Forsaken Realms: Vahrin's Call - About Game Tutorials

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Titan Roc asks the question:

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What Makes a Good Game Tutorial?

Hey there

I hope you're all doing swell and are ready to dive into today's post with me! Buckle up, it's a long one.

"What makes a good game tutorial?" is a question we've had to answer while working on Vahrin's Call.

Our tutorial has changed many times over the game's development cycle and through much re-working and refinement, we now finally have a tutorial we are happy with.

Before we get to the current tutorial though, I want to talk about some of our older iterations.
I think it would be interesting to discuss how the tutorial for Vahrin's Call has evolved over time and more importantly, why we believe the final version works much better than our previous ones.

So without any further ado, let's dive in!

The earliest tutorial we have footage of is one that you may recognise, as we talked about it almost 3 years ago now in one of our earliest dev logs: Vahrin's Call Dev Log #02

In this version, you found yourself in a small, isolated and overgrown area, alongside one of the main protagonists. This character served as your guide, teaching you the basic controls of the game.

As this tutorial was focused on 'learning-by-doing', this character would tell you how to do something and then you would be required to do that thing in order to progress to the next part of the tutorial.

We liked this approach, as it ensured you were being taught everything you needed to know, early on.
We were focused on teaching you everything at the very beginning of the game, as we didn't want you to be confused about the controls mid-way through your adventure.

Additionally, we believed that forcing you to perform an action in order to move on was a good way of ensuring you knew what each button did moving forward.

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