Improving the tutorial

[electricmonk2k]

TL;DR: A list of additions and changes for improving the tutorial.


Hi,

After having played through the first campaign in version 0.13.20-0 (I had previously played the 0.12.x version tutorial a few moths ago, but it had been a while, so I played it again), I've come up with a few suggestions for clarifying a few things in the tutorial. BTW when I refer to "tab-hints", I mean those orange dialog-boxes that are closed with TAB.


Base / First Steps: (AKA Tutorial / Demo campaign):


1. 1st level:

• When examining the shipwreck, the tab-hint that describes the dialog (and tells you to move the iron plates to your inventory) should appear after the dialog has opened, not before. That way, can the player can see what it's trying to point out. This also happens when describing the character-GUI - it's easier to see what the dialog is pointing out if the window is open (there are 3 tab-hints displayed before the dialog is even open).
• "Get close to the iron ore": A 'tutorial-arrow' should point to the iron ore. Also mention that if the player is too far away, the rectangle is red instead of yellow.
• Crafting a stone furnace: When instructed to check the recipes, point out that the furnace cannot be crafted due to lack of stone (the image of the stone furnace in the list of recipes is faded). This should be pointed out once when the dialog is opened.
• "Select furnace and place it on ground": Mention that the furnace must be placed close to your character (it appears green if it's close enough, red if it cannot be built at the location, or faded if too far from the player).
• "Insert iron ore in resource slot of stone furnace": This needs a 'tutorial-arrow' to point to this slot. Also for when being asked to fill the fuel slot.
• "Insert fuel into the stone furnace": Mention that coal must be mined, and wood needs to be harvested from trees.
• "Get the processed iron plates from the stone furnace": Open furnace-dialog, and drag the output (pointed to by an arrow) to your inventory (pointed to by an arrow).
• Crafting burner mining drill: Note that this needs a stone furnace to build, but if you have the pre-requisite ingredients, the stone furnace will automatically be placed on the crafting-queue when crafting a burner mining drill, and if you already have a stone furnace, that one will be used.
• "Place the burner mining drill on the ground over some resources": The character must be close enough. The stone furnace being carried by the cursor turns green if it is OK to build there.

1. 2nd level:

• "Take items from wooden chest": Left-click it and transfer items from the chest-inventory to your inventory
• Burner inserter: "It can insert or unload stuff into and from machines": Additionally, there should be an image of something (eg. an assembling machine or furnace) with two inserters placing items inside the machine, and one taking out the output. Maybe there should be an additional tab-dialog to say that they can be used to re-fuel machines (the picture of the burner-inserter inserting coal into burner miner should be moved there), and perhaps mention that burner-inserters that handle coal can re-fuel themselves.
• When inspecting the wooden chest: "Open the machine's GUI": Should be "Open the chest's GUI"
• Open the chest's GUI: Once it's dialog is open, a tab-hint should suggest the player takes the contents. Maybe even explain what they are.
• BUG: If the first item the player takes from the chest and adds to their own inventory is not the gun, the game gets stuck.
• "Equip the gun": It suggests using the SHIFT + Left-click. However, this only works if the gun is in the box, and not the player's inventory. Also, it should mention that it can be carried with the mouse-cursor to the weapon-slot.
• When equipping the gun, wait until the box-dialog is closed before enemies are spawned. Otherwise, the box-dialog gets in the way of an approaching enemy, and if there are toomany things cluttering the screen, the player may not be able to react to a rapidly approaching enemy if they've never done so before.
• BUG: "Kill the biters before they get to you": If first biter is killed before this message shows, the game gets stuck on that message.
• "The second inverter is reversed": When this is pointed out, the tutorial should mention that this needs to be picked up (hold down right mousebutton to 'mine' the inserter), then place it, using 'R' to rotate it. Mention which way the inserter's arrow should be pointing. Also, it should mention that any fuel it contains when you mine it is also added to your inventory.
• Somewhere along the line, a tab-hint should pop up to say "Don't forget to re-fuel your machines" (this can happen when the red out-of-fuel icon is flashing).
• Also, a tab-hint could mention that multiple items can be placed into the build-queue.
• Make it clear that for the goal of crafting 10 miners and 5 furnaces, it's not just about the number crafted, but each crafted miner or furnace must be built.
• Once the player has built the 10 miners and 5 furnaces, perhaps also mention something about laying the belts and suggest making more inserters (perhaps even mention that inserters can be used to take crafted objects out the furnaces).
• With the objective of getting iron plates, copper plates, and coal, mention that finished resources should be in the player's personal inventory in order for them to count towards the goal.
• In the objective dialog when collecting resources, For resources where the objective is met, the number should be in a different colour (eg. green).
• When mining resources: Mention that sometimes, resources can run out. In that case, move the miners to another patch of resources (parhaps in this level, all resource-patches could be nearly depleted so the player gets a reason to move their miners this level).

1. 3rd level:

• "On a water/ground transition" -> "On a water/ground transition-tile"
• "Build pipes to get the water from the offshore pump into the boilers": This would work better if the boilers were further inland. In the current setup, the player must build the offshore pump next to the boilers, which means there is currently no need to build any pipes (although if they really wanted to, the player could build a pump further away, and an S-shaped pipe to connect the pump and the boilers).
• When building pipes, mention that to make a pipe curve, just build the next pipe-segment next to the one you want to connect it to.
• When making sure water flowing into the steam engine is hot enough: Say that the boilers need to be fuelled with coal.
• "The steam engine's efficiency is highest when it gets water at 100": Explain how to find the current water-temperature.
• When the gun-turret is mentioned, mention that ammo can be crafted. Crafted ammo goes to the ammo-slot in the bottom-right. Ammo can be dragged from there to the turret. Note that if the ammo is right-clicked, only half is grabbed instead of all of it.

[ssilk]

I think this is a good idea and I will sticky this for some while so that others can add their experiences.

[Ghoulish]

A well thought out, and presented post

"Also mention that if the player is too far away, the rectangle is red instead of yellow." That is most definitely needed, took me a while to figure out why the "can not build beep" was happening. These days I just use long reach, but that's another story.

[electricmonk2k]

And here's my thoughts on the 2nd campaign:

Base / New Hope:

2. 1st level:

• When crafting a lab: Show that the crafting-menu can be categorised (the 'Production' category must be chosen to find the lab). Red science packs can be crafted from the "intermediate products" tab.
• When automation researched, give a tab-hint to say that the assembling machine can be used to automatically craft items that require two ingredients.
• When engine researched, mention that engine can only be crafted in an assembling-machine that takes 4 ingredients (engine can be found under "immediate products").

2. 2nd level:

• Suggest player looks in the chest.
• Explain what modules and repair-packs are used for, and how to use the repair-packs to repair something. [EDIT: See this thread for an idea for how this message can be passed on to the player]
• There is an objective to gather some resources and put them in the car. The first time I played this level, I assumed these resources were needed for building trains, rather than being the objective to complete the level. So I gathered them before I even tried to build the trains (partly by building a heavily-defended mine at a not-so-distant patch of iron with a really long belt, and partly by going to the abandoned mines in the car and collecting the resources manually). So it should me made clearer that these resources are required to finish the level, rather than to start building trains. This can be remedied with an additional message from the character saying "I don't think the nearby resources will be enough" and then "It's time to recover the railway to mine distant resources". One thing I did learn however from this was that going to the distant mine by car made it feel like it was a long way away, but going there by train makes it feel much closer. So perhaps, the player should have a reason to drive to the distant mines at least once just to get a feel for the distance (although they do travel there when laying the track, but maybe part of the story for this level could involve retrieving something from the mines before the railway-technology is invented).
• As well as "It's time to recover the railway", mention a few hints about building track, stations, etc. In fact, this could be expanded into a sub-tutorial about using the trains. As the trains in this level are confined to one train per network, the tutorial does not have to be complete (eg. do not include anything about signals in this tutorial).
  Starting-points for train-tutorials are found in the following threads:
  viewtopic.php?f=18&t=21688
  viewtopic.php?f=5&t=23787
  viewtopic.php?f=54&t=34468
  In this particular level, the tutorial should cover the following:
  • Using Stations. Explain what the markings mean, and that the stations must be facing the right way.
  • Coupling wagons to the trains.
  • How to drive a train manually.
  • Trains must either be double-headed (so they can go both ways), or single-headed and include a loop at both ends of the network. Note that in this level, it may just be best not to mention creating a loop, and just stick to double-headed trains so as not to overwhelm the player, but even so, the usage of double-headed trains must be explained. One way this could be explained in the tutorial is for the player to drive the train manually to it's destination, and the player having a monologue about how the train cannot go backwards at full speed, so they must 'mine' the locomotive and re-build it at the other side of the train. Then drive the train back to the factory, and craft a second locomotive. An alternative way would be to allow the player to drive back backwards (but at a slower speed), but when it comes to automating the train-line, it should mention that trains can only be driven backwards when driving manually, so a second locomotive needs to be added to allow bi-directional automatic train-travelling.
  • Explain why the inserters load/unload from/to a chest to/from the train instead of directly from/to a belt.
  • Inserters loading and unloading wagons: beware of stopping a locomotive next to unloading-inserters, as they will remove the fuel. Also mention that inserters can be used to re-fuel the train.
  • Making a schedule to automate the train.
• When "Railway" is researched, the player can start rebuilding the railway, and running a manual train-service. They could then say "If only there was a way to automate this", and then suggest researching "Automated rail transportation" (the tutorial would have to cope with the possibility of Automated rail transportation having been researched by the time the railway is rebuilt). Note that for this to work, the goods-wagon would have to be made available with "Railway" instead of "Automated rail transportation".

2. 3rd level:

• This level is a tricky level for people who've never played it before, so I suggest maybe having a re-cap of what has been taught so far about the military aspect - perhaps even mixing in a few new concepts along the way.
• Explain how to rapidly load ammo in both guns and turrets (eg. using SHIFT+click).
• Remind player about using the right mouse-button to transfer half the stack, and SHIFT+right mouse-button to do it in one click.
• Explain armour.
• Explain how to rapidly switch guns using 'Q'.
• Explain difference (advantages and disadvantages) between the machine-gun, shotgun and rocket launcher (although if this is going to be explained before the first shipwreck is explored, the rocket-launcher can be explained later).
• Explain how to rapidly lay walls and use the sliding doors (perhaps mention this in the second level or even first level of this campaign instead, so as to focus the tutorial for this level on guns).
• Explain what the different capsules do (eg. the defender capsule), and perhaps also a bit about alien artefacts.
• I'm not sure if this is a bug or not, but sometimes, my machine-gun changes to the rocket-launcher even if I still have ammo, and I end up using my precious rockets when I don't want to. Is this an effect of 'Q' being used to both change weapon and clear my hand?

2. 4th level:

• "That looks like some oil over there": Arrow please.
• When connecting the pump-jacks, explain that a pipe must be laid and connected to the output-arrows to do that. And that it must be connected to the input-arrow(s) of the refinery. In fact, have a tutorial about liquids, explaining the following:
  • Laying and connecting pipes to machines.
  • Refineries and chemical plants with recipes that produce multiple liquids stop producing if the output for at least one liquid is full. To help this situation, explain what storage tanks can be used for.
  • The 4-input assembling-machine can take a liquid input via a pipe, and that chemical plants can take solids with inserters, and can produce solids that need to be taken out with inserters.
  • Explain what happens when multiple liquids enter the same pipe (or explain that this must be avoided if that's the case).
• Perhaps introduce flamethrowers and flamethrower-turrets into the mix. Explain why they have 2 pipes, and make it clear whether or not they need to be connected to both types of fuel, or one only and the rest of the fuel continues through the device and comes out the pipe at the other side. However, the story in the tutorial is about wanting to escape because the natives are getting too strong, but if we install flamethrower-turrets, the flamethrower-turrets might just be strong enough to keep the natives at bay for a very long time, which goes against the flow of the story. Perhaps this could be remedied by making the native-attacks more intense (but at the same time, the number of gun-turrets and walls at the start of the level could be increased). One-way of preventing the player from building toomany flamethrower-turrets is to disable the research that leads to them, but have one in a crashed spaceship that can be retrieved (currently in the level, there is a crashed spaceship to the south-east of the factory with laser-turrets, but the player needs to search a bit before they find it - maybe it could be closer, or maybe it could stay where it is (or even be further away) but there could be some sort of hint describing where to look). Even one flamethrower-turret near the staring-location could hold the natives off a bit longer, but more than one may break the flow of the story because they would then be too easy to hold off.

PS. Is it just me or does 0.13 have fewer natives attacking, than 0.12 (although to be fair, I played it on 'Easy' mode)? I do like that you've given us automatic gates to use in 0.13, as this helped a lot in the 3rd level.

[ssilk]

Pressing Q twice will change the weapon. I always put that to another key, cause in a fight I come to often on Q.

Really good work, electromonk2k! Any developer can use that list to improve the tutorials.

[Klonan]

Thank you very much electricmonk2k2,

We are looking at going over the tutorials and campaign missions soon,
And your input is really really useful

[SupplyDepoo]

• "The second inverter is reversed": When this is pointed out, the tutorial should mention that this needs to be picked up (hold down right mousebutton to 'mine' the inserter), then place it, using 'R' to rotate it.

Or just move the mouse cursor over the inserter and press "R"!