Redesigning Polygunners' Tutorial (Design)

It's been a long time since I've made an update about Polygunners. Creating the game as well as keeping on top of my other school work left little time for blog posts, but the game has evolved a lot since the last update. At this point, it's basically done, and I'm planning to release it on Steam early next year. That being said, the semester's over and I have a lot more time on my hands, so I thought I would tackle something that had been bothering me for a while: the tutorial.

To give you an idea of where the tutorial is right now, here's a few screenshots showing the first five minutes of gameplay.

This tutorial is alright, but it fails in a few ways:

1. It doesn't force the player to learn the core mechanics. Aston (the little blue square with red corners that follows you around in the level) tells the player how to play the game, but doesn't actually make the player do those mechanics. It's very easy to miss a line of dialogue and thus lose some key information.

2. It's bug-prone. Aston follows you around, but I didn't write any code to make sure he didn't get stuck behind walls sometimes. Additionally, players can pick up each other's weapons which could lead to a scenario where one player has all the weapons and their allies have nothing.

3. It puts an emphasis on dialogue when it's almost non-existent during the rest of the game. Players might think Aston's talkativeness is indicative of the tone of what's to come. In reality, dialogue is a very small part of the rest of the game.

It needs to be remade.

Goals

It seemed like a good idea to plan out exactly what checkboxes I wanted to mark off before I started designing the level, so I laid them out here.

1. Teach the players all core mechanics.

2. Ensure they understand how to do mechanics and how they are useful.

3. Be engaging. This is the first level the players play - I don't want them quitting before they even get into the actual game.

4. Hint at the tone, general feel, and pace of the game.

5. Be short. I want players to get right into the action.

First concept

I sat down and sketched a rough concept of the level. It's quite similar to the current tutorial, but I plan on placing a stronger guiding hand on the player during the level. Rooms can't be left until the task is complete, and there will be no chance of a player not reading some dialogue and missing out on key information.

Unfortunately, adopting this new design for the tutorial meant removing something a lot of players liked - Aston (the tutorial character shown earlier in the post). I'll have to figure out a way to memorialize him somehow later in the game.

With this idea in mind, I went about actually implementing the changes. Luckily, by this point in development, I had made a lot of tools for myself to make stuff like this easier, so the whole thing only took about two hours.

Here's the final result:

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. It's not the most elegant tutorial ever made, but it accomplishes exactly what it set out to do. Players are forced to actually use the mechanics to progress, it uses universal controls (as in it doesn't depend on Xbox / Playstation controller setups), and it stays true to the theme of the game.

At the end of the day, Polygunners is a game about mechanics. There's bits of art and narrative sprinkled in, but I really wanted this game to focus on game design and gameplay first and foremost at every decision. I think this tutorial sets this tone for the game well, and gets the player into the exciting part of the game very quickly.

Polygunners is also being released on Steam on January 14th, which is a big step for me a a game developer. You can find the Steam page for the game here.