When more gameplay is shown

[Guest]

12 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Also, it's not a single "tutorial mission". Yes, you could do it that way, but that's bad design. Making a series of missions (one for each subject), each with their own scripting, text and everything (ideally also voiceovers, though they'll probably just go with funny Kerbal noises for those), is a harder task than drawing and animating a cartoon.

Ehm, nope, especially not for, you know, a game design studio.

Designing the script for a mission or an animation on paper take probably more or less the same time, actually scripting the mission takes a lot less time than animating the cartoon, it uses assets already used by the rest of the game and it doesn't require to hire somebody new to do it (again, game studio, not Pixar).

13 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

This is why the proper way of doing them is to integrate tutorials into the start of the career mode. Skippable

Aaaaand you lost them, all of them, at "skippable".

 

Also, it's more difficult to explain a concept like how to orbit or what's a gravity turn with a playable tutorial that doesn't just explain you how to do that, an animation can explain to you what a gravity turn is and how to orbit without giving you the solution to the problem in-game.

 

[Guest]

11 minutes ago, Master39 said:

Aaaaand you lost them, all of them, at "skippable".

Yes, and so did you. Nobody is gonna watch cartoons when they could be playing a game. Of course, that's a load of malarkey, anyway. Go play any other game. People don't skip tutorial for Stellaris on their first playthrough. Or for X-Com:Enemy Unknown. Or for any other game. Same for KSP, the target audience isn't composed of goldfishes. BTW, your logic applies to animated videos, too. Nobody will have patience to watch those, so they should have had the animator work on something useful for the game instead. Right? Unless, of course, you make them unskippable, which would be idiotic, because they'd get annoying, fast... just like KSP1 building hints, popping up every new save. 

A playable tutorial can explain a gravity turn better than an animation, it just needs to put some text in, as in "why you're doing what you're doing". OTOH, an animation will leave the player with an important question, "how do I do that in game"? KSP is about learning by doing, not watching lectures, however cute and animated they might be.

12 minutes ago, Master39 said:

Designing the script for a mission or an animation on paper take probably more or less the same time, actually scripting the mission takes a lot less time than animating the cartoon, it uses assets already used by the rest of the game and it doesn't require to hire somebody new to do it (again, game studio, not Pixar).

Go try to script a mission in KSP ME. One that would actually be fun to play, have no bugs, and have a lot of complex scripting, messages to guide the player along and get the mission back on track when something goes wrong, and all that. Go on. I'll wait.

Assets are not everything. In fact, they're a very small part of making a mission. Anything interactive has to be tested, and it's usually far more complex than just animating stuff. 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

Yes, and so did you. Nobody is gonna watch cartoons when they could be playing a game.

You purposefully missed the "contextual" part of the tutorial animation. 47 minutes and a half of animation, spread over 32 tutorials makes 1 minute and a half each, and they appear just after you failed explaining very concisely why you failed.

Nobody has to sit and watch 47 minutes of cartoons to play, or an hour and a half of playing someone else's game and launching someone else's rockets.

 

2 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Go play any other game. People don't skip tutorial for Stellaris on their first playthrough. Or for X-Com:Enemy Unknown. Or for any other game.

Yes, they do. Nobody reads the instruction, did you never notice that half of Youtube is just video instructions for things that already have written ones or playable tutorials?

 

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

Go try to script a mission in KSP ME. One that would actually be fun to play, have no bugs, and have a lot of complex scripting, messages to guide the player along and get the mission back on track when something goes wrong, and all that. Go on. I'll wait.

A tutorial, not a single player campaing.

 

Honestly I think you're just being controversial for the sake of it, in no way you can really think that making half an animated movie just for tutorials it's anyway easier or cheaper (for a game studio, not Pixar, they had to hire someone specifically for this) than making a mission with the tools and the skill they already have at hand.

[PlutoISaPlanet]

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

You purposefully missed the "contextual" part of the tutorial animation. 47 minutes and a half of animation, spread over 32 tutorials makes 1 minute and a half each, and they appear just after you failed explaining very concisely why you failed.

Nobody has to sit and watch 47 minutes of cartoons to play, or an hour and a half of playing someone else's game and launching someone else's rockets.

 

Yes, they do. Nobody reads the instruction, did you never notice that half of Youtube is just video instructions for things that already have written ones or playable tutorials?

 

A tutorial, not a single player campaing.

 

Honestly I think you're just being controversial for the sake of it, in no way you can really think that making half an animated movie just for tutorials it's anyway easier or cheaper (for a game studio, not Pixar, they had to hire someone specifically for this) than making a mission with the tools and the skill they already have at hand.

I tend to agree with you. Just pointing out if people will watch 40 minute Matt Lowne and Scott Manly videos that are literaly just about getting to orbit, they will watch a 1 minute clip giving clues to how they can improve.

[Guest]

On 8/30/2020 at 2:29 AM, Master39 said:

Yes, they do. Nobody reads the instruction, did you never notice that half of Youtube is just video instructions for things that already have written ones or playable tutorials?

Because playable tutorials don't tell you the whole story. Which is not the point of them, BTW. What many of those Youtube video instructions do is tell you "how to win the game" (or at least how not to suck at it, Stellaris in particular can get rather difficult even if you know the tricks). Paradox games in particular have tutorials that are easy to digest, but really too sparse. Only in Stellaris they're somewhat adequate, and even then you have to figure out the meta on your own (I managed a nice empire in vanilla CK2 without resorting to external resources, but that's because the tutorial starts you out in a very strong position early on).

Quite frankly, that some people don't play tutorials is no reason not to include them. I'm not being controversial, I'm being negative about them cutting a particular corner. Playable tutorials are industry standard. You're not holding KSP2 devs to any sort of standard, it seems (more like white-knighting every single bogus decision they make, even if you don't actually care). 

On 8/30/2020 at 2:29 AM, Master39 said:

You purposefully missed the "contextual" part of the tutorial animation. 47 minutes and a half of animation, spread over 32 tutorials makes 1 minute and a half each, and they appear just after you failed explaining very concisely why you failed.

Do they do that every time you fail? If so, then that's a good way to infuriate players, too, especially if tutorial isn't perfect (and it never is). Nothing worse than crashing and getting the same useless advice every single time. No, it the game nags me like this (that is, makes me sit through a minute and a half of animation after each crash), I'll return it, because it'll be unplayable. Also, with a rocket it's fine, but what if your colony dies out due to something you got wrong several real-time weeks ago? No, tutorials come first, failures later.

It has to be possible to disable the hints, and people will use the option. At most, you can hide it deep in the options menu, but that's possible to do with any kind of tutorials.

On 8/30/2020 at 4:17 AM, PlutoISaPlanet said:

I tend to agree with you. Just pointing out if people will watch 40 minute Matt Lowne and Scott Manly videos that are literaly just about getting to orbit, they will watch a 1 minute clip giving clues to how they can improve.

Yeah, and then they'll get back to Scott Manly, because those 1 minute clips won't give them enough of a clue (or maybe just because they like Scott Manly, but that's beside the point). People watch YouTube for different reasons than in-game tutorials. The former is for what would be considered a spoiler/walkthrough in a story-based game, they need to see how a working design looks like. The latter is to get the basic idea behind the game's UI and how to do stuff. The point of in-game tutorials is not to hand everything to the player on a silver platter, if someone can't play the game without that, there's always YouTube.

Edited August 31, 2020 by Guest

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Dragon01 said:

I'm not being controversial, I'm being negative about them cutting a particular corner. Playable tutorials are industry standard. You're not holding KSP2 devs to any sort of standard, it seems (more like white-knighting every single bogus decision they make, even if you don't actually care). 

You don't know if tutorial missions will be there or not, you don't know if the animations will be the only form of tutorial, you simply don't know and yet you've already decided that there will only be the animations, that they will not suffice and that it's all some cutting corners scheme, despite you clearly not knowing a lot on how much an hour of custom made 2D animation made of 32 independent shorts can cost to produce and despite "improved onboarding and tutorial" being one of their main marketing points in every interview.

Apparently other than not knowing what genre of games they're publishing this very dumb game publisher also doesn't know that marketing something you're cutting corners on its not a good idea.

Making up details nobody ever confirmed just to worsen the already worse case scenario and treating it as it's all confirmed news is pretty much the definition of being negative for the sake of it.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 31, 2020 by Master39

[Guest]

11 minutes ago, Master39 said:

...also doesn't know that marketing something you're cutting corners on its not a good idea.

Ah, but it is a good idea, if you do it right. Marketing is all about turning design issues into features. Remember those knives that "never need sharpening" (that is, they break before they dull)? Same here, what guarantee do you have that "improved, easy to understand tutorials" isn't marketingese for "dumbed down, but nice looking and taking up only artist's time instead of artist's and mission designer's"?

I'm just used to trying to see past marketing hype and trying to see the reality, which is usually much less bright. In fact, I've taken a college course where I learned some of their tricks (a really bizarre experience, that one, about as strange as me, a biophysicist, being there in first place ), though it was in book market, not video games. Make no mistake, the last time we've seen actual, honest communication was soon after KSP2 was first unveiled and the devs talked to a few (carefully selected for their community outreach, naturally, but at least ones we could talk to) people in person. Since then, everything we've been getting was heavily filtered and completely one-sided.

Edited August 31, 2020 by Guest

[Vanamonde]

Ease off on the tempers please, guys. 

[SOXBLOX]

57 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Ah, but it is a good idea, if you do it right. Marketing is all about turning design issues into features. Remember those knives that "never need sharpening" (that is, they break before they dull)? Same here, what guarantee do you have that "improved, easy to understand tutorials" isn't marketingese for "dumbed down, but nice looking and taking up only artist's time instead of artist's and mission designer's"?

I'm just used to trying to see past marketing hype and trying to see the reality, which is usually much less bright. In fact, I've taken a college course where I learned some of their tricks (a really bizarre experience, that one, about as strange as me, a biophysicist, being there in first place ), though it was in book market, not video games. Make no mistake, the last time we've seen actual, honest communication was soon after KSP2 was first unveiled and the devs talked to a few (carefully selected for their community outreach, naturally, but at least ones we could talk to) people in person. Since then, everything we've been getting was heavily filtered and completely one-sided.

Evil marketing people...

But really, the tutorials are being designed by people who play the original game. These people would not even consider adding a feature that would annoy them or any potential customer. Why? Because these people designing the game happen to be quite intelligent, intelligent enough to realize that annoyed customers do not leave good reviews for your product. What would the devs gain by dumbing down KSP? Better yet, how could they dumb down KSP? Remove gravity? Make parts unbreakable? IDK.

 I also enjoy Stellaris, but I did reading before I picked up the game, and learned by failing miserably on my first playthrough. It was fun. I didn't bother with the tutorials in either Stellaris or KSP. What would be helpful, in Kerbal, at least, would be something telling me why my ship just flew right past the station I wanted to dock with. Then, I could load my last quicksave and taste victory. 

I dunno why so many folks think that the devs will wreck KSP2.

Edited August 31, 2020 by SOXBLOX

[Guest]

25 minutes ago, SOXBLOX said:

But really, the tutorials are being designed by people who play the original game. These people would not even consider adding a feature that would annoy them or any potential customer.

That's my point, really. These tutorials will have an option to turn them off, and will not be foisted upon the players. Yes, people will turn them off. This is not an argument against doing proper, interactive tutorials. Don't tell me you decided to scrap that silly AI on your first playthrough (in fact, I leave him on hint mode even now).  Though admittedly, he doesn't tell you all that much, and reading up on the basic mechanics probably had that covered. Most people would rather play than read, though.

Also, do keep in mind that there's a flipside to being designed by the people who played the original game: they'll be unable to judge the usefulness of tutorials. 

And yeah, marketing people are evil, their only purpose in life is to build up hype for anything they're given to hype and, ultimately, sell you their product whether you need it or not.  Every time you look at some useless doodad and ask yourself "now why did I buy this junk", you have marketing to thank for that.  

Edited August 31, 2020 by Guest

[PlutoISaPlanet]

Correct me if I am wrong, but you think that the animated tutorials are "cutting corners". Maybe I havent read through ever post but did the Devs say they would let you try what you did wrong after the video in a "virtual world" (im not that great at explaining:) . So would you consider that as good as the tutorials you want?

[theJesuit]

On 8/25/2020 at 11:26 PM, Cattette said:

Though it would be fun if they added another law of physics to spice up the experience. 

Which law would you add?