Tutorials

Back in the heyday of the Spectrum, it was rare for a game to come with full instructions. Granted, a lot of the time it was because the games were got were copies of copies of copies, recorded tape to tape and passed around. There were several we could never make head or tail of. Even when it was a legit copy, the instructions were often along the lines of "Q and A, O and P to move, press Space to fire" and everything else you had to learn by trial and error. The sumptuous manual that came with The Lords of Midnight was an exception.

When I made games for the Dizzy fangame community, I could take as read that everyone understood the basic principles behind the games - pick up items, drop them in the right place to solve a puzzle, work with the somewhat janky jumping mechanics to get to difficult-to-reach places. If I want people other than Dizzy fans to be able to enjoy this game to its fullest, I can't demand that they do their homework on the series first. So, to link the end of Iron Tower to Splintered Realms, there's a 2-screen tutorial section that uses the message system to tell the player about the basics of the game, with a couple of demonstration puzzles.

There were parts of my previous two Dizzy games that were sufficiently obtuse as to be difficult to understand how they worked. Expecting the player to get to grips with how they worked through trial and error, while in the process of solving other puzzles, proved to be a mistake. In Iron Tower Dizzy, Dizzy has a slingshot. It doesn't behave like a normal item and can't be dropped. When he uses it, he's given a list of targets to shoot the slingshot at. To try and get players to understand how critical the feature will be, the game starts with Dizzy locked in a cage and he has to shoot carious things to free himself. The problem was, it's not clear that the list of targets depends on his position, even within the cage, and many of the items he can hit in that part of the game don't help him escape, so players frequently became confused and frustrated.

I don't want that to happen again.

Whenever there's a new mechanic presented in Splintered Realms Dizzy, I plan on using tutorial messages to make it as clear as possible to the player. You can see this already in the demo, with an explanation of switching characters once you reach the main hall. It's better to over-communicate concepts than under-communicate them.

As to progress writing the game, I've finished the first realm. Together with the opening section, that makes it around 20% complete, give or take.