Usually these tutorial levels include instructions that explain what keys or buttons
players are supposed to press in order to achieve certain effects. Often on-screen text
appears, sometimes accompanied by voice-overs that tell players to “Press the
Spacebar to fire your primary weapon” or “Press and hold down the blue X for a super
jump.”Halo, again, had a very nice implementation of non-obtrusive help text that
showed up during gameplay. The key with such automatic in-game help is that you want
the players who do not need it to be able to ignore it fairly easily (or even have an option
to turn it off completely), while it needs to show up and stay around long enough for
those who do need it to see it. You need to make sure novice players will not miss it and
will get a chance to apply it before it disappears. Well-implemented help text can be
quite a boon to making a complex game easier to pick up. Beyond that, however, games
likeSpyro the DragonandThe Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Timego so far as to have
actual game characters tell the player character what the controls for the game are. In
the former game, the friendly elder dragon says, “Spyro, press and hold the blue button
in order to glide.” I think this goes too far and totally shatters the player’s suspension of
disbelief. The in-game characters should not know anything about the player and cer-
tainly nothing about a PlayStation controller. However, I do think it is helpful to remind
players of the game’s controls while they are playing through more removed GUI dis-
plays and non-game character voice-overs. Many modern games include such
sophisticated controls that they are likely to alienate non-hard-core gamers, and
reminding novice players of what they need to do in order to perform a certain move is a
good idea.
I would say that, in retrospect, most of my games have been too difficult, and cer-
tainly too hard for players to get into. The exception to this isThe Suffering, which far
and away did the best job of introducing mechanics to players gradually over the first
level. Indeed, it was specifically designed to do this from the beginning of development.
Though players get the impression that monsters are swarming all around the level,
killing everything they encounter, in fact it is impossible to die for the first 10 to 15 min-
utes of the game. This gives players a safe place to learn the controls. During this safe
period and throughout the first level unobtrusive help text shows up on the screen to
help players learn the different actions they can perform. However,The Suffering’s
130 Chapter 7: The Elements of Gameplay
Console titles such as
The Legend of Zelda:
Ocarina of Timeare
good at teaching the
player how to control
the game.