Guilded Developer Blog | Continuing the Tutorial

Introduction:

During my last blog post, I discussed my then-current work on Guilded's tutorial. At the time, I had made some fairly strong progress towards completing it, which included implementing a dialogue system and setting up a mock run-through to showcase how certain parts of the tutorial might flow into one another. These elements were woefully incomplete at the time, however, and the flow of the tutorial was mostly smoke-and-mirrors. To remedy this, I have spent the past two weeks finishing up and then updating the tutorial in response to some player feedback.

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Finishing the Tutorial:

My main task during the week between February 20 and February 27 was to finish creating Guilded's base tutorial. This process required two major steps. First, I needed to find a way to check for certain button inputs, such as when players interact with the roster or the screen's main hub. This was the most important step, since completing it allowed me to start working on a proper flow through the tutorial. I figured this out during our team's work meeting on Saturday, February 22, when I met with Lead Programmer Jimmy Griffiths to discuss ways I can keep the tutorial from interfering with other scripts. Thanks to this meeting, I realized that I could implement a series of simple listener functions that set a bool to true whenever players click specific buttons. The program stalls while waiting for the button input, ensuring that the next part of the tutorial does not load until then.

The above code snippet shows how this process currently works. The listener function sets the @bool variable to "true" after clicking the "buttons[0]" object, which stops the stall and allows the tutorial to continue. This process can be seen in the video below:

The second step for this process was to actually finish working on the base tutorial. This involved creating all the overlays, writing up the dialogue strings (or taking them from our Narrative Designers' tutorial file, when available), and linking everything together in the tutorial script. I finished implementing the basic tutorial over the course of Sunday and Monday. Putting it together did not prove particularly difficult, but thanks to the need to set every overlay's position by hand, it was very long and tedious. Another video showing off the tutorial's progression is available below:

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Iterating on the Tutorial:

Following some player feedback during testing on Saturday, February 28, I have made a few minor changes to the tutorial, with more to come. The biggest change is that, in response to feedback stating that the tutorial is too lengthy, I altered the tutorial's flow to include buttons players can push to skip past certain sections. However, this is only a temporary solution, and it doesn't fix the tutorial's key issue (which is that Guilded has so many mechanics that introducing them all takes upwards of 10 minutes). As such, I have begun speaking with the Narrative Designers, our Lead Designer, and our Producers to figure out a more effective way to pace the tutorial that still hits all the important beats of Guilded's design.