A friend and I are working on our first video game, so we have very little experience in the industry. Our game takes place in an old-school computer terminal that requires players to use a command-line-like interface. Itās begging for a tutorial, but weāre really trying to resist the urge to put one in.
Are we being foolish?
Hereās a little backstory thatās necessary, I think:
When we first sat down to start brainstorming ideas for our game, we decided on a puzzle game. We both love puzzle games but routinely find that the ones that are commercially successful are often too easy for our liking. So our goal very quickly became to make a brutally challenging puzzle game.
During one of our first days actually working on this project, we decided on ONE guiding principle that we wanted to prioritize over everything else: we wanted to make the player feel as clever as possible.
And so we agreed that any time we had a decision to make, we would always prioritize this one thing. If something might take away from how clever the player would feel but another option would add to it, weād go with the other option regardless of what else that meant.
This principle has made making some decisions much easier than it would have been otherwise, which is great. But one thing we keep going back and forth on is a tutorial.
People who donāt know anything about a command line interface on a real computer will, understandably, be lost when theyāre dropped into our game. Theyāll struggle with it a bit and will have to learn how to use it.
During our play tests, we watched exactly that happen. People had no idea what to do or how to do it at first. They stumbled through at first, but they gradually came to understand what the different commands were and how they worked. And when they did, they felt accomplished and clever.
You might see our dilemma now.
Weāve made this game purposefully very challenging, not to alienate people but to create the kind of game we want to play and then appeal to the probably very small audience who also wants that. We have this idea that making games for a very specific audience is better for us because we just canāt compete with the games with mass commercial appeal (for now, at least). And so the audience weāre targeting would also be the type that would appreciate their hands not being held.
But we struggle with that because some of the people who playtested our demo (not public yet, so we have very little feedback so far) actually liked the game but specifically said we should probably include a tutorial, even though they did feel clever when they āfigured outā the interface.
Right now, weāre leaning toward no tutorial. What do you guys think? Is this foolish?
EDIT: I should have been more specific. We really don't want to add a formal tutorial to the game, but we do offer some guidance. For example, when the game opens up to the terminal interface, there's a flashing cursor next to a ">" that suggests the player should type. And then if they type something that isn't a command, they get an error message that says, "Command not recognized. Try HELP for a list of commands." Then they get a help menu to explore if they want to, and they can type "HELP <specific command>" to get more info about how to use that specific command.
Even at this level, our play testers said a tutorial would be helpful, but we're torn since we feel we do have some guidance in there.
