How to Make Tutorial? - Development Research#1

 Tutorials

Tutorials in modern games are no longer dumped all at once at the beginning, instead, they are broken into smaller pieces and delivered gradually during gameplay. This has three major advantages:

1) Willingness to Learn Grows with Investment

According to Plants vs Zombies designer George Fan, as players become more invested in the game, they become more willing to learn. Explaining all systems at the start can overwhelm and disengage the player.
To solve this, we can reward players with achievements after they complete the first few waves using the most basic systems. Once they’ve succeeded, we introduce more complex systems (like fusion or link) as unlocks, turning them into a kind of reward.
In this way, the player learns while playing, not by being lectured.

2) Play the Real Game Right Away

As mentioned above, learning should feel like playing not like attending a class. Hiding tutorials inside fun gameplay ensures that players still feel like they're playing a real game.
This also makes newly introduced mechanics feel like natural parts of the progressing game, not just more tutorial steps.

3) Teach the Right Thing at the Right Time

Teaching players how a system works only when they first encounter it is far more effective.
For example, explaining how card fusion works at the very beginning is unlikely to stick.
Instead, waiting until the player draws two fusion-compatible cards and then explaining the mechanic allows for hands-on, contextual learning which is much more memorable.

Inverted Pyramid of Decision Making

As defined by Bruce Shelley, games should start with only a few decisions and gradually increase the complexity over time. This helps players naturally learn the systems step-by-step.
Civilization is a great example, you begin by founding a city, but by the end, you're managing dozens of cities, units, resources, and alliances.

The key takeaway from this principle is that we should ensure decisions grow naturally, starting with smaller, simpler choices and gradually evolving into larger, more complex ones. At the beginning of the game, we teach the player simple actions like buying a card and placing it on the board. The decisions they make are also simple at this stage: "Which card should I buy?" "Where should I place this card?"

As the game progresses, the player will have more cards to choose from, and more grids on the board to manage. Now their decisions become more layered: "Which card should go next to which?" "How will this placement affect the board as a whole?"

This creates a natural increase in complexity without overwhelming the player because every new layer is built on the same fundamental loop:
- Buy a card
- Place a card

Even when advanced mechanics come into play (like fusion, synergies, or stacking), the player still feels anchored because the core action remains the same. This sense of familiarity is what keeps them engaged, even as the challenge deepens.

What Kind Of Campaign?

"And so perhaps we can take this format, but instead of thinking about peppering tutorials across a single campaign - we can zoom out and put tutorials in between entire playthroughs of the campaign."

I'm not entirely sure if this idea can be implemented as-is, but instead of that, I think preparing a separate pre-defined campaign that unfolds in a specific way would be much more consistent and significantly easier to balance.

When the player launches the game for the first time, this campaign will run. The player will be given a preset shop and a fixed amount of gold, rather than randomized options. Their possible actions will be heavily restricted but since this won’t be supported by external UI elements or obvious "gamey" constraints, the player will still feel like they’re playing the main game.

This way, with a "pre-designed" campaign, we can avoid giving the player a tutorial-labeled, potentially boring experience, while still teaching them everything they need to know.

Conclusion

As a result of my notes and the examples I’ve reviewed, it seems more logical to set up a system like this. Of course, since this is just a design in writing, it still needs to be visualized, implemented, and tested by players. In the end, no matter how successful a system seems in theory, we can't be sure it will work without repeated testing. On the other hand, at least I’ve learned the fundamentals of what we should and shouldn’t do when creating a tutorial.