10 Simple Video Game Features (That Are A NIGHTMARE To Develop)

An ongoing battle that gameplay designers, level designers and writers alike all have... is with the world of the tutorial.

Traditional tutorial segments are starting to get a little more rare these days, but when they do appear, it’s surprising to see they’ve largely remained unchanged for around thirty years. There’s a strange combination of reasons for this, but one is that tutorials, despite being the first thing you do in-game, tend to be one of the last things actually designed.

Because, why design a tutorial for abilities/techniques that might be cut from the main game, or change significantly a little later on, right?

Another way to add a tutorial is to fragment it up and add it in pieces, split up among the main game, but then you run the danger of creating one of those Text Boxes That Appear Every Half Hour Info Dump games that’re like watching a film and pausing it every ten minutes to explain each of the characters (Kingdom Hearts 3, I’m looking at you, you absolute nightmare).

I mean, you could always just... not have a tutorial, and just have gamers read what to do in the instruction manual that stopped being made in 1999 instead, right?