Tutorial Game within game - a suggestion/discussion.

[mwigdahl]

@mwigdahl

@emshort

If people are using that extension, I’d be happy to hear about it – I have very little feedback from in-practice applications, so knowing whether it’s useful and/or what problems people encounter would let me refine it a bit.

Emily, when I get a bit of time (hopefully tonight, but we’ll see) I’ll write up a little bit of postmortem on the way I’m using it and the manner in which I had to change it.

I can say that although it provides a great structure for doing inline tutorials, I wanted/needed to make enough changes that I ended up effectively re-implementing it in my code (still crediting you, of course).

(checking off the item on my to-do list labeled “Emily post”…)

Looking at the code in my WIP, the main reason I reworked it was to include support for displaying keyword highlighting a la Aaron Reed’s extensions within the tutorial text. I ended up changing some of your tutorial strings and adjusting the order of presentation based on my opening sequence, but really, the structure seemed fine and worked very well for me. I just looked at it and realized that I was going to have to override about 80% of your extension’s rules to put the keyword formatting tags in, and it ended up being less effort overall to just move it over and modify it from within my application.

You’re still mentioned in the credits, of course! It’s a great idea and a great extension! The only thing that might make it easier for others to customize would be to provide hooks for formatting rather than hardcoding it to italics in the rules.

[lribeiro]

Emily,

My suggestion was to those games that won’t benefit (for any reason) from a tutorial in the beginning. To those that do benefit of such, your tutorial extension seems to be a great option.

Anyway, I’ve kind of dropped the idea for all the reasons discussed in this thread, and also because there already is a beginner’s game in progress (although with a different philosophy: it’s a stand-alone project with a much longer playtime): this IF Trainer someone in the MUD told me about.

(but now I kind of fell in love with the idea of a community Hotel game, in which everyone can code a room with a challenge… hmmm, I wonder…)

[Biep]

@lribeiro

What would be great:
2) that it would be written so that the source code could be inserted into any game with small chances of conflict with the source of the main game;

Which is a great idea. Of course people could adapt it to the game (like the current menu help that many games include.

@lribeiro

So, in this game I’ve tried to:
– use names for things and rooms that would be difficult to conflict with any game - I’ve called everything the tutorial thing (tutorial room, tutorial key, etc).

Which unfortunately is the best one can do right now. Which is why I have proposed acts, which serve to make code modular. In fact, acts are slightly stronger, acting as co-routines, so a tutorial act would be re-entrant: you do a bit of tutorial, switch to the main game, and can still go back and continue the tutorial. That would make them appropriate for a hint system too.
Other uses would be flash-backs (slowly the youth of the hero unfolds during the quest), dream sequences, games-within-games (You see a computer here. The screen says “Pytho’s mask”.), stories told (“Well”, the man said, “it all started years ago. As I entered the city…”) and more. (Plug: if you like the idea, please go vote for it!)

Oh, and I like your “tutorial signature”

[Edit: Hmm, I can’t get the links to work. Sorry.]