How should players progressively learn our game? Over the past several sprints, the team and I have been designing our levels and how players should progress understanding-wise in Shattered. Since my last post, playtesting has proven the demand for an effective tutorial, and my focus has shifted to solve this challenge.
Define the Challenge
Following the playtesting efforts, a design challenge of 'How might we ensure players understand how to interact with our world?'. In our game, there are a series of interactions with progressive complexity which are required for success, and we want to teach them so that players understand the foundation of each new skill first. Initially, we began determining how these skills should be taught through level design, focusing on which skills should come first from an experiential perspective rather than dependencies.
How do we teach skills in order? To understand the relationship between progressive skills in Shattered without the bloat of unrelated concepts, I began creating a Skill Chain Diagram.
The Skill Chain Diagram Solution
What is a Skill Chain Diagram? An in-depth explanation of this concept can be found here, but fundamentally it is a diagram visualizing connections between dependent skills. An example of this in Tetris is the ability to 'rotate blocks' and 'move blocks left and right' as prerequisites for 'stacking efficiently'.
How did I implement a Skill Chain Diagram for Shattered? My implementation of the diagram utilized containers for related concepts. This made it simpler to draw connections between skills which were starting from different sources and contained their advancement within one container.
What were the benefits of creating a Skill Chain Diagram? Even while creating the diagram, it became apparent that there were several important skills in the chain which were not being taught with our present tutorials. Notably, there was:
No connection between using movement abilities (run, jump, slide) for traversing, and for dodging This was apparent during our playtest as people were unsure how they should be fighting enemies, resulting in us telling them directly on several occasions. The diagram made the lack of this connection clear, as players were never taught that these skills could be used in such a manner.
Fake connections between mechanics, aka Red Herrings, resultant of players bringing in the knowledge of existing games became clearer. These sourced from the knowledge gaps which became apparent in the diagram. For example, players often attributed our games' sliding ability to the roll in dark souls. In the Souls games, rolling makes the player invincible for a number of frames, and its use encompasses every attack the player could face. Basically, the roll is a one-stop shop for avoiding attacks. For us, our slide is useful in a specific context: ground-based attacks. We weren't teaching this explicitly, so the gap on the diagram became an obvious potential source of this red herring. Having created the diagram, it became much clearer that there was a point at which these red herrings were infiltrating our players' understanding.
Wrapup
Going forward, what impact did the Skill Chain Diagram create? In the coming sprints, the Skill Chain Diagram will be used to reinforce tutorials and progression in the level design. Additionally, this diagram is far from finished, serving as an evolving space to preemptively test and check connections between concepts.
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