Tutorials are a valuable asset that guide players from a place of low or nonexistent skill to a place of confidence, some degree of skill, and knowledge of basic concepts related to the game. Many game mechanics that are embedded in video gaming, sports, or skillful actions and games are surprisingly non-intuitive. Consider the factors behind sending a bowling ball down a lane. For somebody completely new to bowling the ball is a cruel mistress that finds the gutter without error, yet perfect games are a testament to the fact that there is more than luck to smashing the ten pins on the opposite end. In basketball the rim seems two inches wide and the ball never falls in. In this way the rim itself is a barrier telling the player that they have failed or succeeded, but it doesn’t show them errors in their form .

For video games we can consider the combat system of the Devil May Cry series or the portal mechanic in the Portal series. The monsters and puzzles give a pass/fail barrier to the players but don’t give them an understanding of why they have failed. Without a means to guide newer players in their infancy of playing and enjoying the game, all games of sport and skill risk overwhelming the new player and their lack of skill and confidence may ultimately drive them away. What’s important to note in all of these examples is that setting a player freely on a game without direction and hoping they’ll grasp about long enough to learn how to play is not ever as successful as guiding them along. Since video games almost universally demand their players have and use skills and knowledge that aren’t passed down through generations as in traditional sports, tutorials are often used to bridge the gap between what a player knows and what they’ll be asked to know in order to succeed at the game.

Level 1 of The Impossible Game in a world without tutorial-centered level design

Artwork by evil-geezuz.deviantart.com

The usefulness of tutorials can’t really be overstated as they provide a framework for feeding manageable amounts of new information to the player. Consider the previous video game examples, the Devil May Cry and Portal series. The combat system in DMC is incredibly deep and would quickly overwhelm any one player’s ability to comprehend it if it were dumped on the player before their first fight, especially when you add in unique and progressively challenging enemies. Portal asks players to think in a way that violates known physics (yes quantum mechanics, I know you exist, but bear with me) in increasingly difficult and sometimes timed circumstances, a gameplay requirement that’s almost as unintuitive as thinking in four dimensions. Yet both of these games and even harder video games succeed for two reasons. The first is that their game is a continuously evolving tutorial that lasts anywhere between the first half to the entirety of the game. This can happen within the game (for Portal and DMC) or as a separate node outside of the game as in Street Fighter’s Training Mode. The second is that there is no active force against the player and the challenges that are presented can be learned and repeat themselves. Even if you die for the 50th time in a notoriously difficult singleplayer game, the game will present the same challenge to you the 51st time.

Tutorials in real-time strategy games suffer from three common pitfalls. The first and most dangerous pitfall is that the tutorials build upon one another in linear fashion without giving players the ability to prove themselves to themselves in a safe environment. The second mistake is that these tutorials presuppose a base level of familiarity with the game type and/or controls, and this is often an underlying assumption that feeds into the first mistake. Finally, tutorials in RTS games are typically built as part of the campaign experience. While this isn’t a problem in an of itself, it does mean that players can play the campaign without learning anything that allows them to understand multiplayer play. The implication of this is that the one vehicle that was given to the player to develop their skill, the one source intended to function as a tutorial, has fundamentally failed. Any one of these mistakes can be overcome, but the three combined are devastating and are artificially hindering overall enjoyment of the RTS genre.

A natural consequence of subpar tutorial design, competition, and the 90s.

While WarCraft III, Praetorians, Rise of Nations, Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, and more are guilty of the above, StarCraft II is the current reigning champion for RTS games (sorry Grey Goo, Sins of a Solar Empire, Halo Wars, and other contenders) and will suffice as an example of the genre given its preeminence. Before continuing, it is worth mentioning that the degree to which these concerns were lessened when compared to the original StarCraft can not be overstated. Angry fist-shaking aside, let’s examine StarCraft II’s tutorial experience and the campaign that fulfills part of that role with the goal of taking the lessons learned and helping Littlewargame.

When you select “Campaign”, you find a screen that offers to show you a tutorial. Upon entering, you find small lessons that teach you the basics of movement, attacking, supply, resource management, camera angles… everything that you could possibly need in small subsets. At initial blush this is fantastic, and indeed it is a marked improvement over the usual RTS tutorial fare. The problem stems from each of these aspects being too separate of one another and effectively being disjointed. While all are basic controls or aspects of the game, there’s no sense of progression or skill as you go through the

Admittedly they won’t be asked to do this, but it will feel like it.

Part of learning and feeling a sense of progression stems from an awareness that your own current level of skill isn’t sufficient, but that just out of reach is a level you can achieve to accomplish the task the game or challenge is asking of you. The incredibly brief and disjointed nature of the Tutorial system in StarCraft II is supposed to suffice to allow a player the ability to play the campaign, but there are several built-in assumptions that undercut this method. The most serious is that, of the three races in the game, the player will be prepared for playing Terran (the campaign race) after the campaign. There are almost no tutorials for the other two playable races (Protoss and Zerg) in the game and that is a huge detriment to a new player as they are effectively cut out of playing 2/3rds of the game without a serious independent effort to start from scratch for Protoss and Zerg. The second issue stems from the campaign-as-tutorial approach, specifically Mission 2: The Outlaws.

As a positive note for StarCraft II, it avoided the problem of presupposing familiarity with the controls and conceits of the genre easily with the brief “Tutorials” session you can find prior to playing the Campaign. The first mission is well done and builds nicely off of the Tutorials. You get a handful of units and kill enemy units that are the same as your own, all of which are intelligent choices that let the player ease into the campaign by allowing them to prove their skill. It’s quick, bloody, and has an immediate positive result on the player and their skill level. It’s unfortunate that it artfully avoided the pit of “they’ll-know-this-already” only to jump off the Cliffs of Insanity Linear Progression Fallacy without a parachute. In “The Outlaws” you’re expected to:

Make workers

Mine resources

Make production facilities

Make supply structures

Make attacking units

Rescue another base

Kill an enemy base

Defend against enemy attacks

What.

None of this by itself would be too burdensome and even all of this together wouldn’t be problematic were it later in the campaign. The problem lies in that this is the player’s first test of most if not all of those items. For players experienced with the genre this is par for the course, but there’s almost no chance a truly new player will get anything but frustration out of this. The frustration increases as the campaign raises the stakes, speed requirements, and knowledge linearly instead of incrementally while making the overall missions more difficult the further they progress into the campaign. Keep in mind that StarCraft II has an amazing campaign-as-tutorial system compared to its peers… yet this is clearly an approach Littlewargame can not abide.

My next article will be on the first five Tutorial maps I’ve created for Littlewargame that are based on the lessons learned from playing years of RTS games and their accompanying tutorial systems. I believe that Littlewargame not only can have something better, but that it’s required given the ease of accessibility for the game itself. This article was a bit dense, but if you enjoyed it or got something out of it please leave a comment below. As a final note, I have nothing against Blizzard or StarCraft II. I’ve played many of the company’s games and enjoyed playing StarCraft II for several years, but my personal feelings over its multiplayer depth and the enjoyment I’ve had playing it are independent of the work the game has done to help guide players that are newest to the genre. As a shoutout, consider downloading the free trial for StarCraft II if you haven’t already.