Re: Tutorials

I agree, Advance Wars contains one of the best tutorials. There's one 
little pitfall
it fails to avoid that's bugging me, though. :) A friend of mine, for example,
wasn't too eager to read through many lines of dialogue in the beginning of
each mission. So he ended up skipping most of it and asking me if something
came up he didn't know how to handle. And yes, skipping some of it crossed my
mind, too, when I was first playing the game.

So even though Advance Wars splits its tutorial over multiple missions, the
actual (tutorial) mission normally consists of two separate parts: the 
tutorial and
the actual mission. I recall a few occasions where the game provided assistance
during the mission, but unfortunately they were an obvious minority.

The same method that's used on the tutorial as a whole could be applied to 
a single
mission as well. All we need to do is make the game give clues on the fly. 
This in turn
would require that we recognize the situations and display the proper 
clues. In the
simplest form, this could be implemented with a set of very simple rules 
like in the
ones already in Advance Wars:
         if (infantry is chosen for the first time) then display hint

Or they could be a more integral part of the game, resulting in a bit more 
complex
rules along these lines
         if (x is in range to attack y) then
                 suggest using x against y
         else if (x hasn't been used to attack y AND 6 turns has passed) then
                 suggest getting into position to use x against y

One has to remember, though, that post-designing a tutorial to an otherwise
complete game (like I'm here doing with AW) seldom results in the Wind 
Wakerish
fluidity and ease of learning you were talking about in your text.

Cheers,
Kimmo

>Here's my rant:
>
>http://www.bookofhook.com/Article/GameDesign/TheArtoftheTutorial.html




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