Working on the tutorial! It's gonna be 2D, in a storybook, playable, and multiplayer! You'll see when another player is in the tutorial in the lobby and can click "join in" and possess one of the bodies of tutorial NPCs.
INCOMING INFODUMP ABOUT HOW I CAME UP WITH IT
I worked as a TA in an intensive program for a while in university. My university in particular was super reputable in the pedagogy field of our discipline, so TAs were held to a high standard of learning how to teach effectively and in some cases to participate in pedagogical research and lesson plan creation. I really loved it and got heavily involved. I even got to show my student research at the top research conference for pedagogy in my field! It was really cool :). My favorite thing that I did, however, (which was also the subject of my research) was getting to walk students through doing things on their own.
Tutorials are often most similar to lecture slides, even if they pop up as you play. They're incremental, involve a good bit of text, and often don't feel very interactive. The best lecture slides in a classroom environment are ones lead the student through the thought process of how the involved people came to the conclusion the professor is presenting to you. It also makes you feel more connected to the work you are studying, you feel more engaged, and you feel like you could have figured that out on your own, given the time! Given how predictive confidence is on student performance, that confidence boost is everything, especially to students that are prone to do a little self-gatekeeping from their field. (Marginalized students, impoverished students, or just students who haven't had the opportunity to feel proud of themselves often enough)
But even these excellent, "lead-you-through-it" lectures are not the gold standard. The gold standard is literally doing it yourself. The thing is, unless you have very few students or a subject that is well-geared for that kind of thing, that's very difficult to achieve. You have to create the perfect conditions for the student to figure it out on their own, which often involves a lot of time, and a lot of one-on-one time. My research was working on a tool that would fit that said "gold standard" by having students draw open-ended diagrams simulating code using little HTML tools to create boxes representing variables and drag pointers to and from different places. Then we had a little auto-grader (no AI, it was completely deterministic!) that could grade the diagrams using graph theory. It was SO COOL. But even though the tool is fully automated, it still requires a lot of teaching support and good quality education to actually do its job, because even with a gold standard tool that allows students to "figure it out" themselves, you need the educational support for them to be proficient and confident enough to do that to begin with.
Just like teaching, you want to tell the story of the rules instead of just stating them. But too much exposition is a bad thing in short-play, cooperative games like ours. We also want to leave the story relatively open ended to preserve some of the mystique of it and allow players to come up with their own narratives for why the rats are doing such terrible things as sacrificing each other to appease an evil, isolated goddess. Any way I sliced it, it seemed like the 'slides' approach to the game, built-in or otherwise, would feel clunky and take away from the experience. The game is simple enough that we could maybe leave off a tutorial for the central playerbase, but given that it's a friendslop game it's super important that it's accessible to the least common denominator of "gamer experience". The best tutorial is no tutorial at all (Minecraft, Lethal Company, etc.) or a tutorial so profoundly built in to the story it really doesn't feel like one (Hades, Portal, etc.) But for our game, with a very novel mechanic requiring a tutorial plus a genre that is allergic to tutorials and an overbearing story, neither option was a perfect fit. We would just do a built in tutorial and make it as minimally invasive as possible.
God knows why it took me so long to figure out given my past research in pedagogy. It finally dawned on me: Why not do the same thing as I did before in my research? Instead of making it fully "learn on your own" the metaphorical lecture slides, make it interactive! Make the tutorial a mini version of the game with minimal text, one that you can play with friends (just like the real game), and one that leaves wonder still to be found by the player. Multiplayer-only games involve a lot of in-lobby time, but players would generally much prefer to spend that time chatting over doing a stupid singleplayer tutorial. This helps alleviate both issues, adding an extra "toy" to the lobby and making it something you can do with friends.
It's even more funny because I evaded the "feels-like-powerpoint-slides-tutorial" feeling by making a bunch of art that looks suspiciously slide shaped. But I really do think they feel less like a Powerpoint Presentation than most other tutorials in play.
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This is a mini devlog for Ratacombs! An upcoming play-with-friends silly horror game made by me (programmer + art), Kati (art but insane), and Petu (sound). For the time being, I exclusively post on Tumblr while I work up the courage to branch out to other social media sites. You can join us on discord or keep following along on this blog!
Also, we are looking for a good environmental (shaders + lighting artist) so let us know if you know anyone! :3
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