This week, as we approach our first beta build benchmark, the User Interface team has been dedicating our time towards making tutorials. My responsibilities for these tutorials are focused within the battle scene, along with the UI Programming Lead Ben Lussman. I have been working on writing and implementing the tutorial dialogue for the battle scenes, as well as maintaining a consistent dialogue tone with each tutorial scene. There are 3 stages of the game, building the bot, assigning the controls, and battling. Because DuolBots has such an emphasis on customization, there’s a lot of ground to cover when introducing the game to new players. To tackle this, we’ve decided to loop through each scene twice, with the first run through giving players the basics to maneuver through the scenes, then returning to the start and giving players more intricate options.
One of the challenges of making a good tutorial is being able to step back from the role of a developer and instead seeing the game through the lens of a new player. As developers, we know the ins and outs of the game mechanics and move through them without much thought, whereas new players might find these same mechanics confusing or unintuitive. As I attempt to write this tutorial dialogue, I constantly find myself backtracking to write down instructions for a mechanic that I had accidentally skipped. There’s also the challenge of making sure the tutorial isn’t too long or too much at once. This is the reason we’ve chosen to take players through the process twice for the tutorial, to allow players to process smaller amounts of information at a time. We hope that we can streamline this process so that the tutorial is completable in the shortest amount of time while giving the players a complete understanding of the game.
- Shelby Vian, UI Programmer
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