The New Paradigm For Manuals & Tutorials?
Back to HDRLying, then, and a new editorial which is named 'Manuals and Tutorials in the years to come', and looks at a simple, but perennial dilemma: "For the most part, people seem to find tutorials intrusive and irritating if they’re too structured not integrated into the game, but find the game intensely unapproachable and inaccessible if no help is provided at all. What is a developer to do?"
Nayan then lists some must-dos for tutorials, and here's a couple that I particularly agree with: "Provide large manuals that don’t just offer redundant tutorial information, but also offer full color art, additional literature for the player, and some other extras."
Another notable one that a bunch of games I can think of break on a regular basis: "Don’t bother extensively teaching the player how to do simple movement, unless your control scheme is something whacky and/or new. Even new gamers are smart enough to figure it out, as long as you provide a simple correlation between the appropriate stick or button, and the action." But how do you completely stop obnoxiousness when learning a game, given the many different learning curves of players? Likely, you can't.
Comments
I personally prefer the manuals that give you additional information that isn't discussed in the game, but provides backstory, a good example is the normal and special edition manuals for Halo 2; they give you not only the run down of the weapons along with personal ancedotes, but the special edition gave you the aliens perspective on the human weapons. It makes for great reading and goes a long way towards creating a more interesting addition.
Posted by: tenno | August 1, 2007 4:24 PM
As far as manuals go, I really miss seeing manuals with a personality to them. Most everything I've bought recently doesn't even have anything I'd CONSIDER a manual, but in the few cases that they do, they're dry affairs written by technical writers, probably because abstract information is easier to translate than solid prose.
Many moons ago, manuals strove to be entertaining. The manuals for the Wizardry games spring to mind - they weren't exactly works of art, but they were conversational and had a lot of character.
I have no idea if there's even a place for the manual anymore, outside of games with lots of technical data that a player needs to process. But if they're going to go through the whole ordeal of paying people to write it and paying a printer to print it, it ought to have some flavor.
Posted by: devlocke | August 2, 2007 7:31 PM