Warscale 75 - On tutors and tutorials

Hi everybody!

I remember almost all of my teachers since kindergarten and some of them were very fun, others were really boring but each of them leaves something into us which forms part of our personality and cultural baggage.

I was lucky to teach a lot of students around their highschool and university exams and for a couple of years I was in charge of a programming languages course at my university in Peru. I hope I was able to leave a mark on them or I may say I failed as a teacher.

I know I did fine in some ocassions where students came to me with thanks and smiles and a couple of presents (...yummi). Of course they came AFTER I sent the notes, they knew attempting anything before would affect them negatively. Say I was a real @$$ while writing grades (I had a 60% pass ratio) but I always was there for them. And after they passed the course I made real friends with some and they even offered to help me tutoring other students. Good times.

But, you are not here to get my bio, and probably not to listen how I drank my gratitude whisky. You are here for Warscale (I hope) but the development this week had to do with tutorials so some memories came to me.

Tutorial System
During this testing stage, I got many comments on the gameplay. Some testers asked me what to do while I was playing with them. Others told me it was simple to click but wouldn't understand all the concepts. On the end, as some suggested, all came down to Warscale lacking a proper tutorial system.

As I said before, Warscale is an unsigned offspring of two beasts: Magic:The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons. As such, it shares a lot of similarities with them and even looks as them, with a tiled game board and cards. But at the same time it brings its own set of rules and gameplay, so Magic players won't really understand Warscale and D&D players won't find the rules they are used to. Players used to both will be confused, players with no knowledge on those games will find it even more cryptic.


Finally, and even more critical (as someone pointed) NO ONE READS THE MANUAL. Even worse when the manual alone is a 40 page monster, they will just go away and look for the next game.

So I really had to bite it and start working on the tutorial. One of the conditions was that it should be a standalone script module and hook the least possible with the actual game code to avoid big code changes. I managed to create something simple but at the same time quite monolithic. If I need to add more steps into the process it will require some work.

The next step was to create the script text. You know, short sentences describing each part of the game, explaining the environment, the objectives of each step, requesting the player input and the effects of the actions. I'm no native english speaker so I guess it can do wih some editing as the manual, but will work for now.


I know this is not the best tutorial in the world, not really the most visual or anything, but if people finish the tutorial mission and are able to grasp the game basics then I have succceeded in my objective.


Miscellaneous fixes
Of course there was a round of general bug fixes:

- Some weapons were not displaying their attack range.
- Delete a spellbook in the Load spellbook screen. Indeed there was a button for this already but it was always invisible. [fizban + 500gp]
- Added a number near the attack value of a unit so its easier to see how many attacks the unit has left.
- Replaced the multicolored air texture for a purple texture like an explosion of energy. [fizban + 500gp]
- Added more detail to the fire texture as a fire vortex with light coming out of the center.
- Added more detail to the water texture as a water vortex with light coming out from the center.
- The background image aspect ratio function wasn't returning the proper ratio in some cases.
- Increased the fadeout time for the Spritekin logo, it was too fast so it looked like it was suddenly disappearing.
- Added spritekin splash screens for widescreen resolutions.
- The Add buddy button now has a proper alignment on resize.
- Cards in the lobbly and game room are now properly sizing. They were stretching on widescreen resolutions.
- Cards in the game room now are better distributed to use the screen space.

Thats all for now, as usual the latest updates have been uploaded in the game server and the game patcher will be able to fetch everything if you would like to try them.

Good luck with your games!
Guimo