A short guide to designing immersive, fun game tutorials
Tutorials are often one of the first friction points in your game that can turn away players. If your tutorial is boring or annoying with no option to skip, players may become frustrated and drop your game.
But tutorials are often necessary to make sure that your player knows how to get the most out of your game, so how can you make them the best they can be?
If possible, give a skip option
If your tutorial is embedded into the story of your game, which I personally would like to encourage it to be, skipping the tutorial may not be possible. But if you have a set portion of your game that is purely for tutorial purposes with no actual impact to the experience of your game, you NEED to have a skip tutorial button. This is good for people replaying the game, people who already have played similar games and understand the mechanic, and highly impatient people. For the highly impatient, it’s also good to give an option to come back to the tutorial in the menu somewhere, in case they realize part way in they actually don’t understand how to play as well as they thought they did.
That being said, it’s important to keep in mind that if you follow the tips below, there’s a good chance your tutorial WON’T be skippable. As a general rule, skippable tutorials are bad tutorials.
Make your tutorials interactive
Think of this as “show, don’t tell” but for a tutorial. If you are taking the player through how to perform a game mechanic, have them actually PERFORM this mechanic, don’t just them how. It’s actually okay if it takes them a couple of goes to nail down the mechanic (especially for combat) because making a mistake and figuring out what you did wrong is a great way to learn.
Spread out the tutorial
Let players learn things WHEN they need to, not all at the start. A good tutorial feels like you just started playing the game. I think Persona 5 Royale has one of my favorite tutorials of all time, because it doesn’t actually feel like a tutorial at all. You’re literally just playing the game with some helpful hints here and there. With the enormous amount of content and mechanics the game has, this is essential.
Use your tutorial for world building
Your tutorial stage can be a chance for players to really become immersed in the world of your game. If a tutorial can feel as though you are really learning with your playable character, that will increase immersion for the player. As a quick and easy example that works in almost any game, you can have a non-playable character teach your character the ropes, winding story with instruction.
References and further reading
(Video) Tutorials 101 — How to Design a Good Game Tutorial — Extra Credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCPcn-Q5nKE
(Article) 10 tips for designing a game tutorial — https://www.filamentgames.com/blog/10-tips-designing-game-tutorial/
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