Eradicate Week 11: Event Drive Tutorial

Seems I am more on a every two weeks update schedule, than even every Friday, but it will have to do. I am so excited for the direction of the game that I just keep working on it, instead of writing about it.

First, the main hand-drawn art work, by Anthony Moss at Magus Studio, www.magusstudios.com, has been completed and scanned. He will start coloring them after the New Year.

But the main topic today is that Operation: Eradicate needs an event drive tutorial to help people get into the game faster. I was in a brief conversation with a gentleman at a larger mobile game publisher who noted that even if the game play is solid (which we are sure it is), and the art is improved (which we know about and are in the works to update), he advised that a video tutorial would not be enough to on-ramp players into the game.

I asked him specifically if he thought a video tutorial would be good enough, or should we install an event driven mechanism that is used during the first play of the game. Bummer, as that means another week of work.

After that conversation, I restarted Tiny Towers and was reminded that they had a 20 step tutorial that quickly gets you into the game.

But I truly want this game to succeed and cutting corners near the end isn't for me. So I buckled down right before Christmas add the entire Tutorial layer over the existing game, adding triggers, button disabling switches, move restrictions and of course all the dialog (which will have to be translated!!!) needed to get the tutorial into the game.

But the main bonus, I did all this before we entered a beta test, so now I don't have to teach anyone how to play the game. They can test the tutorial, and test the game at the same time. Bravo for me.

Here are a couple screenshots of the final tutorial (some images still missing):

This is a dev diary about our Eradicate project (view all posts here). Also visit Skejo Studios to see all we are doing there.