Day 1 of the Tutorial

Gah…

Quickly turned into the nightmare I thought it was going to be. Sat down and tried to create something dumb simple, a tutorial that would force the player to step through the rules 1 by 1.

Created a small, 7x7 board, with a pop up screen that would direct them to click here, and then here, read some instructions, then click here. However, the system was very easy to fool. It was completely automated, with no checks to see what the player was actually doing. And in order to achieve that I would have to really dig into some of the core code and change it, not what you want to do when you have 11 days left.

So we need something different.

Working towards a free play system where the board is prepopulated with “opposing tiles” yet the player is able to play by themselves. Might do a pop up system in the future, but as of now there will be instructional text at the bottom that players can scroll through and read at their leisure that breaks down everything.

What I have learned from this experience thus far is that tutorials are extremely difficult to build. You have to break your own code & force it to basically slow down so that you can explain what is happening. Its really messy and with that looming date, beginning to get stressed. We have to have a tutorial system. End of story. If we cannot communicate our rules and design to allow complete strangers to play, we have basically failed.