Thinking on Tutorials

Unhaunter needs some kind of tutorial because it is not a typical game. It might be somewhat familiar for players of Phasmophobia, but being 2D isometric and with its own quirks, this makes it not straightforward to learn. Also, there are not that many players familiar with the Phasmo genre, so most people will not be able to play the game properly without guidance.

The problem that we face with Unhaunter is that the game is still in very early development with a lot of stuff that will change. Tutorials require a lot of ad-hoc code, and we risk the tutorial becoming obsolete and leaving a lot of dead and messy code.

For this reason, instead of making an ad-hoc tutorial in the code, we will leverage the map editor to create tutorials; while the code added in Unhaunter for this will be kind of generic, just to support the tools needed in the map. In this way, if the game changes, we just need to update the tutorial map to teach different things.

If needed, we can split the tutorials into several maps, leaving it up to the player to do one after another. But initially we just need one. The tutorial map will be linear and would use yellow arrows on the ground to make the path obvious; the map will be largely navigated left-to-right, or in an S-pattern where after reaching the first end, the player will go down and then go left.

I'll add an NPC for the tutorials that can trigger text dialogs when the player approaches, so we can explain one thing at a time.

To make it easy to code, we could add a selection of NPCs, give them IDs, and put all their dialogs in the layer properties. Then just show a UI dialog similar to the one for Pause with the text.

Playtest with 0lhi 2024-03-16

Also, 0lhi played the game too, and we found the following:

• Stereo without an aural field is dizzying; for now the main song has been set to mono.
• There was some confusion on the evidence. Why can we select the evidence in the truck if we did nothing?
• Lack of feedback when the ghost attempts to follow the player outside the house. It would be nice to have something more epic that showcases that the ghost is trapped inside.