Designing a new project for the Digital Future Lab (Part 1): Tutorials.

I was assigned to a different project in the Digital Future Lab. This quarter, I will be working on the prototype of a brand new game. I am not allowed to share the details of the genre of the project, but the project is intended to be designed by our new design team who is composed from University of Washington Tacoma students. For now, I am the only developer working on this project. My goal is to start the initial design of the theme and the gameplay mechanics of the game, and then hand the design document to the Tacoma team so that they can start designing content for the game. The design document would also have a set of requirements that the design team should keep in mind when designing content for the game.

I started by doing a lot of research on what defines a good game design. My research included studying "The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses", I also looked up a lot of blogs and videos that are posted online by professional game designers like GDC videos. This has helped me design the initial theme and problem statement of the game.

Then I started by meeting with our design team and analyzing some of the design issues that we faced in our previous games, and figure out how to reduce their chances from happening again. One big issue that we all agreed on was how to design tutorials for our new game. Our games typically had an issue in trying to explain its rules to new players, Our tutorials would end up having to explain every new mechanic of the game. Because of that, our tutorials for games like "Ghostlight Manor" would take about 10 minutes to finish, potentially more. Not only that, our tutorials heavily hold the player's hand to make sure they do every step correctly. This leads the first few levels to become very boring due to how easy they are.

In order to fix this issue, I wrote a section in the design document that explains to the new designers some techniques they could use in order to design tutorials that do not take forever to finish. For example, one of the games that showed up a lot in my design research. That game is titled "Shovel Knight". The game is a side scroller platformer that won universal acclaim from its reviewers, the game also won "Best Indie Game for 2014 by the video game awards". One of the things that I noticed by playing the game is that the game has no text tutorials. Based on my observations, the game does that by introducing every mechanic with a problem that can only be solved using one method, and progressively making the mechanic harder and harder until the player masters the mechanic.

The example I wrote in the design document was regarding a portal mechanic. If I wanted to introduce a new mechanic in the game, instead of writing a text tutorial that explains how portals work. I would simply create a dead end room with one portal in it. When the player reaches this room, they will find out that there is only one way to reach the next section, which is to get close to the weird looking object in the room that they never saw before. When they do, they will find out that they are now in a different section in the level. This way they will draw the conclusion that what they saw was some sort of portal that can send them to a different section of the level, and they do not have to be interrupted by a text box to explain that to them. After that, the designer could then progressively increase the challenge by featuring two portals for example, and then more next time, etc.

Another requirement I wrote in the document is to make sure that the tutorials can all be skipped. if the user saw the tutorial already, They should have a way to play the game without seeing the tutorial, and only access it when the user requests it.