Hello, my question is how to teach the player how to understand and navigate through the controls of the game in the guise of a normal level. What would be an ideal set of rooms, and what would be in those rooms to get the player comfortable with the later more advanced stages?

My reason for asking this, is my brothers and I recently released a game (can be found in the indie-game forum section: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/649361-spheroid/#entry5104428), and was met with a lot of players saying that the game was too hard, or too confusing, or was not very well explained. So, I'd really like to change that, and we have decided that before any missions, the first "mission" should be specifically designed to get the player familiar with the game.

Things I want the player to be familiar with:

-Controls for character-

-Reading Radar-

-identifying-

-unlocking doors-

-collecting all items in the area-

This might make a lot more sense if you try the game. But even just in theory, the main thing is getting the player accustomed to the controls. I got the basic idea of having a single simple enemy in the room. But should I just have a text message (from a character) tell you "fire with left click"? Or should I just let them figure it out?

Thank you for your time,

-Shade-

Don't think of it as a "tutorial level".

Rather, you should review your learning curve.

Early levels should introduce few concepts and let you master them, and the game should evolve from there.

"Tutorials" are forced, and not fun to play through.

On the other hand, Megaman and Mario levels are fun, even though, they each contain a "so-called tutorial level".

By reviewing the learning curve of your game (preferably on a spreadsheet that contains all of your game mechanics) you can insure to integrate game mechanics at the right pace.

People that are "confused" are often overwhelmed by new stuff. Make sure this doesn't happen (it doesn't mean you necessarily have to make the game any easier though).

I too find tutorials annoying to deal with. I find that I continually ask myself if the real game is going to start soon. And I can't quite bring myself to skip them because I wonder if I'm going to miss something important whether it's info about the game or an item or something that I could use later on.

I think it's important to provide the player with a fairly safe area right off the bat where he can experiment with the all the controls, weapons, and options that are available. The things that you do there are pretty much consequence free (you're not likely to die, you're not likely to kill someone that you shouldn't, or loose an important item that you'll regret later on).

If doors or key aren't obvious in their appearance or function, then you probably need a tutorial or a message of some kind. But needing a key for a door that is locked (you do actually tell the player the door is locked, right?) is pretty obvious (in my opinion) and the idea of needing a red key for the red door is also pretty standard. A tutorial for that seems like overkill to me. However, if the act of unlocking a door were to involve some sort of additional mini-game then a tutorial would make sense.

But taking a wild guess, it might be the "collecting all the items" part of your game that might be the least intuitive. Without playing your game (I can only look at screenshots just now), it sounds like a sort of mission to me and it could be as simple as the player isn't aware of what the mission parameters are.

That was all very useful advice from all of you. I'll definitely keep it in mind.

Thank you so much everyone for the insight!

-Shade-

Another "must absolutely do" in order to test that your game is teaching correctly the player : make a non-gamer test your game.

Note that this is only true for casual games.

More often than not, your results will be compromised if the target audience is largely different from your test users...