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Weekly Update - Tutorial Tips

2 years ago1,512 words

I recently finished the Live A Live Remake... but barely understood its mechanics, as has been the case with pretty much all RPGs I've played in the past. Annoying! Tutorials are the norm for modern games, and here's an overwhelming barrage of images showing all of the tutorials Atonal Dreams includes to hopefully explain its mechanics in a more satisfying way. But are they too much?? Not clear enough?!? I'd value your input!

I'm happy with Atonal Dreams' primary mechanics now, and I'm currently working through my list of things to clean up before the next alpha test.

One part of that cleanup has involved revising all the tutorials. In what few modern games I've played, I've noticed a common format for tutorials: popups containing a video or image with text underneath. I recently completed the recent Live A Live Remake, so here's one from that, for example:




I think there were only a handful of these tutorial popups in that game, and they were very brief, touching only on things like this which didn't even need explaining (a "Y - Read Mind" hint already appears every time you approach an NPC) rather than more complicated or technical things.

I don't know whether or not this remake kept or revised the stats-based aspects of the mechanics or not, because I never understood or remembered the mechanics of old RPGs. Characters have stats like this, though:




Three attack stats? Huh? Why? They certainly weren't explained to me anywhere. But I notice there's a 'Toggle Info' button there. Will that explain anything?



That switches to this, which apparently shows resistances. Oh, he resists those things? I had no idea, and I don't know where they're coming from either. Weirdly, there's now an 'Icon Guide' button at the bottom that wasn't there before.



That brings up this thing, which - if I scroll to the bottom - 'explains' the stats (so why wasn't the 'Icon Guide' button on the previous screen where the stats were shown??). But does it? What does "affects almost all damage dealt" mean, exactly? Almost? What are the exceptions? And what are physical attacks? Attacks are marked with one of these many types, in many cases seemingly at random (if they were even in the original, I don't think they were shown to the player):



Which ones are physical? Who knows! The first seven, maybe? But that's just a guess. Or does it depend on the skill??

I spent about 30 hours in that world, and as I said, I've played the original through to completion a couple of times, but even after spending so long thinking about my own game's mechanics, I have little idea how they work in this. Skills seem to do apparently random damage even against the same enemy type, increasing stats doesn't seem to meaningfully increase damage output as far as I could tell, and my 'strategy' largely involved picking skills almost at random. That's how I always played RPGs in the past, too, though I can't say that it's very fulfilling.

(Interestingly, like in Atonal Dreams, characters' HP is restored to full at the end of every battle, and skills have no cost... though battles use a grid/chessboard-like layout, which you can move around, and skills have a range of adjacent or distant squares they can target. I just chose whatever skill I was in range to use, usually.)

So I wanted to do something different with Atonal Dreams. To make things clearer to the curious player so they can actually strategise and get satisfaction from choices deliberately and well made!

But obviously everyone's preferences are different, so I've been wondering a lot about whether I've explained too much, or whether just attempting to describe things opens up the expectation for things to be completely explained in a way I've failed to do!



So here are the 28 tutorials (more than I thought) currently in Atonal Dreams. I know they're overwhelming when presented all at once like this! The proper context would have them shown gradually over the first couple of hours of gameplay. But this'll have to do for now.

(They're in .jpg format to keep the filesize down, so the quality's less than ideal. Also, highlighted text shifts between a rainbow of colours, which is why it's coloured differently across these static images.)

They're shown here in the order they're shown to the player (probably, unless all the various tweaks I've made changed a couple of them around):






































Phew! Congratulations on getting through all those if you did!!

I'm curious to hear how what you think of the level of detail seen in them! Too much? Too confusing?

Obviously the context would make a difference; you wouldn't be bombarded with this amount of information all at once in the game. So I'll be curious to hear from testers about that again during the next test.

The stuff I still need to do is largely tedious, nitpicky, or fixing weird bugs I don't know how to reproduce, and I'd say a lot of it isn't necessary to move on to the next stage...

So I think what I'll do is say I'll spend the next week on it, then run the next alpha the week after that. I'll ask for volunteers next weekend.



Quick personal note: My parents were away for two weeks, but are back now. Bleh. I miss the quiet and expanded personal space already. I need to move out.

I had long talks with a couple of my three remaining real-world friends over those two weeks. One mentioned her friends who are doing freelance web development, which I think I talked about last week?

The other - who I only talked to last night, in a video call - is living with her partner in her own place and working from home doing a tech job for decent pay... but she spent a long time talking about how frustrated and lost and unsatisfied she was by it all. It put some things into perspective, and made me appreciate how personally fulfilling what I'm doing now is, and dread how bleak the alternatives would be (hardly for the first time).

Do we toil away in poverty doing something we love, or do something we only tolerate in order to pay the bills? Most people do the latter because they have no choice.

I'll just have to hope that a Kickstarter - which I should do sooner in the coming months - will earn enough for the time I've spent on Atonal Dreams to have not been a complete waste.

I've also been thinking a lot about how I need to open commenting here and the Discord up to the public, I need to engage more on social media, since that's apparently crucial... but I've already talked about that a lot before. I'll need to focus on it in earnest once the game's ready enough to properly promote, though, which it almost is. About which I have very mixed feelings.