Currently working on tutorial. Tutorial's are always a nuisance - players don't want to sit through them and can't be trusted to follow them! So you have to be as transparent and robust as possible, meaning lots and lots of work finding things the players can do and designing the tutorial around them.
There's a couple of approaches for interactive tutes. For Footy I copied the game Scene and added a tutorial to it as a quick, low effort solution. However, every time I changed the game Scene, I had to manually update the tutorial scene, which ended up being quite a lot of work. So for Adventures I'm adding a Tutorial controller and gubbins over the top of a normal level. This keeps the game engine completely separate from the tute, but does add quite a lot of fudge work! SpriteTile is great in this regard. I can use it for generating procedural levels, but also it's straightforward to load a map from it. So I load a tutorial map into the normal game scene, and slap a Tutorial over the top.
Originally I was intending on having the tutorial as a solo affair, but I realised that if several people (eg. a family or group of students in a lunch time) wanted to try the game for the first time, the tutorial ought to be multiplayer. And that means finding each other in game! Played a lot of multiplayer games with friends and it can a while, sometimes hours, before we get to meet up altogether (eg. Guild Wars). So I'm having to work it so the players can meet early and see each other, but not get in the way of each other's learning of how the game works. Suffice to say that throws up quite a few design issues!
Demo will definitely be ready this month though. Looking forwards to getting some people testing!
There's a couple of approaches for interactive tutes. For Footy I copied the game Scene and added a tutorial to it as a quick, low effort solution. However, every time I changed the game Scene, I had to manually update the tutorial scene, which ended up being quite a lot of work. So for Adventures I'm adding a Tutorial controller and gubbins over the top of a normal level. This keeps the game engine completely separate from the tute, but does add quite a lot of fudge work! SpriteTile is great in this regard. I can use it for generating procedural levels, but also it's straightforward to load a map from it. So I load a tutorial map into the normal game scene, and slap a Tutorial over the top.
Originally I was intending on having the tutorial as a solo affair, but I realised that if several people (eg. a family or group of students in a lunch time) wanted to try the game for the first time, the tutorial ought to be multiplayer. And that means finding each other in game! Played a lot of multiplayer games with friends and it can a while, sometimes hours, before we get to meet up altogether (eg. Guild Wars). So I'm having to work it so the players can meet early and see each other, but not get in the way of each other's learning of how the game works. Suffice to say that throws up quite a few design issues!
Demo will definitely be ready this month though. Looking forwards to getting some people testing!