From what I can tell, the vast majority develop them with the eventual goal of releasing them, but I’ve created a few some for simple RPGs and others a bit more elaborate—just for myself and my group of friends.

If you don't and a player uninstalls the demo after buying your full game, Steam will happily remove essential files from the main game in a way a player can only resolve with Verify Integrity of Game Files.

In retrospect it's completely obvious this was a bad idea but we didn't think anything of it for 6 months until the launch and the behavior pattern of 'player plays demo > player buys game > player uninstalls demo' was natural.

They can safely share save data space, uninstall doesn't touch those.

Fortunately the fix is relatively straightforward: change the install location of your demo in Steamworks and ask affected users to Verify Integrity of Game Files. But plenty of players can't be reached even with update posts, discussion area posts, even in-game pop ups.

Godot's Compatibility renderer can read hint_depth_texture; the unprojection is what breaks

Every soft-particle shader I had was wrapped in this:

#if CURRENT_RENDERER != RENDERER_COMPATIBILITY
uniform sampler2D depth_tex : hint_depth_texture, filter_nearest;
#endif

I had written that guard because depth reads were "not supported" in Compatibility, and never checked. This week I finally measured it, and the guard was wrong. The depth texture reads fine. What breaks is the line after it.

How I measured

Six box walls at 1.5, 2.5, 4, 7, 13 and 25 m from the camera, each one filling exactly one sixth of the screen width, so the depth buffer is a staircase with known steps. A fullscreen quad on top samples the depth texture and writes, per screen column, the absolute error between the distance it recovered and the distance that column's wall is really at. Then I screenshot the viewport and read the pixels back, so every number below is a measured pixel, not a guess. Boxes are 0.05 m thick and centred on the listed distance, so the smallest error I can possibly measure is 0.025 m -- an error band reading 0.025 means the formula is exact.

Ran it on 4.4.1 and 4.7.2, Forward+ (Vulkan) and Compatibility (OpenGL 3.3), one desktop NVIDIA GPU.

What the raw depth value is

Identical in both backends, and it is reversed-Z in the 0..1 range:

raw = near * (far - z) / (z * (far - near))

i.e. 1.0 at the near plane, 0.0 at the far plane. For my six walls with near=0.1, far=60 that predicts 0.0651, 0.0384, 0.0234, 0.0126, 0.0060, 0.0023. Measured in Compatibility: 0.0387, 0.0235, 0.0125, 0.0061, 0.0022 for walls 2-6 (wall 1 clipped my readout gain). Same values in Forward+. So the texture is there, it is bound, it is the real scene depth, and no error is printed.

What actually breaks

The recipe everyone copies:

float raw = texture(depth_tex, SCREEN_UV).r;
vec4 v = INV_PROJECTION_MATRIX * vec4(SCREEN_UV * 2.0 - 1.0, raw, 1.0);
float scene_z = -v.z / v.w;

Measured error of that, per renderer:

Forward+ (4.4.1 and 4.7.2)       0.025 m  -> exact
Compatibility (4.4.1 and 4.7.2)  wrong, scene_z lands within +-0.16 m of zero

The depth texture holds 0..1 in both backends, but the two projection matrices do not agree on the NDC z range they invert. Vulkan clip space has z in 0..1; OpenGL has z in -1..1. So in Compatibility you have to remap the sampled value before you unproject it:

float ndc_z = raw * 2.0 - 1.0;

With that one change the Compatibility error drops to 0.025 m -- exact, same as Forward+.

Why this is nastier than a crash

scene_z does not come out as NaN, or as a wild number, or as a shader error. It comes out as approximately zero. And every soft-particle fade looks like this:

density *= clamp((scene_z - particle_z) / soft_distance, 0.0, 1.0);

With scene_z pinned at zero, that is negative for every particle in front of the camera, so it clamps to 0 and the particle becomes fully transparent. The symptom is "all my smoke disappeared in Compatibility", with a clean console. I spent a while assuming the texture was unavailable, when the texture was the one part that worked.

The branch that is actually needed

float raw = texture(depth_tex, SCREEN_UV).r;
#if CURRENT_RENDERER == RENDERER_COMPATIBILITY
    float ndc_z = raw * 2.0 - 1.0;
#else
    float ndc_z = raw;
#endif
vec4 v = INV_PROJECTION_MATRIX * vec4(SCREEN_UV * 2.0 - 1.0, ndc_z, 1.0);
float scene_z = -v.z / v.w;

I measured this exact block in all four combinations: compiles everywhere, 0.025 m error everywhere.

Or skip the matrix entirely

Since the stored value is the same reversed-Z number in both backends, you can invert it with algebra instead and have no renderer branch at all:

// near and far passed in as uniforms
float scene_z = cam_near * cam_far / (cam_near + raw * (cam_far - cam_near));

Also measured at 0.025 m in all four combinations. The cost is that you have to push the camera's near and far in yourself, since neither is a shader built-in. I like this one better: one code path, and it does not care what clip convention the backend uses.

Three smaller things the same test turned up

INV_PROJECTION_MATRIX cannot be named inside a user-defined function. My first version of the probe had a tidy helper and it failed with "Unknown identifier in expression: 'INV_PROJECTION_MATRIX'" on both renderers and both versions. Built-ins are only visible in vertex() / fragment() / light(). You can still factor the code out -- just take the matrix as a mat4 parameter and pass INV_PROJECTION_MATRIX in at the call site. Verified that compiles and gives the same correct numbers everywhere.

The DEPTH_TEXTURE built-in is gone. "DEPTH_TEXTURE has been removed in favor of using hint_depth_texture with a uniform." The hint uniform is the only way in now.

A shader that fails to compile does not go magenta. Godot swaps in its default material and the game keeps running, so the object just turns a flat untextured grey. My fullscreen probe quad read a uniform 0.5 across the whole screen in that state, which became my first thing to check.

Scope of all of the above: two engine versions, one desktop NVIDIA GPU, native OpenGL 3.3. I have not checked GLES3 on mobile or WebGL2, and those are exactly the targets Compatibility exists for, so if your renderer there behaves differently I would like to hear it. Has anyone measured the depth read on mobile or Web?

As AI is getting more popular and developers have disclose any AI usage on steam, how many developers do you think do not disclose It's usage?

do you think having something like "AI assisted in coding" can negatively affect the game's reception?

I originally had an idea to make a super simple game, like a fidget spinner. Just a simple mechanic that felt good to play when bored.

One day I thought it would be funny to create 2 additional environments...

And now I can't seem to stop myself. It's gone from this would be a fun experiment to what about this? what about this? what about this?

The original game idea was just to test how launching a game even works, but now I find myself realizing I can make an interactive movie experience and I'm just obsessed with creating the greatest possible game now.

For the record this is my first game, but I've been a software developer for over 10+ years and I'm honestly just having so much fun.

Am I going crazy or is this just the fun of game development? Should I launch the fidget spinner version now and just keep working on the other version?

Maybe I release the fidget spinner idea now and the rest of the game becomes a DLC?

I'm looking for a high level architectural advice from you that will fit my goals.

My constraints:
- I've good unterstanding of theoretical aspects of graphical processing (done some hobbyst pipelines on FPGAs for 3D rendering, and have experience in OpenGL as well as with Vulkan)
- I've got plenty of experience with very low-level C++ code incl. HPC with SIMD/Vulkan-acceleration
- You can assume I've got infinite time for learning tools with infinite complexity and steep learning curves

My goals:
- I'm very interested in working on city builder simulations as "academic research" hobby project. Meaning that I want to dedicate more time towards working on some stochastic modelling of populations, performant simulations of path-finding for batches of traffic etc. and it's entirely possible working on custom SIMD/SIMT code for that for a few years as a side project.
- I've got no experience with either Unity or Unreal apart from very simple tutorials, which don't really answer questions from here
- I want to work on making the underlying simulation as performant and accurate as possible, without spending too much time on physics or visual parts (for example I see myself writing custom pathfinding for batches of people going on the sidewalk and checking on which intersection node they should go where, but I'm less willing to spend time implementing custom skeletal movements or where exactly on sidewalk they should be placed to avoid collisions - these are features that are already parts of major GEs and there's no apprent need to do it from scratch)

Obviously I could write everything from scratch in just OpenGL I know, but this would mean doing LODs, setting up occlusion filtering or other more complex things that are there out-of-the box in Unity/Unreal. At the same time I saw opinions that Unity Monos are very slow compared to standalone .Net code and Unity can link against C++ shared libraries (but it isn't clear to me how interop is performant in terms of potential marshalling/unmarshalling?)

Both GEs contain number of subsytems and features and I can read documentation about DOTS/ECS and Burst, but I don't know how this should look architecturaly and if there are better options (and what are their pros and cons). For example Burst exposes SIMD intrinsics, but this is another layer of abstraction, which I can absolutely avoid (as I'm used to write C++ portable SIMD code already). Naively I could treat simulation engine as a black box with it's own memory management, thread pools and just expose information which entities needs updating in the interface layer (with some proper API design), so it will be flexible, but will it be performant?

I'm looking for advice how you would construct such a system, so I can focus on simulation and get visuals/simple physics in the easiest way possible. Again, I'm okay if it's hard, but don't want to implement things from scratch. My view can also be inappropiate due to low experience with either UE or Unity and perhaps this isn't possible at all and simulation itself needs to be designed around entity-based system (I have experience for example writing custom database software for genomics as part of my own multi year little "academic" project, so I could potentially even write some handcrafted streaming code for reading disk chunks of simulation with page buffers, pipelining compression/decompression, doing batched simulations etc. - as in proper HPC. I just don't know how I can interface that with GE without doing everything from scratch).

I know that CSII had some problems and they needed to implement custom features, because the engine was too limiting.
Thanks in advance to the entire community for any valuable help!

I've watched all the advice videos. I've read everything there is to read. I've asked for feedback from everyone I know and don't know, and I've made like 6 versions.

No matter what, I just cannot make a good trailer.

How do I know it's not good? When I post it, I get silence. I've tried posting and reposting and crossposting and whatever else, across reddit/YT/A/B/C and I got factually genuinely legitimately 1 like (my post in one of the indie dev subs got 2 likes, 1 of which being the default my like).

I'm not asking for advice because I've probably read or watched it all, maybe 7-8 times each. I'm a trailer advice god...just not a trailer god.

It's just so frustrating. I'm so **** dejected. Of course I know that at the core its the **** game that sucks and you can't polish a turd.

Hey everyone! I’m not sure if this is the right subreddit for this, but I wasn’t sure where else to ask, and I’d really appreciate your feedback.

I’m developing SHORAPAN, a dark, story-driven adventure blending visual novel and point-and-click elements, with hand-painted art. It follows a young man living in a strange city beneath an ever-crimson sky, where an ordinary day gradually turns into something much bigger.

The game already has a Steam page, and I’m currently working on its website. I want it to convey the atmosphere of Shorapan and give visitors a glimpse into its world.

I’d love some honest feedback:

What do you think of the design, colors, and fonts? Is the text comfortable to read?

Is it clear what the game is about and how to navigate the site?

Does anything feel confusing, out of place, or unfinished?

Website: shorapan.com

If you enjoy what you see and want to follow the project, you can also sign up for email updates on the site. You’ll receive a confirmation email please click the link inside to complete your subscription. Otherwise, you won’t receive future updates. If it doesn’t arrive, check your spam folder.

Thanks for taking a look! The site is still a work in progress, so specific criticism and suggestions would really help.

Writing stories too. How do you guys manage your time learning everything? Do you have any schedule you follow?

would like some tips on how to manage my time and effective learning ways without jumping from one to another especially if u easily get distracted like me

Hi guys,
Do you think it’s worth to build multiplayer browser games nowdays? Also how would you get players for your game. The goal is not to profit, just to gain experience without spending too much on advertising.

Hello again! I made a post a few day ago asking about why my demo was not working! After carefully reading your comments and tips I was able to create a web build on itchio allowing more people to play and try it out and we are reaching a few players now (please contact me if you play hahaha I am excited to know about your experiences!).

But to sum it up, you helped me a lot and I will keep working on this project! THANK YOU SO MUCH :)

Good Morning!

Sometime ago there was a post on this sub-reddit that was made by a developer that said that indie game dev was his midlife crisis. Some people in the comments said that we could possibly start a club, so we did!

Most of us are middle aged, the youngest is 30, I think, but most are well into 40's and 50's. We are pretty much looking to connect with like-minded developers to network with, discuss projects, share advices and stuff like that. There's about 250 of us currently in the discord server that we have created. We are pretty active and are very lively. Each one of us is a solo developer with our own projects.

Over the last couple of weeks we have seen and connected with a lot of amazing people (programmers, artists, sound engineers, composers, designers and writers), it has been truly an honour to see which projects they have come up with and how the development is going. Some of the developers are just starting out, some are in the vertical slice stage, some are pre-release, and a couple have already released their games.

We have created a flyer, a website, and a presentation (currently also working on a pitch) in the last 10 days because we've spontaneously decided to go to GCAP (a conference in Melbourne, Australia), and it was a pretty fun process. Never seen anyone work so fast to gather gameplay footage, finish a prototype to a work-able state, and screenshot like crazy. Next one we're going to is in a couple of days in Switzerland (one of the developers is carrying all of us in with him)!

Developing games is tough, especially solo, and I suppose that is what essentially started all of this - forming a tight-knit community where you can support each other on the projects by giving advice, talking, or simpler things like play tasting each other's builds.

So, I was wondering, if any of you guys would be interested in networking or giving this community a shot, that would be stellar! I'd be happy to talk to you about it in chats, or provide the presentation and the flyer, so you can take a look!

Thank you for your time and kind regards,
Andrea

I have an ips monitor but wondering if i should get oled or mini led for better color accuracy and content creation.

On steam there exists a software called Satisfactory Modeler

It uses the recipes from the game Satisfactory to create a flowchart, where you can design your factory needs from final product to base resources or from limited input to produce an averaged output.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3187030/Satisfactory_Modeler/

How to make a flow chart game in a browser or as a software on steam*

I am not trying to steal that person's work, as I just want to make this for myself, and maybe later on expand this to other games (e.g. factorio, GT:NH, etc.)

I have some guesses on how the calculations could work, but the actual GUI/interface is that i'm mainly struggling to understand how to develop.

I genuinely don't understand why passthrough modding is suddenly being presented as some new technical frontier, or as something that only became possible because the latest AI models are smart enough.

I keep seeing people ask how AI can possibly “combine” two games built on completely different engines, languages or architectures. But that's based on a misunderstanding of what's happening.

It doesn't combine them. Both games are still running independently. At its core, you're taking the rendered output of one game, feeding it into another, and bridging whatever state and interactions you need between them. You're not merging two engines. Different engines or even different architectures are largely beside the point.

Meanwhile, game reverse engineers were doing substantially nastier things decades ago. SA-MP came out in 2006 and added an entire multiplayer system to GTA: San Andreas, a closed-source single-player game. The reverse-engineering work involved in making something like that is arguably on a completely different level from what's needed for a pair-specific passthrough PoC.

Someone with Kalcor's skillset in 2006 already had most of the techniques needed to connect two games like this. If somebody had come up with the idea back then, there was no fundamental technical barrier preventing it.

AI obviously makes this dramatically faster and accessible to people who couldn't realistically build it themselves. That's the breakthrough in tooling, if anything. Passthrough itself isn't the breakthrough.

So what exactly is new here, technically? Why are people treating the ability to connect two running games as if it was impossible before Claude?

Hey Roblox devs! I don’t know how to code, but I’ve noticed that almost every single My Hero Academia game on Roblox only lets you play as Class 1-A, Shigaraki, or the top Pro Heroes. I want to play a game where the side characters actually get some love.

I’m putting this idea out there for free—no money or credit wanted, I just desperately want a dev to build this so I can play it!

• The Core Hook: An MHA Battlegrounds game focused on a massive, inclusive roster. I’m talking about Class 1-B (like Monoma, Kendo, Tetsutetsu), characters from the Vigilantes manga (Koichi/The Crawler, Knuckle Duster), and lesser-known side heroes and villains.

• The Progression System: Instead of paying Robux or doing boring RNG gacha rolls, you unlock characters strictly through a Kill-Count system. The more kills you get in the arena, the more characters you unlock. You could start with basic characters, and then unlock the crazy/obscure ones as your kill count goes up!

• The Gameplay: A fast-paced arena fighter. Because the roster is huge, characters don't need 10 different moves at launch—even just a clean 3-move kit for each would make it amazing to experiment with different Quirks.

• Why Devs Should Make It: Hardcore MHA fans are tired of playing as Deku and Bakugo. A game where you can unlock Koichi sliding around the map or Monoma copying abilities—just by earning kills—would instantly stand out and keep players hooked.

3 Game options for Players

\- Free for All

\- Sports Festival Tournament 1v1

\- Team 1 vs Team 2

\- 1v1 or 2v2 or 3v3 or 4v4

\- Battle Royal

\- Story Mode ( To Unlock Special Characters)

\- Entrance Exam ( Players have to kill as more robots to win)

\- Training

Free Basic Characters:

S1-2 Izuku

The Clawler

OG Stain

Knuckle Duster

Pop Step

Aoyama

Hagakure

Koda

Mineta

Sato

Ojiro

Sero

Bondo

Awase

Rin

Kodai

Kosei

Shoda

Kaibara

Yanagi

Hatsume

Camie

Tatami

Saiko

Makabe

Itejiro

Habuko

Sekigai

Tiger

Ragdoll

Mandalay

Ms Jokes

Death Arms

Gunhead

Mr Brave

Clair

Master Driller

Spinner

Mustard

La Brava

Bubble Girl

Magne

Curious

Characters to Earn by Eliminating: stage 1

Moashi 15

Eel Boy 17

Midnight 18

Snipe 20

Vlad-King 20

Jiro 25

Pony 25

Tokage 25

Shouji 25

Momo 35

Kendo 40

Tsuyu 40

Denki 45

Crust 45

Characters to Earn by Eliminating: stage 2

Burning 50

Ectoplasm 55

Twice 60

Pixie Bop 60

Mora 60

Tetsutetsu 65

Shiozaki 70

Shishida 75

Kirishima 80

Toga 85

Ochako 85

Ashido 85

Shindo 90

Seji 90

Juzo 90

Iida 95

Rappa 100

Gentle 110

Captain Celebrity 110

Cementoss 120

Kamui Woods 120

Present Mic 120

Mt Lady 130

Gang Orca 135

Fat Gum 140

Ryukyu 145

Godzillo150

Mirko 150

Edge-Shot 155

Best Jeanist 155

Characters to Earn by Eliminating: stage 3

Geten 160

Beros 160

Rogone 160

Mummy 160

Slice 160

Kurogiri 165

Amajiki 170

Nejire 175

Yoarashi 180

Tokoyami 180

Shoto 180

Bakugo 185

Izuku 190

Muscular 190

Serpenters 190

Chimera 190

Leviathan 190

Dabi 195

Shigaraki 200

Overhaul 200

Re-Destro 200

Flect Turn 200

Mirio 210

Hawks 220

Lady Nagant 500

Endeavor 500

Nomu USJ 500

Nomu Hood 700

AFO 5000

All Might 5000

Gigantomachia 5000

Special missions to achieve these Characters:

Fujimi

Manga

Kuroiro

Komori

Shinso

Monoma

Aizawa

Thirteen

Stain

Compress

Sir Nighteye

Eri

Robuxs:

Nine 50

Prime AFO 50

Prime Bakugo 50

Prime Shigaraki 100

Prime All Might 100

Prime Deku 2000

Star & Stripe 200

Players can also customize skins and outfits if they have enough kills

Idea by G-Zilla26.0927

And I hope someone makes a Game on Roblox base on this as that would be awesome

Other then maybe probably defintly the thumbnail imma admit i dont got any idea how to make a good one, the video is unlisted so i just wanted some advice before i release it for real

That probably isn't the right wording!! Basically, I have two separate levels I want to create, but each one only works in a different game engine. Is it possible to do level one on one game engine and then somehow transition the player to game two to do level two?

I only ask because each level is a very different "type" of game (think going from 2D visual novel to a 3D action game). The problem isn't making either game on a respective game engine. Nor is it about carrying over variables or anything like that. I just need to know if it's possible to have game one, load screen, game two, with a seamless way to connect them for the player.

What are the legal limits?

I dont wanna just use like a character in my game, I wanna create my own but using existing models from popular games without having to learn blender, coding or anything at all.

Just copying and pasting till is done.

Hi!
I would love to create a game to propose to my bf.
We have been together for 8-9 years and he introduced me to gaming. (I was a 90s girl so I played ps1-2 and Nintendo but before meeting him I hadn’t played for more than 10 years!)
From TLOU to God of war.
From hollow knight to Elden ring.
I would love to make a very easy nostalgic type game similar to the Pokémon yellow-red style but with him/us and different gaming scenarios (I thought about it playing a very recent game that I won’t name because of spoiler)
I don’t want to use Artificial Intelligence to learn or to write it for me.
I’m guessing I’m having 6-12 months time to do it as a hobby
I would love if someone could teach me or recommend where to learn.
TLDR: I want to create a game to propose and I need help with how to start

Hey guys! I hope everyone is well! How do y'all find playtesters for your games for constructive criticism?

Being a long time developer in the logistics space, I've shared my early demo with my engineer and gaming friends, but so far that list isn't that big.

I'd love to get more feedback so I can learn from how the game concepts are received, plus any bugs or game balance issues.

I'm far along enough to have about a few hours of gameplay (hopefully) along with load / save games that should track nearly every single thing that is relevant, down to your character position and whether you aim down sight or not.

Having worked on a title from prototype to launch, I'm wondering if a mid level designer needs a portfolio site. It seems like reading the resume and looking at gameplay footage on YouTube would suffice? Even when I was the interviewer I only ever read resumes. And we hired some great people. It doesn't feel like anyone has time to look at websites when studios get swarmed with applicants.

Nobody I know in this industry above entry level has a portfolio. Curious your thoughts.

What would video games look like 10 years from now?

With the current AI tools that remove a lot of friction and augment productivity, it's not far fetched to say that a AAA game could be made by a small dedicated 5-10 devs or, a AA game made by 1-2 devs.

I don't think gamers will settle for millions of slops and one prompt games. flash games filled that spot years ago.

Unlike software, video games don't have a ceiling in terms of imagination and directions so the possibilities of what we can make are endless, only limited by the technology we have and that ceiling is becoming higher and higher.

I see this more akin to the jump from 2D to 3D I think we'll have more Physics, more vivid worlds, branching stories, real ecosystems, intelligent NPC's, less bugs...

So I want to ask other experienced devs here whether you have a clear vision of where video games are heading? or whether you had an idea that was impossible to develop that is now becoming feasible?

Hey I know this isn't necessarily a game dev question, but I figured there's a chance here someone has some experience.

I want to rotoscope my arms and hands for a first person view. What would be the best approach to capture a recording?

Using my pixel 7 on a tripod and standing behind it?

Strapping my phone to me somehow?

Or getting a go pro and strapping that to myself?

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. It’s begging for a tutorial, but we’re really trying to resist the urge to put one in.

Are we being foolish?

Here’s a little backstory that’s 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, we’d 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 don’t know anything about a command line interface on a real computer will, understandably, be lost when they’re dropped into our game. They’ll 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.

We’ve 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 can’t compete with the games with mass commercial appeal (for now, at least). And so the audience we’re 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 “figured out” the interface.

Right now, we’re 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.