fun tutorial mode

Okay, you have presented a number of ideas without any context. This makes it really hard to give feedback on them.

As with so many ideas, their execution is often more important to their worth than the idea itself. For instance, Pac-Man sounds like a terrible idea. . . okay, so you play a yellow dot with a mouth animation that goes around a maze eating dots while running away from ghosts except when you eat a special power up dot that lets you eat the ghosts. Sounds horrible when you write it out, but if Pac-Man were released today it would still be a very fun game.

First Introduce yourself. Do you make games? Are you a coder/artist/writer?

Then tell us your game idea as succintly as possible, but with enough information that we know what your talking about when you ask about how to make your game. Is this an RPG, TBS, or FPS game or some hybrid? Tell us about the gameplay. What is the setting (in brief - just enough details so we can put our minds around it. . . anime sci-fi, realistic fantasy, gritty space-station, etc.)

When I boil your question down to a pretty basic form, I get this question: Would it be cool to have branching pathways in the story-telling portion of my game?

The answer to that is almost always "yes". Branching pathways allow players to feel like they have more control over the outcome of the game. Players really like this, but it comes with costs.

The most notable is development time. If you have branching story arcs, then they will require a great deal more time to develop and create. If your game is relatively low budget, and has good content creation tools, this can be a real easy way to expand the scope of your game without a great deal of additional engineering or art assets being needed. Simply have your level and content designers work on making more content and levels. Of course, you'll have to pay for different "endings" and "big events" which can mean a larger budget for these bits of art and/or voice-acting too.

Another bad thing about branching storylines is that they can also "require" the player to replay elements of a game in order to see all of the game's content. Some players just won't pick up a game after they've beaten it and/or they will resent it if your title is good enough to become a marketable intellectual property and the ending THEY chose is not extended into the sequel.

All of these problems have solutions though. This is just to give you an idea of what kinds of problems you might run into with branching storylines.

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Original post by dink Okay, you have presented a number of ideas without any context. This makes it really hard to give feedback on them. As with so many ideas, their execution is often more important to their worth than the idea itself. For instance, Pac-Man sounds like a terrible idea. . . okay, so you play a yellow dot with a mouth animation that goes around a maze eating dots while running away from ghosts except when you eat a special power up dot that lets you eat the ghosts. Sounds horrible when you write it out, but if Pac-Man were released today it would still be a very fun game. First Introduce yourself. Do you make games? Are you a coder/artist/writer? Then tell us your game idea as succintly as possible, but with enough information that we know what your talking about when you ask about how to make your game. Is this an RPG, TBS, or FPS game or some hybrid? Tell us about the gameplay. What is the setting (in brief - just enough details so we can put our minds around it. . . anime sci-fi, realistic fantasy, gritty space-station, etc.)

Nice summary of the FAQ that is sticky at the top of the page. :)

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Original post by Sexy_Sadie Ok, so I have an idea for a fun tutorial mode that gets you aquainted with the game...

What you've presented sounds like the beginning of a game - i.e. first section of the game itself - rather than a tutorial, which I'd consider to be before the game. The tutorial is where you're teaching someone basic things like how to move and how to interact with the world; as such you don't want to put too much story exposition in there, as making the player learn both the basics of the gameplay and the basics of the story at the same time means a steeper learning curve.

So, lemmie consider it as a beginning instead of a tutorial.

In that situation, I like the idea of giving the player "a guide" in the form of a friendly faction - it's a handy way of teaching the player about the world without having to have pop-up prompts or something (like you walk up to a security terminal, and one of the guys you're with goes "It's Level 5 encrypted. We'll need to find a keycard somewhere to get past that"). It's a good opportunity to teach the player some basic strategies for dealing with common enemies and stuff.

As far as replay value goes, it would be sensible to let the player perform the action that really kicks the story off at any time (i.e. betraying the faction and joining a rival, or whatever). That way they won't have to do the really basic missions again unless they want to.