Tutorial changes, testing and comments appreciated


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Post Wednesday, 27th June 2012, 19:21

Tutorial changes, testing and comments appreciated

I've pushed some changes to the first tutorial lesson to master, and would appreciate testing and comments, especially from people who have (since 0.7 or 0.8) used the tutorial to learn the game. The general aim of these and coming changes is to shorten the time required to go through the tutorials, shorten the tutorial texts (so you won't gloss over and miss important bits), and drop introduction to non-essential commands. My view would be that the tutorial only gives you the essentials, so you're equipped to start playing the game without feeling overwhelmed by the basics. There could be advanced tutorial lessons for advanced topics, or the hints mode should cover them.

The changes originally come courtesy of an usability student project (a team called KiSS - short of KiviSopan Sekoittajat - Finnish for "Stirrers of Stone Soup", approximately). I've been a bit selective about including them and made some additional changes of my own.

Here's the commit that went to master. Here's the commit message so you can quickly get an idea what's going on:

Selective changes to tutorial lesson 1 from this year's usability project (KiSS team). Includes my own edits to their changes.

Changes include:
* Added [] brackets around control texts (will do for all the lessons)
* Shorten the first movement tutorial quite a bit
* Combined diagonal movement and shiftmove parts of the lesson, only one message for each
* Shortened arrival to 2nd floor text
* Shortened autoexclusion text
* Greatly shorten/compress 2nd floor (secret doors and water only)
* Remove green crystal and statues. Contradicts with the idea of making the level look exciting. Reasoning: different visuals suggest some sort of significance in the tutorial, instead of eyecandy.

Did not include/further edits:
* Going straight into diagonal movement explanation, kept the go_on message.
* Kept the very first movement part more similar to the original layout-wise, especially kept single-width diagonal corridors to enforce diagonal movement. Reduced blue tile count.
* Undid making the forest path smaller (did not get why that was done - maybe to force you to move closer to exclusions?).
* Shortened autoexclusion text further - first just say that some "dangerous ground" is marked with exclusions, and then only refer to exclusions, not terrain/features/ground etc. This makes it much shorter in all, though relevance to actually features may be lost. (clouds, dangerous monsters..)

Comments/TODO:
* Suggesting to use arrow keys is IMHO bad, should go straight to numpad/vi keys (or mouse). Problems: having to explain vi keys straight away is awkward. The diagram for movement keys is a bit lengthy to show right away. Numlock is troublesome.
* Shiftmove seems non-essential, and KiSS' testers had trouble with it (numlock/numpad trouble). I would move it to an "advanced movement" lesson.
* Finding stairs by level map command (X and <) also feels like an advanced movement material.
* Closing doors also. It's relevant when monsters (or clouds) are around. Move to lesson 2 later, or a new advanced lesson.
* 2nd floor is a little small now, but while playing, it seems all right.


(One of the things I forgot to mention is that they added line breaks to some of the tutorial messages. I'm not sure about that, but included them in the commit.)

KiSS also delivered changes to the other lessons, which are available in this commit to a separate branch. I intend to bring their changes (ones that I find agreeable) in before 0.11 release.

Testing and comments, criticism appreciated! The trunk page has not yet updated with this change, but this should happen within a day or two.

--Eino
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Post Wednesday, 27th June 2012, 19:47

Re: Tutorial changes, testing and comments appreciated

evktalo wrote:(a team called KiSS - short of KiviSopan Sekoittajat - Finnish for "Stirrers of Stone Soup", approximately).


Keep It Simple, Stupid; lol.
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Post Thursday, 5th July 2012, 14:20

Re: Tutorial changes, testing and comments appreciated

Lesson 2 is ready for testing. Here's the commit if you want to look at the diff, and here's the commit message.

Tutorial lesson 2: incorporate changes from KiSS team, edit further, put messages into database.

I've changed the key assignment around in cmd-keys.h to make sure the "primary" key comes up for CMD_TARGET_SELECT and CMD_TARGET_CYCLE_FORWARD.

Changes include:
* Added [] brackets around control texts
* Intro shortened a little
* Monster examination cut, only one training dummy. Was extremely verbose. It's still a useful thing to learn, so should be put into an advanced lesson later.
* Monster comparison cage only has two monsters: an ooze and a wyvern.
* Level 1 layout changed
* Removed ammo cycling: seemed hard to pick up in testing, should be covered in an advanced lesson or in the CeHu hint mode scenario.
* Level 2 shortened a bit accordingly
* Removed a casual pack of rats from level 2
* An awkward reminder about chopping and resting before the second rat room

Changes from KiSS not included:
* Removal of the hint about waiting for monsters to close in
* Revamp of level 2 layout (was too compact - things came in view too early)

Comments/TODO:
* The hint about chopping rat corpses could come from stepping on one
* There could be a hint about eating when you get hungry
* Did not include autofight
* Content is repeated in <console> and <webtiles>
* Final screen whitespace - there should be line breaks before and after each yellow heading, but I'm still clueless how to add them


As a sidenote (but an important one), thanks to kilobyte, tutorial messages can now live in the database, and thus can be improved and translated via transifex (eventually?). Note that lessons 3 and 4 aren't in the db yet, and I still will go through 3-5 for improvements from KiSS and myself.

--Eino
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Post Thursday, 5th July 2012, 14:45

Re: Tutorial changes, testing and comments appreciated

From what I've seen, a lot of focus from these various teams has been on the tutorials and not on the game itself.

Has this been considered for future teams, or is this an inappropriate place to ask?
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Post Thursday, 5th July 2012, 19:31

Re: Tutorial changes, testing and comments appreciated

From my uni (Oulu University) we've got two kinds of teams: project course teams (UP team and KiSS) and usability testing course teams (Warwalrus, Dungeon Olms). The teams from the latter course do just testing (as you might guess).

In the project course, there's just 300 hours or something per student. My feeling is that it is a bit scant for getting into Crawl code and doing something significant. Also, the teams have been related to research in a way that I think we are getting usability testing -heavy activities from them.

We did do some code in the UP team since we had a capable coder in felirx (he was hijacked into the devteam, too). If I recall correctly, much of the starting menus are his work.

--Eino

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Post Thursday, 5th July 2012, 21:01

Re: Tutorial changes, testing and comments appreciated

Okay, here is my feedback. I suppose I've been overzealous in places, so please take it easy.
Overall it feels quite nice (except from the very first complaint which ruins everything).
Note, that some of my complaints are not about tutorial, but the game itself - tutorial only highlights those problems (at least I don't notice them when simply playing)

Okay, here is my feedback. I suppose I've been overzealous in places, so please take it easy. Overall it feels quite nice (except from the very first complaint which ruins everything).

Lesson 1.
  • When you select tutorial, a black screen with a character tile in the cente appears. There is no terrain whatsoever. The status menu on the right says it doesn't have health, magic, experience, str/dex/int etc. Feels EXTREMELY bad. I think it should be the #1 thing to fix.
  • My notebook doesn't recognize Shift+<numpad number key> - it thinks that it is simply <number key>. And IIRC it's not only my notebook problem - there are others like that. Don't know how to combat this though -.-
  • "A new level! To begin with, head over to that door to the right" - the "To begin with" feels rather odd here.
  • Do we really need to tell player now how to close the door? I close the door so rarely, that I don't thinka new player should try remembering it
  • Search for secret dor is a *long* one. I've pressed [5] like 20 times and still nothing happened. WTF?? Yes, you told me it can take many turns, but THAT MANY?? I suggest giving the character higher T&D to alleviate this.
  • - Okay, I got it, [5] makes you rest for 100 turns, but [numpad-5] only for 1. And tutorial doesn't differentiate them enough.
  • Deep water. When I try to walk into it I get "Why would you want to do that?". It is totally ok, but what about first telling the player that the character cannot swim [in deep water]?
  • Okay, it turns out, we have this pice of info. Maybe move the blue square a little bit higher? It should also say that you can *try* moving into dangerous terrain and nothing bad will happen, so as to relieve the fear of accidentally drowning due to a fingerslip
  • Minimap mouse control. Does the tutorial suggest going back to the starting point [using the mouse]? Why would it? What do we want to do there?
  • Autoexclusions. I think we should make player cross a single tile of autoexclusion to deliver how that feels, instead of proceeding with autoexplore, that avoids exclusions. Currently it feels like a bit of extra and totally unrelevant information.
  • "To travel directly to the stairs, you can [click] on them or you can press [X << Enter]". Why "<<" instead of "<"? Typo?
  • After completing the first lesson, closing crawl with the "x" button in the upper right (windows) leaves me with "Assert (save) in 'tags.h' at line 96 failed." I'll create a bugreport on mantis.

Lesson 2:
  • When I get a weapon and open a door I see a dummy but there's no message "A training dummy comes to view". Not sure if it *should* be there, but I somehow expected it. Again, not sure if it happens in actual game.
  • Well, okay, I have a weapon, I see a dummy what next? How do I kill things? Can we have a blue square after the door that says "A worthy opponent! To attack an enemy simply move in its direction", please?
  • - Oh I get that message in the doorway.. Still kinda confusing - I'm used to blue squares telling me things, not doors.
  • Why does dummy fight back? It's a dummy!
  • Not enough stress on[5] vs [numpad-5] difference can totally break all that hunger-related sync. I waited for only some 2-3 turns before the door, and went "wtf" later. Also, no damage to the player can make him not want to rest, and that too will break the sync. Basically, if you are not hungry, then corpse-related message feels out of place, because player is neither hungry, nor has ever seen a corpse, and should rather be placed beyond the rat, not in front of it. I myself waited only some 2-3 turns before the door, and got hungry 2 turns after killing the rat.
  • "...you can also step back and wait (with [.])..." - not only with [.] but with [numpad-5] also.
  • While examining the monsters, there is no hint on how to exit the descrition screen. [Esc] works as expected. (a minor tutorial-unrelated issue).
  • "You can fire darts at the monster with [f] or by [clicking] on them in the inventory panel. To confirm auto-targeted monster press [f] or [Enter]." Why cannot I confirm it by clicking on the darts in the inventory again? Mouseclick-enter-mouseclick-enter feels inconvenient.
  • Why are dummies positioned behind deep water? They cannot move, and not being able to retrieve ammo seems meh. I think tutorial should even explicitly say that you'd beter not waste preicous ammo when you cannot retrieve it and make you throw stones instead of arrows/darts at those behind deepwater/lava.
  • Also, probably we should show the player that autoexpolore picks up valuable things automatically. I think it is nice piece of info to know, and lets player know what is that greenish square around the item is for. Oh, nevermind that is what lesson 3 is for.
Last edited by moxian on Thursday, 5th July 2012, 21:44, edited 1 time in total.

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evktalo
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Post Thursday, 5th July 2012, 21:07

Re: Tutorial changes, testing and comments appreciated

evktalo wrote:We did do some code in the UP team since we had a capable coder in felirx (he was hijacked into the devteam, too). If I recall correctly, much of the starting menus are his work.

--Eino

That's an understatement. He also coded PrecisionMenu, the class that supports it. I used it for the new skill menu. Highscores uses it too. It's really powerful, and it would be great to port the rest of the UI to it, starting with shop menu, descriptions and dungeon overview.
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Post Sunday, 8th July 2012, 06:08

Re: Tutorial changes, testing and comments appreciated

So many thanks moxian, that was some high quality feedback! Awesome. Makes me happy!

[*]When you select tutorial, a black screen with a character tile in the cente appears. There is no terrain whatsoever. The status menu on the right says it doesn't have health, magic, experience, str/dex/int etc. Feels EXTREMELY bad. I think it should be the #1 thing to fix.


Yeah, it looks quite bad. *looks around for an actual coder* Well, it might not be a coding issue, maybe some thing needs to be done in the map epilogue, or stuff in there needs to be in a certain order. I recall something similar with the pan lord warning messages.

[*] My notebook doesn't recognize Shift+<numpad number key> - it thinks that it is simply <number key>. And IIRC it's not only my notebook problem - there are others like that. Don't know how to combat this though -.-


Me neither, unfortunately.. does changing numlock help? I don't remember if I took that bit out of the texts.

[*] Search for secret dor is a *long* one. I've pressed [5] like 20 times and still nothing happened. WTF?? Yes, you told me it can take many turns, but THAT MANY?? I suggest giving the character higher T&D to alleviate this.
[*] - Okay, I got it, [5] makes you rest for 100 turns, but [numpad-5] only for 1. And tutorial doesn't differentiate them enough.
[*] Not enough stress on[5] vs [numpad-5] difference can totally break all that hunger-related sync. I waited for only some 2-3 turns before the door, and went "wtf" later. Also, no damage to the player can make him not want to rest, and that too will break the sync. Basically, if you are not hungry, then corpse-related message feels out of place, because player is neither hungry, nor has ever seen a corpse, and should rather be placed beyond the rat, not in front of it. I myself waited only some 2-3 turns before the door, and got hungry 2 turns after killing the rat.


Hmmh. It could note that it's the numrow 5, and not numpad 5.. but that'd require "hardcoding" the command letter to the tutorial texts. Now it looks up the key used for the long rest command.

[*] Do we really need to tell player now how to close the door? I close the door so rarely, that I don't thinka new player should try remembering it


I agree.

[*] Deep water. When I try to walk into it I get "Why would you want to do that?". It is totally ok, but what about first telling the player that the character cannot swim [in deep water]?
[*] Okay, it turns out, we have this pice of info. Maybe move the blue square a little bit higher? It should also say that you can *try* moving into dangerous terrain and nothing bad will happen, so as to relieve the fear of accidentally drowning due to a fingerslip


Yeah, perhaps could be earlier. Maybe there's also space for your suggestion.

[*] Minimap mouse control. Does the tutorial suggest going back to the starting point [using the mouse]? Why would it? What do we want to do there?


Indeed! There probably should be some reason to travel back to where you came from.

[*] Autoexclusions. I think we should make player cross a single tile of autoexclusion to deliver how that feels, instead of proceeding with autoexplore, that avoids exclusions. Currently it feels like a bit of extra and totally unrelevant information.


Yes, makes sense. Makes it a bit more complex, but I'll look into it. Or at least place a TODO. ;)

[*] When I get a weapon and open a door I see a dummy but there's no message "A training dummy comes to view". Not sure if it *should* be there, but I somehow expected it. Again, not sure if it happens in actual game.


Hmm yes, there should be one.

[*] Well, okay, I have a weapon, I see a dummy what next? How do I kill things? Can we have a blue square after the door that says "A worthy opponent! To attack an enemy simply move in its direction", please?
[*] - Oh I get that message in the doorway.. Still kinda confusing - I'm used to blue squares telling me things, not doors.


I agree that the messages on the doors are awkward. I'll look into putting them all into blue squares.

[*] "...you can also step back and wait (with [.])..." - not only with [.] but with [numpad-5] also.


I would like to only print one key per command (plus mouse). Printing several makes them unwieldy and long, especially when the message is already long. Even if it is less infomative

[*] While examining the monsters, there is no hint on how to exit the descrition screen. [Esc] works as expected. (a minor tutorial-unrelated issue).


I think we should print such instructions in the tutorial where appropriate. Hints mode has very nice instructions in many screens, that are not included in normal game (where it might clutter them).

[*] "You can fire darts at the monster with [f] or by [clicking] on them in the inventory panel. To confirm auto-targeted monster press [f] or [Enter]." Why cannot I confirm it by clicking on the darts in the inventory again? Mouseclick-enter-mouseclick-enter feels inconvenient.


Sounds like a good interface improvement idea.

[*] Why are dummies positioned behind deep water? They cannot move, and not being able to retrieve ammo seems meh. I think tutorial should even explicitly say that you'd beter not waste preicous ammo when you cannot retrieve it and make you throw stones instead of arrows/darts at those behind deepwater/lava.


I think it's so you can't just go melee them. About not wasting ammo, it's a sensible strategy but sounds like the basic tutorial shouldn't use space to suggest it.

[*] Also, probably we should show the player that autoexpolore picks up valuable things automatically. I think it is nice piece of info to know, and lets player know what is that greenish square around the item is for. Oh, nevermind that is what lesson 3 is for.[/list]


Lesson 2 does give you a "dynamic" message when you first pick up an item you previously threw. Of course, that you didn't notice it goes to show that the messages are easy to miss. :) But yeah, lesson 3 has more on autopickup (although not on thrown items, but that's probably ok).

I've started working on the third lesson, and have a pretty clear idea what I want to merge from jpeg's original and KiSS's suggestions. I think I should get it done early next week.

--Eino

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Post Friday, 17th August 2012, 14:34

Re: Tutorial changes, testing and comments appreciated

I've just pushed a revision of the third lesson to master. Testing much appreciated! Here's the commit message for an overview of the changes:

  Code:
Changes include:
 * Autopickup frame explained when you see the autopickup'd item
 * Autopickup text shortened
 * The goblin that prevents autopickup later on only comes into view after you step on the item
 * New second floor layout, old layout used as the new third floor
 * Much less fighting on the second floor: no kobolds peltering you with stuff from behind the water
 * Weapon swap removed
 * Quantified drop removed
 * Since unrandarts come preidentified, tweak the ratskin cloak text accordingly
 * Less complex digging lesson
 * Three scroll id part removed, replaced with a scroll of identify for the amulet
 * Tutorial tile for dropping the amulet (covers dropping)
 * Third floor covers shopping
 * The end fight made optional (can buy a levitation ring to cross the water to exit)
 * Several tweaks and shortenings to texts
 * Removed fire resistance armour from the ending fight
 * No tutorial messages on doors (as per feedback from moxian in the tavern)

Changes from KiSS not included:
 * The level designs were too cramped; things tended to come into view prematurely and cause message spam
 * Preidentified items didn't feel right

Comments/TODO:
 * Left several TODO messages to the tutorial text database; mostly about needing tutorial texts inside shop, search etc screens
 * Not sure about the ending; it's not necessarily clear at all that the player can get the levitation ring from the shop (which would teach them about 'a'bilities)
 * I made some texts longer by adding "in the inventory panel" when discussing clicking on items - perhaps we could assume that the player can figure that out
 * Would like to get rid of skill tips
 * The third floor is a little big/empty


I haven't incorporated moxian's excellent feedback yet, but hope to do so before 0.11 is released. I think there's now only Lesson 4 left, and it won't get that many changes (since I'm rejecting the lesson 4+5 merge that the KiSS team did).

--Eino

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Post Saturday, 18th August 2012, 10:05

Re: Tutorial changes, testing and comments appreciated

Is there a way to make tutorail check point unstopable? I mean, as the reminder for auto explore is out of track, I missed it when exploring level 3, so I came back to read it, and was really disappointed about the text. If it was on the track but don't stop autoexplore, it could be nice reminder, but non annoying.

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