Articles | Aren't Tutorials Dumb?
AXX First Voyage was a most peculiar experience. The three players who had any major experience with the demo gave me two sets of immensely polarizing experiences, and those experiences were immensely polarized to their own experience in the genre/style of product AXX was presented as.
Pr0nogo/higs - Very little experience - picked up fundamentals fast and intermediate by the end of demo, very little difficulty. Put in time to learn the project to a extent (albeit with some help from me on both sides).
Swedishman - Immense experience/top 10 DMC3 player globally - Destroyed thoroughly by the early trash, annihilated by later opponents, unable to even grasp the basics, never cleared the demo (or got close) (partly due to breaking the doors). Put in some effort to learn the project but failed to grasp very much at all even with extensive help from me.
I never got Pr0nogo’s feedback on the general difficulty subject, but higs and swede-kun both effectively said the exact same thing: they both liked difficulty in a product, but weren’t attracted to a product by difficulty. Difficulty wasn’t necessarily a secret ingredient that made something difficult, and early difficulty usually amounted to frustration.
AXX’s Arvatur in the First Voyage was the most fundamentally simple of any ARPG map with the most basic enemies outside of the Souls franchise. The most major “learning” curve amounted to determining the extremely subtle meme-infested queues I had for level progression. 3 crow statues - killing them caused a series of 3 crow caws to emit 3 times from the location of the next objective, which was otherwise blocked off by golden crows. Killing the magus and collecting the eggplant were two separate but necessary objectives in the same spot. The former procs the spawn of the void moon and the second opens the later section of the level. Balls spawn in the area surrounding the tower which may be the most obscure part of the demo given I was never able to put in the visual reads for its presence, but the void moon should draw your attention back to the courtyard. Also it’s the same color as Schwa’s barrier, if you go to the opposing end of the zone and end up confused.
Arvatur’s demo was intentionally obtuse in certain respects as an experiment. I wanted to see how much people would nose around if given free reigns under the unspoken pretense there would be hidden shit. Pr0nogo went to areas I had intended to put easter eggs but didn’t get to doing yet, the swedishman found a lot of bugs and broken collision I hadn’t hammered out, and higs mostly went into linear paths.
The single most major thing I got out of the demo was that the movelist was only very rarely called upon to figure out more advanced maneuvers. Of course, these weren’t necessary for the First Voyage. Both the first players ommitted all of the most powerful attacks and just spammed prime and advancing attack and gave no shit becasue nothing in the game world was dangerous. The swedishman would later conclude the other moves were worthless and intentionally ignored them, when he was already struggling the most, further inhibiting his ability to learn and grow.
It’s no surprise that this compounded the unspoken hostility and malice he had hidden from me in regards to the project all this time. Perhaps, that hidden hostility and malice was a part of the barrier that prevented him from learning. It surely prevented him from paying attention, as a great deal of feedback he gave me later on, even after the second demo, was things I had already put in and he otherwise hadn’t noticed or ignored.
Yasazeva is the de-facto third or fourth tutorial zone concept and the first that ever saw any actual tutorialization concepts put in.
As detailed in an earlier demo video I had always plans to make getting acclimated with the project, the moveset, and its inner mechanics a lot easier than it was. I had always planned for objectives to be less obscure than the crow statues in Arvatur - it was, after all, just a tech demo and something of a social experiment. But never in my wildest imagination did I foresee the player who was effectively the Jaedong of DMC struggling with units that could be stunlocked with a single attack.
Watching videos and streams of the engagements was interesting from a meta perspective but it didn’t give me much insight into the actual problems the players faced.
Dealing with players who absolutely refused to engage me was something I already had encountered with D&D. It’s a tired and annoying thing and one I would expect anyone I consort with to be well more than old enough to work out on their own at this point. Just because we spend all day shitposting doesn’t mean we don’t want to help each other in more serious and meaningful subjects. At least, that’s what I had hoped. But the experience with the swedishman painted a picture of complete confusion. If I was to regard it with the most lenient and passive possible response my only answer is that he was someone who needed his hand held in a tutorial to understand every minor thing before being handed gameplay. However, spamming the user with popups during their first map seemed stupid. How to approach this conundrum?
When I brought this subject to HKS, he immediately, as predicted, said that I could simply try using Honkai Impact’s tutorial system.
Honkai Impact is (obviously) a cellphone game whose tutorials handhold you through all combos and inputs of characters with FG-style on-screen prompts. Most often these tutorials don’t prepare you for actually playing the characters later on but referencing them is useful in such cases because of their input display.
I’ve never thought of my game as something that should be or could be speed run, but I’ve always asked myself “How would you speedrun this?” In other words, I looked at systems and engagements as how optimally they could be run, not how they would be run on average. In an ideal world, with the highest skill level possible, I would still want the product to be challenging. But the First Voyage was nothing like this. It aimed to be, but it wasn’t going to be. Indeed, I intentionally made many decisions with the intent of leaving the project very easy to complete, particularly for Pr0nogo’s sake. Some weren’t intentional, like the Gundarvar Soldiers being so screwy. But things like adding the dock healing were all for the sake for the FV players.
Things have changed a lot since then and the project is probably 3-4x as fast to play as it was in the First Voyage. The inner mechanics for the stagger system have also become substantially more complex than they were before. This was necessary growth, but it also adds an extra learning curve.
Currently, AXX’s systems are as such that most player should be able to become as proficient as I am in about fifteen minutes of gameplay. There’s no dual inputs, no double tapping, no really specific combos except for the 2-3 key distances for Ragnarok and longer Mixups many of which are fluid across different movesets. Even rudimentary experimentation with inputs will teach you the game in a few moments. Just to be certain I had created a First Voyage combo/input video prior to its release. Demonstrating the entire game’s functionality and explaining all of its systems was something that took less than 15 minutes to do. It’s likely that the new changes to the product wouldn’t increase that time.
However, taking 15 minutes to explain everything at the start of a product has always felt like a bad move. Yasazeva, the prototype tutorial level I conjured during 2023, takes a different approach. As I demod in a video, it displays inputs and basic functionalities as a Toast notification when you approach the Iron Emperor. You can just skip him and complete the level without it. No part of the tutorials require you to wait and read, and his save system is built in such a way as to not require you to ever interact with him to proceed.
Yasazeva was never completed. It ended at the initial battle trigger, where you acquire Conquest and are told that Primary Attack is Left Click. At this point I drew a huge blank. How do I introduce the player to the combat? Do I do it in waves of units, 1 attack at a time? Do I give it all at once in a dialogue? Do I just tell you all of the keys and let you figure it out?
Recently we talked about adding an entire new dimension to the combat through the Scythe and Soul Theft concept. When would this be explained to the player? Probably after the first fight. How? This depends on if I add those extra resources or not. Perhaps a section after the first fight should be delegated just to the Scythe and its resources. Great. How am I giving the player this information?
Yasazeva’s final size will make it more of a proper zone than a mere tutorial.
A degree of variance was expected with AXX, and if I was handed this information alone I would have shrugged and said “well of course some people had trouble, there’s no tutorial!” D&D taught me that not everyone is capable of processing basic information. I added information to compensate for this in light of that knowledge, but it did nothing to stem the endless tide of salt. Honestly, I felt bewildered.
Really, I should not need any more tutorialization than what the project already has. The movelist in the menu is above and beyond the most information required to successfully 1cc Arvatur in the First Voyage. The rest can be figured out as you experience the braindead fodder in the courtyard. Of course, that’s without having been privy to my developer content and demo videos up to this point. That knowledge arms you to the teeth.
Of course, if this were the case, Yasazeva would not exist. It’s more than just a tutorial, it’s a storytelling bulletpoint. The tutorialization aspect is a bonus. In very much the same sense as the RTS concepts offering you a chance to get bunker rushed, Yasazeva is a chance for you to die ceaselessly to being unable to air dash but still rake in journoscum bux.
Yasazeva and how to proceed with the combat demo has stumped me because of the other uncertainties in the project could dramatically influence how the entire zone is built. For example, if the Leylines/Domains system is ultimately decided to include construction and unit spawning, or companions, where did this stuff get shown? Probably after the combat engine? Will it be core to the project or something unlocked later on? Something that significant should probably be part of it from the very start.
Yasazeva presents the player with a series of increasingly complex and non-obvious platforming challenges to introduce you to the movement system, complete with hidden passages and Astolfos throughout the level, which will also come to hold memory fragments and dialogue once created. As such, consumption and exploration is entirely paced to the player’s movement.
Combat is different. Unless I take a route similar to Honkai I need to piecemeal information because it wouldn’t be demonstrated to you. Of course, I’ve considered having Aradrya show you all of the moves on by one. But that would have the same impact as running all of the Honkai tutorials back to back - information retention would be weak. It’s the opposing edge of the double-edged sword of having your entire moveset available from the start. Unlike Honkai, though, exploring that moveset isn’t necessary for success, at least not presently.
The question remains how best should this information be tutorialized?
I’ve always felt that letting the player learn the game on their own, and offering multiple ways to overcome challenges so they explore their own expression, is the best mindset. But, if you absolutely have to explain something, it should be done concisely and without interrupting the player’s current activity or controls. As such, no controls except for the combat controls would be locked out during the locomotion part of Yasazeva - you can speed run it very fast and ignore the Emperor entirely.
My current concept proposal is to have a character speak to you mentally and inform you of basic combat controls once per wave in a small Bloody Palace-styled arena chain, with the Scythe taking place after the fact. Ragnarok and similar functionality could be relegated to after this process in a similar arena. Or just by a dialogue blurb before the next zone.
The Scythe arena will double as a unspoken introduction to multi-unit and multi-faction combat as well as macro play, pitting you vs both the White and the Blood in a 3-way scuffle, complete with the Blood building and expanding structures for unit creation.
The Leyline tutorial would probably take place in the Golden Sanctuary, unless Sanshaka Revise is added to the tutorial chain concept, which is very possible, since it would likely include the first boss (and a possible Vestigial Star encounter). The Golden Sanctuary may not even exist, though, as you already have Zeus as a hub. It ultimately depends if I feel like dialogue with Aradrya stands to benefit the project or not.
All in all if Yasazeva were worked on to a functionally complete state it alone would be sufficient for a Second Voyage release because the results of a tutorialization attempt would be beneficial data to harvest for a variety of reasons. As such, perhaps Yasazeva should be a production priority over Arvatur or any other zone were I to work on the project again.