advanced tutorial is that it would have to explain all the HATPC mechanics that the original tutorials don't. The original tutorials don't even explain some simple things such as the mechanics of how objects fall, or how you bounce off of crates, or how boulders roll off one another, or how duck-jumping into a crate that is under a platform won't make you bounce off, etc. And it's IMO not a natural progression to introduce every mechanic of HATPC and to then tell the player how wooden boxes work, which is why I think we should remake the tutorials from the ground up.

Yeah, I think Kro is right - the new tutorial should explain a lot of mechanics that simply aren't covered in the original tutorial and should probably do so in a more gradual way.

Probably the first thing to do would be to make a list of things that need to be introduced via tutorial. And probably not a tutorial in the sense of dedicated tutorial levels, but a tutorial that spans the entire campaign (or a large part of it) explaining and exploring mechanics as they are introduced. In the interest of catching all the mechanics that need to be put into a tutorial, I'll make a thread with a header that lists all the things to be introduced by tutorial so that we can gather and discuss them there, then we can work on ordering them and actually designing levels.

I'm pretty sure Jell started this page with a manual somewhen, so there should be a list already existing of all the mechanisms of the tricks we've found.