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[Alevice]

Its a bit minor but god i grow tired since I cant be arse to resume many games and end up playing the same recycled section over every modern game i play for an hour or two. And as I have said, many designers actually fail to teach/convey how their own game gimmick or whatever works, you have no idea how many times i have been frustrated because the gimmick wasnt so clear and i would have to repeat a given area because fuck, they couldnt be clear about it. Its easy to borrow the same yteaching course every other game has, but when teaching from the ground up, several fail to do so

[gimymblert]

@sirniko
I'm with you, this is something I always thought about, the initial challenge must be entertaining for first time user but invisible to advance user through layered design. @sik example its pretty typical, most advance user won't even see it's a challenge, they will only see a landmark, while novice will be force to think. In practice however it's hard to not "tell" novice how to do it without being obvious, but as soon as the skilled player notice the hand holding they rage!

For example in @sik example it's still not enough, the player must press "jump" AND press forward, which is not evident to A LOT of novice (you ow that if you have been in a playtest), in fact they will use only one hand to move then move to the jump key, look at the key, look at the screen press jump, and it won't work and they would be confused and staring at the screen to see what's wrong AND NOT PRESSING jump again, then conclude it's hard ... not everyone is a gamer who play zillion games.

A lot of very difficult mobile game use simple control scheme, the difficulty is not the deterrent (see the popular geometry dash or flappy bird), but that's what noob dev think when the player don't succeed, because the dev have no concept of control load. Most modern gaming is based on simultaneous load of control input and output (many things to look at) we don't see anymore because of familiarity, but we learn with early game (pacman, space invader, pong, and that whole geneation follow simple control and visual load). Load management and communication is more important than dumbing down the game in difficulty.

[gunswordfist]

Didn't a Panzer Dragoon game do this right?

[Razz]

just like written / forced tutorials can go (horribly) wrong, so can invisible tutorials -- it's up to the dev to make them work through good design. imo the whole push for invisible tutorials recently (ignited by egoraptor's mmx sequelitus and auntie pixalante's 1-1 analysis) is awesome because that is the kind of gameplay I prefer, but that doesn't mean everything needs to be that way

[oahda]

same shit with games that try to avoid using HUD elements at all costs btw (im talking about things like the infamous "bloody screen" in modern shooters or that thing dead space does). This Is An Immersive Game(tm). you can tell its Immersive(tm) because it doesnt have a health bar. you see, real life doesnt have a health bar either. SO NEXT GEN! SO REAL!!!!!

Pft, I'm still doing this, mostly for aesthetic reasons. There will be HUD elements sometimes but none that are constantly on screen. Too cluttered for my zenzitive artzy mind~~~

[s0]

also depends on how many hud elements your game actually needs i guess

[valrus]

It's not so much instructive level design that bugs me, as much as it is overlong stretches of time and level devoted to it before the core gameplay starts.  The reason why Mario 1-1 worked so well is that it's all encapsulated into a few seconds of gameplay.  It's not like Mario has to run left two screens before he finds something he needs to jump over, run left another screen to find his first goomba, and encounter his first [?] block in level 1-2.

The other thing is that lots of games try to introduce the story and setting at the same time, slowing things down further.   "Where am I?"  <run left one screen> "I hope everyone else is alright." <run left one screen> <encounter first jump> <run left one screen> <camera slow pans to highlight some environmental detail> <run left> <encounter first enemy> etc.

[SousaVilla]

I actually like diegetic tutorials, as you dont have to smash buttons to close irrelevant windowns. Another thing that I like are optional tutorial messages, like the blocks in super mario world or the messages of demon/dark souls. Like Sirniko said, having extra rewards for skilled players that perform better at the tutorial levels is also pretty cool.

Having a bunch of dialogue explaining stuff and interrupting the game flow annoys me. If you're gonna do that, at least allow an option to skip it.

[Tuba]

Instructive Level Design is great but I agree that it has to be something natural, the hard part is doing it without letting the player notice.

I think part of the problem here is that since you are at TIG, you probably played a lot of games in your life and also made some, so it's probably easier for you to notice when a game is trying to teach you something. I know it is for me, but is it for the average player out there?

[gimymblert]

Level design itself is less a problem than learning input, game input are generally abstraction, that's what makes everything hard.

[Sik]

For example in @sik example it's still not enough, the player must press "jump" AND press forward, which is not evident to A LOT of novice (you ow that if you have been in a playtest), in fact they will use only one hand to move then move to the jump key, look at the key, look at the screen press jump, and it won't work and they would be confused and staring at the screen to see what's wrong AND NOT PRESSING jump again, then conclude it's hard ... not everyone is a gamer who play zillion games.

That wasn't a problem in my experience (maybe because to reach that point you must have already figured out how running works), and yes I've tested the game against people who don't play any sort of action games as well - and I've seen weird shit (like somebody completely refusing to press left for about half an hour at least, despite knowing what it did).

Some amusing things is that they intuitively try the spacebar for jumping first (amusing in that I'm seeing most new games prefer Z or X instead) and that when you get a power-up the two things tried first nearly always aren't other buttons, but rather double jump and crouch+jump. (incidentally, Sol uses the former, Project MD the latter... I'm still clueless how people think those are the obvious inputs o_o) How I got all that right from the first try is beyond me.

[battlerager]

Shouldn't this go in the "Design" subforum?   Oh well.

Personally, I disagree with the OP's sentiment. To me, this feels like rage against games that "wasted their potential on explaining", tainting a game design principle as a whole.

Edit: I do see you call it "an essential principle" but think people overdo it, but where exactly is the line? Maybe you expected the wrong thing from a game or weren't the target audience? It's tricky.


Another discussion springing up here seems to be attempts at diegetic HUD and diegetic tutorials. Maybe warrants its own thread?
I think the latest I experienced there were the introductory sequences of Far Cry 3 and the Tomb Raider reboot.
Generally, I like them fine, it's 100% better than displaying xbox360_gamepad.png on screen, with mappings superimposed. (UGH) My main gripe with them is that both of these try to marry high-intensity, life-or-death situations for the avatar with "have the player dick around with the controls with low chance of fuckup, since this isn't supposed to be hard yet".

If you let people dick around with little (theatrical) danger, you lose out on having a gripping, intense opening.
If you put people through a (gameplay-wise) difficult situation right away to match the tone, it defeats the purpose of having a tutorial to begin with.

The end result is a middle ground, generelly regarded as a "happy" medium - but the disconnect is always there, right under the surface.

[s0]

i should say that i am very critical of what i call "fps style immersion". or rather im critical of how much of a dogma it is. i think the way videogame designers approach "immersion" is ass backwards in some ways. but ive already talked about that elsewhere and idk if this thread is the right place for it. maybe i shouldnt have brought up huds earlier.

[Tuba]

Another discussion springing up here seems to be attempts at diegetic HUD and diegetic tutorials. Maybe warrants its own thread?
I think the latest I experienced there were the introductory sequences of Far Cry 3 and the Tomb Raider reboot.
Generally, I like them fine, it's 100% better than displaying xbox360_gamepad.png on screen, with mappings superimposed. (UGH) My main gripe with them is that both of these try to marry high-intensity, life-or-death situations for the avatar with "have the player dick around with the controls with low chance of fuckup, since this isn't supposed to be hard yet".

If you let people dick around with little (theatrical) danger, you lose out on having a gripping, intense opening.
If you put people through a (gameplay-wise) difficult situation right away to match the tone, it defeats the purpose of having a tutorial to begin with.

The end result is a middle ground, generelly regarded as a "happy" medium - but the disconnect is always there, right under the surface.

Controls on most AAA games are too complex now for things like the first Mario level, in some games like Assassin's Creed, the first hour is pretty much just a bunch of tutorial missions.

Bayonetta does something interesting in that sense, it starts with a big opening full of enemies but it also gives invincibility to the player so  he can play around.

[gimymblert]

The input itself is also a huge problem, maybe game are fine but pad are not