Teaching the game is level design’s job, not the UI’s

When I ask someone how they teach their game to the player, the answer usually splits in two, but the two are the same mistake seen from different sides. One says “I put in a tutorial, I explained it step by step,” the other says “I did not want to bore the player, a well designed game explains itself.” Both of them take teaching for a separate part bolted onto the side of the game, one bolts that part on and the other leaves it off entirely. But teaching is not a bolted on part, it is the level itself. Delete the tutorial completely and your level keeps teaching something, the only difference is that you no longer picked what it teaches.

One of the easiest and most effective methods is isolating the player. First you introduce the mechanic in a safe place, the player loses nothing when he gets it wrong. Then you take the floor away and the same mechanic now carries a penalty. Then you combine it with another mechanic and produce a brand new problem. Portal’s momentum lesson runs like this. The first place you see it there is flat ground under you, you fall into the portal and get flung across, and if you do not stick it you get up and try again. A few rooms later you have to do the same fling over a pool of acid. In the last rooms you use the same move under turret fire while steering an energy ball. Three steps, not one line of text, and at the end the player can use that mechanic under pressure.

90% of Portal is tutorial but nobody notices they are playing a tutorial, because nothing is being explained to you, a room is put in front of you. And when you clear the room you do not think you learned something, you think you cleared the room. The player who reads a text box has heard about the mechanic, the player who cleared the room has used it once. We fell in love with Valve’s games because of exactly these masterful designs. The eye guidance they do in the levels and the fact that everything the games tell you happens in the flow are among the biggest reasons for that.

Do not take from this that you should never put in a text box. Isolation does not work in every genre. The mechanics of turn-based strategy and management games are abstract and statistical, you cannot explain happiness or science in Civilization by making the player play them because neither is a thing that shows up on screen. There, text is a legitimate solution. The rule is this, if the mechanic is visible on screen, teach it by making the player play it, if it only lives in a table, write it. The mistake most of you make is never drawing that line and explaining everything from the same place.

Everyone says the same thing about Final Fantasy XIII, it gets good after 15 hours. But nothing is actually added to the game at hour 15. The game’s combat is built on the paradigm system, there are six roles, each character can play three of them, you prepare six separate setups and switch between them in the middle of a fight, but the system needs a full party of three to work. For hours the game either gives you two characters or, when it gives you three, does not let you choose who to take, and on top of that Auto Battle picks your commands in combat most of the time. The only thing that happens at hour 15 is those restrictions coming off. For 15 hours the game described a system to you and never once let you use it, and describing does not count as teaching.

In Metal Thunder I open up 11 weapons and over 40 modifiers all at once the moment the first run ends, because content-gating felt dishonest to me. FF13 kept its systems shut for 15 hours, I opened all of mine in the first minute, and both give the same result because neither has an order of teaching. From the player’s side there is no difference between holding a mechanic back without letting him use it and piling all of them in front of him, in both cases he does not know what to do with what he is holding. The fact that most of the reviews calling the game empty were written in the first fifteen minutes is some proof of that.

There is also the version of teaching that does not say a word. Half-Life puts you on a tram and for several minutes there is nothing you can do but look. That is the lesson, the game will never take the camera off you and everything that matters will happen inside the world. In Journey, the moment you crest the first sand dune the mountain with its pillar of light is standing in front of you, there is no interface and no direction arrow, and yet for the next two hours you know where you are going. Elden Ring plants the Tree Sentinel right in the middle of the road as soon as you leave the tutorial, and you are not expected to beat him at that level either, that is the thing it is teaching, the road here is a suggestion and you can go around whatever you want. All three tell you what kind of game you are playing in the first five minutes and without explaining anything to you.

There is also the mistake of shouting the answer. You paint every climbable surface yellow, you put an outline on every interactable object, you put a light on the door to go through. The player moves along with all that but does not learn to read your world, he learns to follow the paint, and he gets stuck in the first room where you take the outline away. Visibility on its own is not the problem anyway. In Dark Souls the boss has no hidden weak spot, you go and hit it, and the game is still hard because the whole job is reading the pattern, holding the distance and finding the timing. The thing to make easier is not the player understanding what to do, it is being able to do what he understood.

Open your game and look for those three steps for every new main mechanic, where it is introduced safely, where the penalty comes in, where it combines with another mechanic. If one of the three is missing, that mechanic has not been taught enough, it has only been handed over. And when you put a player in front of it, watch one single thing, at the first place he sees the mechanic does he use it himself or only after you say something. If it happens after you say something, the problem is not the player’s attention, it is where you put that mechanic.

The player forgets as much as you explained, what stays is as much as you made him play.