I'll leave it at that.
I've been working really hard on getting the first 15 minutes of Cyber Heist to a good place. It's amazingly hard to strike that balance between "fun" and "sufficiently easy for early player's skill level". Actually, balance implies that I go back and forth. Really, I can just never seem to make levels simple enough for people to learn easily.
Chris had a fantastic idea to write tutorial text on the environment, like objects in the Thief's world or the actual image of the Hacker's map. We tested 3 such tutorial levels and what I considered to be easy levels once with a group of about 16 high school students and with EA the following day. I was disappointed that the text didn't work as well as I'd hoped it would. Sometimes, people would be trying to figure out what they were supposed to be doing, when the instruction was written on the map literally 2 cm away.
Needless to say, tutorials are extremely difficult to get right. I'm still trying to figure out how simple they need to go to enable people to play without any Dev instruction. Clearly, we at least got something sort of right for the IGF judges, but they're likely a much more dedicated group of people, and gamers to boot.
Whats also interesting is that the tutorial progresses past the actual tutorial, itself. The first few levels have to be carefully crafted to almost force skills that you'll need later on. So far, it seems to have really helped to have individual levels dedicated to a particular, basic skill early on. It has to feel rewarding, but be basic enough for them to see a puzzle that a newcomer to the game could assess and act on. Its solidly within the realm of handholding, but gets executed in a more subtle way.
This week we have to move on to the end of the game, and I'm not quite yet sure what that level should look like. Should it be grand and magnificent? More difficult than any previous level? Gimmicky? The good news is that it shouldn't need to take the time and attention that the first 15 minutes of gameplay is taking, and I'm excited to give it a go.
