The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

[NeuralStunner]

They didn't know the "ED" button was it.

This is an RPG thing as far as I can tell. I see it in RPGMaker stuff all the time, and it always strikes me as odd. If the entire "END" would fit I don't know how much more clear that would be, either.

As much as we might roll our eyes at "obvious" tutorials in games, they aren't there for no reason.

[zrrion the insect]

ED is for "enter" ? that is a peculiar choice I suppose. WOuld have gone with CR personally but that would be even less likely to be clear

[Captain Ventris]

Just finished a run through of Doom 2. Can't actually remember the last time I just played the original levels.

[Nash]

As much as we might roll our eyes at "obvious" tutorials in games, they aren't there for no reason.

Exactly. I have seen close to 10 of these "outside-of-community" videos of people playing my game by now and I am actually quite surprised by the amount of things that some of these people aren't aware of, that are very obvious to us. Even stuff like pressing "use" to respawn (I've seen two of these videos where they couldn't figure out how to respawn and just went to the menu and presed "New Game"!).

Yep, those stupid tutorials are gonna have to be implemented...

[Gez]

ED is for "enter" ? that is a peculiar choice I suppose. WOuld have gone with CR personally but that would be even less likely to be clear

How about using special glyphs like ↵ or ✔ ? Now that GZDoom is unicode, those shouldn't be too much of a problem to implement... You could even put them in a different color, like bright green, to be eye-catching.

[dpJudas]

Yep, those stupid tutorials are gonna have to be implemented...

Please don't. Sometimes going for the lowest common denominator isn't going to solve anything. The UI problem here is that you shouldn't use 'ED' as the text to continue or save. It is rather obscure. And perhaps only having one button to respawn, or not typing 'You have died. Press E to respawn" is the real problem here.

Most game tutorial are at such a [censored word] level that if you need the tutorial then it isn't going to help (people this helpless will just get stuck elsewhere unless you make your gameplay so basic and simple that even a toddler can do it), or you can figure things out on your own and thus don't need the tutorial. What's worse, by force feeding the mechanics of the game to the player you will have destroyed the discovery part of the game, which is usually the most interesting part of trying a new game.

[Enjay]

I dunno, I usually don't skip tutorials in a game that I haven't played before and I almost always pick up some tip or other that I might have taken too long to discover if I'd just launched into the game proper.

I certainly don't really see any harm in simple "tool tips" (especially if they can be disabled in the menu). For example, if, on death, a script popped up saying "Press [USE] to respawn." Then the problem that Nash saw in the videos would simply vanish.

---

I agree, however, that ED is obscure. In fact, until the discussion expanded on it, I didn't even know what was meant by ED.

[dpJudas]

I don't mind tips, hints and early maps that are easier (to give you time to adjust to the rules of the game). All those things can be very good things. It is game tutorials specifically I have an issue with. I really think they are a really really poor solution. It is like trying to solve your UI problems in normal programs by saying people should read the manual! There's a reason people don't - it is a very boring way to progress for most people.

[Enjay]

Agreed. "Fixing" a poor UI by making a tutorial is not the way forward. But, games - almost all games - do have some obscure techniques, methods, features or keystrokes that are absolutely fine once you have been told about them, but which simply diving in and playing might not reveal.

I see no harm in a tutorial, especially if it is optional. People who don't want it don't have to use it.

The UI should, of course, be as good, clear and obvious as possible too though.

[Graf Zahl]

I changed the symbols on the virtual keyboard for both BS and ED, I hope that makes it clearer. On the other hand, once people start thinking that the keyboard in front of them is for decorative purposes only, we have a bigger problem, and one we cannot solve on the engine side.

[Enjay]

As someone who hasn't enabled my game controller in GZDoom, I'd totally forgotten that there even was a virtual keyboard.

once people start thinking that the keyboard in front of them is for decorative purposes only, we have a bigger problem, and one we cannot solve on the engine side.

Yeah, that is... odd. I suppose that I can see the "touchscreen generation" of digital savages trying to poke, poke, poke the screen to get it to do something but is it such a stretch to figure out that the controller that you have been using for the rest of the game can be used to navigate the keyboard - just like it can in thousands of other games. At that point, you're really dealing with people who don't know how their device works of how to operate it.

I mean, engine side, I guess there could be a message above the keyboard saying "use the controller to navigate the keyboard" or something but then I think that probably is getting into the lowest common denominator hand holding that dpJudas was concerned about.

[Nash]

For the respawn thing, I "solved" the problem by adding more buttons that activate the respawn - you can now press the fire button or jump, two commonly-used game keys.

I generally agree about useless "press W to move forward" tutorials, fuck those. But for things that DO have to be explained, I will add an option to disable them.

At some point, it has to be considered that maybe certain types of gamers simply aren't your target audience...

EDIT: Also, smart phone generation isn't 100% to blame. My girlfriend, who is very tech-savvy (she can do simple scripting to automate tasks at work), and has thousands of hours in other non-FPS games, actually had trouble figuring out how to repsawn in GZDoom the first time she ever tried it. By "trouble", I mean it took her about 30 seconeds before she finally "found" the button on the keyboard (the use key) to respawn.

So sometimes it's also simply due to the fact that not everyone plays all kinds of games.

[Enjay]

Agreed on all counts. However, there are a lot of the "smart phone generation" who consider themselves tech-savvy because they know how to use the apps that they use, and sneer at anyone who doesn't. Yet give them a chance to do something, anything, involving just a little bit of understanding of how their device works and they immediately come unstuck. Hence my use of the term "digital savages". The media, educationalists (and other sources) like to characterise the "smart phone generation" as "digital natives", implying that they were born to the technology and therefore inherently understand it. My experience is that they don't - indeed, I would suggest that they know less than the generation before them who both had accessible devices but also had the need to learn their devices too.

Of course, part of this is due to the increases simplicity and intuitiveness of modern devices that remove the need to understand what the machine is doing in the background. Ultimately, I suppose that is a good thing, but I think that it can lead to the situation above.

[Rachael]

There may actually be some truth to that, Enjay. If there's a software problem on my phone, I am on top of it like butter on bread, but a lot of that is because of my experience with computers in general, not because I actually use it - and to be quite honest, I mostly don't. It's been handy when a friend has been discussing something in Discord (sometimes important) but I want to lay down in bed for a little bit, so I take Discord with me so as not to be rude and otherwise ignore them - but - outside of that, I hardly ever use it. But if there's a problem, despite my inexperience with the damn thing, most of the time I can fix it. I have a basic understanding of how the Android OS works, and I sure am no pro at it, but at least I can keep it running. And that's probably more than can be said of some people who use it a lot more than I do. (Incidentally I do get called to fix those very problems in other people's phones sometimes, too...)

[leileilol]

.......and that is why Star Trek IV is still the best Star Trek movie.