There are many frustrating aspects of game development, each one more soul-destroying than the last. For today, I want to talk about one that not only hurts developers but consumers as well — onboarding and tutorials and how despite for the people who literally create games, it can be painful to try and tell someone how to play their game.
Holding Hands
Tutorials are a necessary evil when it comes to game dev no matter the genre. In today’s market with the rise of YouTubers and streamers, it is possible for anyone to find your game, and the argument that you’re too small to worry about onboarding has long passed.
From a design standpoint, understanding how to onboard people and display your game are essential if you want to grow as a developer and for your game to succeed in the greater market. Most people will quit a game within the first ten minutes of starting it up, AKA: your tutorial and opening area.
Even though tutorials have been done to death for many games and established genres, this is a nonnegotiable point for your game — it must have some kind of onboarding to it. Every game can be someone’s first, and you don’t want to ruin a chance of making a lifelong fan of your game just because you decided to ignore onboarding.
The tutorial for a game can take many forms depending on the genre. Some games literally make their first level the tutorial, complete with prompts and onboarding. Other games may have a separate tutorial or tutorial scenario if we’re talking about strategy games. No matter what, there are vital parts of your design that your tutorial should cover.
What You Need to Onboard
The most obvious point are the general controls — how does someone literally play your game? While expert fans will scoff at being told for the infinite time to press the analog stick to move or A and D, this is still good form that needs to be included.
Once you get past the basics, your tutorial must include any elements or rules unique to your game. If you’re building a strategy game, an X-Com like, whatever, if your game has something different to it, that must be covered in the tutorial. For any abstract-based game, if you have mechanics that don’t behave like the traditional elements of your game, then there must be a specific point made to the player.
The goal is to explain to the player what are they doing, how do they do it, and why they are doing it, for every system in your game. By the time the tutorial is done, the player should have an understanding of what do they need to do to win your game and how it is played.
What is often the killer for strategy games is that onboarding only goes over what the controls are, not how to start learning how to play (source: Author)
What is often difficult for designers is to separate onboarding from just telling the player what to do. There is a difference between saying “You want to focus on hiding behind high cover to protect your units,” vs “just click here.” A breakdown in logic is often the quit point for people when they realize that they don’t know what they’re doing, and the game doesn’t seem to be giving them proper advice.
It’s a hard line to walk between too much and too little information, as both can ruin your game in the player’s eyes.
Over boarding
What we see more often than not from new developers is over-embellishing the onboarding of their game in a number of ways. The most popular is the lore dump — minutes of exposition and important characters and terms before the player even knows how to move their character or what the game is about. I’ve seen games that start with a lot of exposition, put in a mini tutorial, do more exposition, and then have another tutorial that goes over the things that were already done in the previous tutorial.
While you don’t want your onboarding to be too small (as I’ll talk about next), the player shouldn’t be exposed to concepts and exposition before they even know how to play. Within the tutorial itself, you want things to be “snappy” to move the player through the different mechanics and elements of your gameplay. Words are your enemy in this respect — you want to be as concise as possible while still providing information to the player.
Good onboarding teaches the player when its relevant, with Celeste, advanced maneuvers were available from the get-go, but were not required until further in. (source: Author)
There is no video game out there that should require more than 30 minutes of play just to get started. Some games do break down their tutorials into moderate and advanced lessons which are optional, and that’s an option to use.
A good tutorial does the job and is over before you know it. However, being over too soon is the opposite problem for designers.
Under boarding
Different genres require different lessons with onboarding, some can get by with a few seconds of onboarding; sometimes more. But the one universal factor is that the player needs to know how to play the game after it’s done.
Not providing enough onboarding usually occurs in games that feature unique elements and systems to them. If the player finishes your tutorial, goes to the first fight, or loads the first map, and is immediately lost as to what’s happening, then you have a problem.
In an attempt to not overwhelm the player, some designers like to stagger their onboarding across levels — with the intent being to introduce essential elements when they are relevant. Doom Eternal did this really well with the tutorial introductions for each new enemy type. An example I ran into that had a problem with this method was Magenta Horizon, a challenging action game with its own take on action design and how to engage with enemies.
The issue I had with the tutorial was that while it introduced the basics, it did not mention several vital combos and maneuvers the player had access to; several of which would help against some of the more aggressive enemy types that they were fighting. These messages came up later in the game, but way after the point where they player could have really used this information, and the game was patched after my play to introduce a few more of those messages earlier.
4X and Grand Strategy titles are painful for new players, as just telling someone what a GUI element does means nothing when it comes time to figure out how to play. (Source: Author)
If the player has access to mechanics and abilities from the onset, then you must onboard those to the player early in the game; not after an hour + of playing. For games with abilities and options locked at the beginning, you can wait on tutorials for them until they are brought into the game.
Never assume that some tech or maneuver is known to everyone in a game. One of the most common examples of this kind of tutorial is having a mention that down + jump will let a character fall through a platform. This is something that almost every single metroidvania or action/adventure game has these days, but it is still referenced at the start of the game to make sure that someone knows that this is an option. A classic example is the now famous “crouch jump” maneuver seen in many FPS during the 90’s but has fallen out of notoriety outside of boomer shooters.
A counterpoint to this are games where learning about how things work and what does what is part of the experience. For many roguelikes and tactical games, the entire point of the game is to begin with no knowledge of the world and start building a mental guide. Where I would argue is that the player still needs to know the base level rules for how a game works. If they are having trouble because they’re doing X, and X doesn’t work because they’re supposed to be using Y which hasn’t been taught yet, they’re not going to spend time hunting down how to play the game; they’re going to get frustrated and quit. And again, if you have something that is intrinsically unique to your game — no other game is using this mechanic or system in this way, then there must be some kind of onboarding for it.
Guided Lessons
For games that are built around scenarios or run-focused, onboarding can be a bit different for them. When there is RNG and procedural generation at play, it’s impossible to know exactly what the player will be dealing with for their first run. Often in roguelike-styled games, a lot of churn occurs through the first run — whether it is because the player gets frustrated, sees what the game is about, or is simply not feeling the gameplay.
There is a discussion to be had about what the “first” run or first play of games like this should be like. Many strategy games alongside a tutorial may feature a fixed scenario or have a campaign that is essentially an extended tutorial to teach the player about all the units, and possible events, and prepare them for playing the game that will have randomized elements.
Both have their up and downsides to them. A fixed run could leave the player feeling like the game isn’t doing much for the obvious reason that the design is being purposely held back. Another problem is if the player thinks that the game is supposed to be handled the same way every time and could lead them into trouble when things start going differently in the main game. If the player runs into an event and has no idea what the outcomes are, and the very first time they use it they get a run-ending outcome, they’re not going to try it again to see if the next time won’t ruin their game.
Roguelikes and Roguelites are tricky for onboarding when randomized runs can interfere with the lessons (source: Steam)
With a randomized run, onboarding becomes difficult when the designer doesn’t know what’s going to happen during the course of playing.
You can design generic messages about clicking on units, building structures, etc., but you’re not going to be able to help the player when it comes to decision-making unless you design a dynamic tutorial which may be out of scope for some designers. This was the issue I have with learning games like the Total War series and 4X strategy — where the number of events and decision-making is so great that I don’t have any frame of reference in terms of playing. In this case, if I click a bunch of buttons and win, I didn’t learn anything; if I click a bunch of buttons and lose, I still didn’t learn anything.
Returning to the last section, part of the enjoyment of many tactical and challenging games is figuring out “the solution”, and if the game just tells the player “Do X, Y, and Z, and you’ll win”, the player is going to get bored and leave. However, if the player is failing because they’re not understanding, or the game didn’t onboard, an essential feature, they’re going to leave in frustration and assume the game is not working right.
Lesson’s Over
Good onboarding is an artform that for some games is not that important if you’re working with a known genre. However, for games that are trying to do something different to stand out, onboarding is all the more important to get people started.
This is often the reason why some genres remain niche and have trouble reaching a wider audience. If you can present something that has depth but make it very easy to learn. This is why games like Mario + Rabbits and Balatro worked so well — they took genres that aren’t normally easy to learn from the outside with tactical strategy and deckbuilders respectively and made them easy to learn. You don’t need to be experts in either genre to be able to pick up and play these games.
I’ve said a lot of times that there needs to be more gateway games to niche genres: allowing someone to get their feet wet and appreciate what makes the genre special without the hardcore bite that comes with it. For games that do find that special sauce for onboarding, it is often part of what leads to mega-hits that manage to break out beyond the general fans of the genre.
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