New Player tutorial mode
Posted: Mon 03.09.2007, 22:30
I think a number of people had this idea simultaneously while reading through the "focus on the new user" thread, so I'll bring it up here for discussion.
As a longer term project, we could look at the idea of having a built-in tutorial mode.
This mode could be entered when joining a server as a new character. Perhaps "First time playing mangband? Choose X" would be displayed on a screen prior to the character creation screen.
In this mode, we would provide the player with info as they play.
The character creation portion could consist of extra info explaining whats going on, along with providing a truncated series of options: I would advocate actually only allowing a Half-Troll Warrior as the option. You may think this begs the question of if, at this point, we should even have the player go through the motions. However, its part of the game, and we can present it as a simple "how to" with few options.
In game, we could provide info to the player a numebr of different ways. Tutorial text could be displayed, perhaps, via the chat window. Or, and I like this bit (tho I dont know if its possible), we could, in our tutorial mode, actually create an additional term window for our text. This of course has the downside of there already not being a lot of room for term windows on people's screens.
At this point, we could, perhaps, have a pre-scripted series of tasks to prompt the player to do. These could be things such as wearing armor, weapon, lightsource. Then, perhaps we would prompt the player to head to shop 1 to buy a lantern, etc. We would explain the commands necessary to do what we are prompting, and breifly explain anything related.
One question is how we would deal with triggering additional text. I have no idea what would be more or less realistic, but this could be via perhaps interacting with the tutorial in some way (hitting a key etc), or detecting when the player has done something (say, if they have purchased a lantern).
Or, more simply, this could just be an in-game help file deal - tho realtime makes this iffy in some cases.
Anyhoo, what ideas do you have about some kind of mode or setup like this?
As a longer term project, we could look at the idea of having a built-in tutorial mode.
This mode could be entered when joining a server as a new character. Perhaps "First time playing mangband? Choose X" would be displayed on a screen prior to the character creation screen.
In this mode, we would provide the player with info as they play.
The character creation portion could consist of extra info explaining whats going on, along with providing a truncated series of options: I would advocate actually only allowing a Half-Troll Warrior as the option. You may think this begs the question of if, at this point, we should even have the player go through the motions. However, its part of the game, and we can present it as a simple "how to" with few options.
In game, we could provide info to the player a numebr of different ways. Tutorial text could be displayed, perhaps, via the chat window. Or, and I like this bit (tho I dont know if its possible), we could, in our tutorial mode, actually create an additional term window for our text. This of course has the downside of there already not being a lot of room for term windows on people's screens.
At this point, we could, perhaps, have a pre-scripted series of tasks to prompt the player to do. These could be things such as wearing armor, weapon, lightsource. Then, perhaps we would prompt the player to head to shop 1 to buy a lantern, etc. We would explain the commands necessary to do what we are prompting, and breifly explain anything related.
One question is how we would deal with triggering additional text. I have no idea what would be more or less realistic, but this could be via perhaps interacting with the tutorial in some way (hitting a key etc), or detecting when the player has done something (say, if they have purchased a lantern).
Or, more simply, this could just be an in-game help file deal - tho realtime makes this iffy in some cases.
Anyhoo, what ideas do you have about some kind of mode or setup like this?