Alright guys, someone started another forum game, so now we need to balance it out with another intellectual conversation.

As you know, we have quite a lot of different tiles and mechanics planned for Aeon. One major challenge that we have will be to ensure that new players will not be overwhelmed or confused by all of this. It is our job to present these tiles and systems in the most intuitive way possible.

For more info on how to go about doing this, I have some great videos on this subject:

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/easy-games
This one will help us when designing the campaign levels in general, but the second half of the video starts talking about what makes for good tutorials.

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/tutorials-101
This is the continuation of the previous episode, going more in-depth into how to make your tutorials great.

And if that's not enough for you, here's another, much longer video that looks into how awesome Mega Man X's tutorial was:
WARNING: very excessive use of bad words. In fact, I might not even be allowed to post this on here... http://youtu.be/8FpigqfcvlM

So now that you're enlightened on what makes a good tutorial, what do you think are some of the mistakes that HATPC made in its tutorial levels? White might be the best way for us to introduce players to all of our mechanics? Do we even need designated tutorial levels? And what if the player decides to start making levels before they've learned everything from the tutorials?

Like I've said many times in the past week or two, we're hoping to get an Aeon demo out by Christmas, but until then, you can try experimenting with some of these theories by making your own HATPC tutorial levels.

Without having watched/read the links, a slight flaw was not introducing all tiles that were in the game (Water Tap Crates, but also Gems). However, we will not be able to do that if we're going to include all tiles, unless we're making the game too filled with tutorials of different kinds.

What tiles shall be introduced in our tutorials?

Once the tutorials are made, i can test them out to see how easily accessible every bit of information is.

If you watch the megaman video, you'll see how you can introduce concepts to the player very subtly simply by how the level is laid out. For example, say the first tutorial level in HATPC didn't have any of those dumb text screens. The level still would have done a good job of introducing you to the difference between wooden and steel crates simply by how they are positioned in the start of the level.

This allows us to not have to formally introduce all of the tiles. We can instead rely on the player's intuition. For instance, if they know what a steel crate is, and they know how arrow crates work, then we don't have to introduce them to steel arrow crates.

There was a game that was posted on here many months ago that I can't find the link to. I think it was a newgrounds game where you controlled some kind of blob that could eat and spit out certain fluids. It was a cool game, and it had user levels. But because its "tutorial" was stretched throughout the entire campaign, players had to finish the lengthy campaign before they were introduced to all of the mechanics that the level editor offered. This inadvertently made user levels feel as if they were spoilers to the campaign, which relied so heavily on waiting for the perfect moment to introduced new concepts.

Because Aeon is designed to be all about user-made levels, we'd want to make our tutorial as small as possible, so that new players could easily get introduced to all of the basics without having to do much work for it.

It's also best to find as many people as possible to test the tutorial levels on and watch how they react to it. Every good game needs playtesting, even if it's just with your friends and family.

In your first paragraph of your first post, were you referring to my "multiple words" game? :3

I believe you mean Spewer, Livio?

yes! to both questions...

Like Isa, without clicking on any links (I not a busy man), I'll say this. I'd prefer no text boxes, or at least ones that don't prohibit your movement (like signposts in SMF2). We could divide tutorial levels so each one covers a certain state of object (breakable level, semi-breakable level, indestructible level) or by type of object (missile (we're using those, right?) level, bomb level, "boulder" level), or by character (level to introduce character A's abilities, B's abilities etc.) and integrate what they've learned occasionally into more comprehensive levels like they do in..... something?

I also think we shouldn't include EVERYTHING in tutorials like certain glitches, advanced techniques or secrets. Sometimes it's fun to discover stuff yourself thru an accidental button combo or sheer luck. INTELLECTUAL TOPIC FTDUBBAYAH!

Our idea was to have one level set for each character, as well as a final level set using all characters (except Hugsy) for the escape.
My idea, that I think I have brought up before, was to include a tutorial set of levels where the characters escape the ship. One level for each of the characters (except Hugsy) where you are introduced to the controls, the various objects and the characters.

The biggest mistake in HatPC were the unavoidable text pop-ups. Something many Flash games do these days is have floating text. Simply two sentences that explain what you need to do without actually interrupting the gameplay or blocking a large portion of the screen.

Lol@ http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/tutorials-101, "triple click the player'' - I laughed so hard XD

I haven't yet watched the mega man thingie(20 minutes long? ) but IMO, we should have one big tutorial level for the game mechanics - for example, having stuff like



is a good example that shows you gravity, arrows, platforms and spikes breaking. so unlike neopets, we will have our levels interesting. we'll show the user our concepts by playing them. the way I see it, after such an example, a minipuzzle (really, really mini, I mean) to try it out can do great.

after we show them the regular mechanics, clearly they will not need any further explanation about diagonal arrows for example. the way neopets showed boxes vs metals was good, so like someone said above, after having metals and arrows explain, a diagonal metal arrow is obvious. Now, when they know(or at least familiar with) the mechanics, we can introduce the other character's abilities and stuff. if we need to tell them with text, remember we need as little text as we can; and as people said, it should flow with the game and not interrupt. it could appear in the background, for example, like in a video with subtitles somehow.

except for the test popups, I think neopets made the mistake of not being creative. tutorial 1 was just way too big. the whole middle section with the ladders was useless and annoying. but generally I don't think their tutorial sucked so bad. tut6 is a really stupid tutorial of course, but the idea is understood, I guarantee.

If we ever need text, I think it would be cool to have the text appear like tutorial arrows do, or even like the text in HATIC, where it scrolls with the background.

Here's an idea I got on how to introduce the player to corner-jumping
The first crawl space makes sure the player associates small cramped areas with crawling. And so when they see a crawl space that's been elevated a bit, it's more likely that they will try crawl-jumping. And the final crawl space teaches the player that they can use this trick to jump into high crawl spaces as well.

I wonder if there's a way we could introduce players, without using text, to the idea that you need to collect all of the power boxes in order to open the door and win the game. Perhaps we could do something like this:
The player is drawn to the right by the chain of collectables. By the time they collect them all, there's a dead end, so they really have no where to go but to backtrack. But they should also be drawn to the door's opening animation, walking towards it to see what happened. Hopefully the win screen is designed in such a way as to tell the user that they've won the level, and perhaps the transition should be set up in a way as to not startle them. In fact, that's something cool HATPC had going for it. The game would freeze for a second or two when you got into the door, signifying that something important has happened, and then you'd see the win screen.

i think with the actual levels, there should be three levels open at the the time, so if they cannot beat one level, then they can still play the rest of the levels.

The idea was to have each character have its own set of levels and have the first level of each set unlocked from the start. So you start with 5 levels to play and just progress with each character individually.