Yeah, I’d aim for something that’s not meant to be frustrating.
I mentioned this idea back on the blog before release and was greeted with angry readers. It’s kind of what the Boris section is, but very light handed. There was a lot of debate among the team about how much of a tutorial this should be. I was against it, and other team members wanted a full-on tutorial. Given the nature of the game, I was against it (and still think it was the right call for THIS game). Given a new game, I might do something a little more structured.
Problem with skipping dialog is, it doesn’t happen until farther in the game. It wasn’t until past the Sheriff that I saw play testers skipping dialog.
Yeah, something like the Boris section (but with additional puzzles) is what I had in mind. When Valve teaches a gameplay concept, they don’t tell you they’re teaching the mechanic with UI prompts or anything. It’s a natural part of the gameplay. The only thing that makes it a tutorial is that they deliberately limit your available options at the time, much like the Boris section of the game. Ideally, tutorials should be effectively invisible.
Ooh, now that is a serious problem. About the only way I can see to deal with that at the moment is to somehow encourage people to skip dialogue in the tutorial section, then punish them for it with the lesson, but that’s an obviously bad idea.
Maybe an alternative would be that every so often when a player skips dialogue, the NPC gets annoyed at the player for doing so. But that seems like it would be tricky to implement in a way that doesn’t punish reasonable dialogue skipping.
But this forces the tutorial on people who don’t need it. I’d prefer a tutorial to be optional.
If it’s done well, it won’t feel like a tutorial, it will just feel like a very simple section of the game. To make it feel natural, it can’t be optional, it needs to feel like a part of the story. Your comment reflects the root of this problem: hard core and new players. They need very different things. In TWP if you choose CASUAL mode, there is more handholding or on-scene messages, but it’s the same puzzles.
Personally, I can’t stand tutorials. I want to be pushed into the pool and figure out how to swim, but that is not how most people today want it. If you’re going to make a true mass-market adventure game, you need to hold people hands and ease them into it, but that doesn’t mean pop-up messages and forced click zones.
People complain about TWP and new players being lost, but I submit the same is true of new players and any FPS. There is a lot of “game play language” that people understand. For as good as it was, the “tutorial” for Half-life would have done nothing for my mom.
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Let me clarify something… I’d prefer the tutorial to be optional if it was long as suggested above. I was perfectly fine with the short Boris section. Also, I don’t see the need for anything more complex… game mechanics are quite simple.
Also: I don’t know how people are expected to solve puzzles by skipping dialogue? Funny thing is, my elderly mother, a big fan of murder mysteries, pour over every line spoken by a character… and usually knows who’s the murderer way beforehand.
Also she says it outloud. Ruining everything, forever. Thanks, Mom.
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If you can’t “train” the players, have you thought about to “play” with the situation (or the players)? Turn the dialog skipping into a joke. For example you could write in the game description on Steam: “Skip all dialogs and don’t understand anything!” If the player skips, let’s say, three sentences in the game, the character could say to the player (breaking the fourth wall): “Why do you interrupt me constantly? I don’t understand a word.” Ok, these suggestions aren’t funny, but I hope you get what I’m trying to say. 
In other words: If there are players (or press reviews) complaining about a (missing) feature you could turn this into a joke. Similar to the toilet paper thing.
Regarding the tutorial section:
Because we are all experienced players. We know how to play an adventure game. So a tutorial with the pattern “Click here. And now there.” would be annoying for us. btw: I like and appreciate tutorials that are part of the story (as you have described it in your post above).
As I haven’t understood it completely, I have to ask: For which group have you designed TWP? Is TWP a classic adventure game for (hard core) adventure fans? Or for casual gamer? Should it attract new gamer for the genre? Is it for older player? Or younger ones?
I ask this because if TWP is for the fans of the genre, you can ignore the skipping issue and the tutorial. The fans will spread the word and help others exploring the world of TWP - like DZ-Jay did with his nephew.
Why have the testers skipped the dialog? (Have you asked them?)
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It was designed for adventure game fans, but the move to other, more casual platforms means we have a opportunity to get new people. We’re not interested in people who have no interest narrative games or games where you have to think. We have no desire to turn the game into a casual experience, but on the other hand, we have no problem with helping new players along. But we won’t change the DNA of the game to do that. Not only don’t we want to, we don’t have the time or money, but we will be what we can to help bring new players to adventure games.
Of course, this would be a very different conversation if I was doing a new game.
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@milanfahrnholz has answered this already: I replay games to do things I haven’t tried before. Beside that, sometimes you repeat several things in the first playthough. For example I have tried to get the shovel from Doug. And I got every time the answer “I’m diggin’”. This is funny. But not after 20 tries. In such cases I am thankful if I can skip the line.
The cut scenes in TWP aren’t annoying. But if you have to watch them over and over again, they will annoy you - or at least me. (And there are games out there with annoying cut scenes. )
Yes. I agree with you: That should be the best advice.
Another example based on an observation I made with people who weren´t aware of the able to skip dialogue in the game:
Sometimes it just happens that you accidentally hit a dialouge option you already tried and it opens a rather long back an forth between the character and the NPC you really don´t need to hear just yet again. And in that case the ability to skip is also very convienient.
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If you play lots of adventure games, you’ve done a lot more “tutorials” than you realize. For instance, Monkey Island 2 has what at first glance seems like a fairly complex puzzle chain in order to create a voodoo doll. but rather than that be the end of that series of puzzles, the knowledge and thinking needed to make the voodoo doll trains you to be able to figure out how to make a second voodoo doll much later in the game. Without that first voodoo doll quest, the second one would seem quite arbitrary.
The original Monkey Island had “tutorials” also. The game taught you all about sword fighting and collecting insults, then required you to apply that knowledge for solving a more advanced puzzle later. The special ghost-killing brew needed late in the game also served as a tutorial in that it taught you what was needed to kill a ghost, so that when you’re forced to improvise, you have the clues you need to figure out the right solution.
Sometimes puzzles have their own built-in tutorials. One example from Monkey Island involves a catapult. You can use the catapult in its initial state, only to find that the rock won’t hit anything of consequence. It’s basically teaching you that you’re going to have to aim the catapult in order to hit anything, and as the catapult is adjusted, the changing point of impact gives you feedback. The game doesn’t say “that won’t work” or even worse simply do nothing. Instead, it’s teaching you that you’re on the right track, but that there’s more you need to do first.
You may argue that these aren’t tutorials because they’re not bringing gameplay to a screeching halt to teach a concept, but that’s the point. Adventure games rely extensively on seamlessly teaching you gameplay concepts, so it’s really just a matter of applying similar concepts at the beginning of the game to teach players information they’ll need for the rest of the game. And really, a tutorial is just a matter of perspective. For a seasoned adventure gamer, opening doors is something that comes automatically. But for someone playing an adventure game for the first time, even the interface can be quite foreign, and the first closed door a player encounters will serve as an impromptu tutorial for the rest of the game. In the case of the Boris “tutorial”, progress is literally gated behind a gate. It’s a non-puzzle for most of us, but for someone brand new to the game, understanding how to use the interface is their first puzzle. The game won’t let you go anywhere until you’ve figured out how to open doors (and gates).
Really, the one element needed for a tutorial is a controlled environment so a person can focus on the concept(s) being taught. If done right, you don’t even know you’re doing a tutorial.
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Can you ask her who killed Boris and Franklin, please?
Then let the players skip the dialogue, if they want, but highlight important key words in the texts. In this way instead of reading everything their eyes will just scan the text searching for highlighted words and they will read the entire sentence only if such words do appear.
To me it’s horrid, but it’s better than letting them skip everything and it makes the search for clues in texts a more explicit activity, almost a sub-game.
I have no idea how to achieve this for players who use only audio.
By default, this aid should be on for players on “casual” and off for players on “hard”.
Also, what about adding an achievement for those who finished the game without using the skip command?
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seems clever to me
I would never have imagined that people who use only audio would skip it.
More in general, I would ask myself if this happens for novels. Except for murder mysteries where someone might skip to the solution, I would not expect novel readers to skip uninteresting chapters. Do you think this can happen? If this does not happen for novels, then I would ask myself why it happens in games. Let’s call the explanation “X”. And then I would try to do something to make X false. — OTOH, I recall having skipped descriptions in novels. So maybe the problem is not exclusive to games.
Hmmm… I know you are saying this now, and at the very beginning of the project you also commented on that; but I remember markedly you stating in the blog at the early stages of development how you wanted to make the experience more “modern” to attract a wider audience.
You also mentioned that expanding the audience may be the only way to make a sustainable business out of making games.
This, according to you at least, was part of the motivation for the lighting effects and the non-pixel-perfect 3D-ish environments.
You also commented on your disappointment on some reviewers calling the game “retro” or general comments on the “dated” or “low-res” graphics by the general commenters. I recall you saying something like you hoped that the modern lighting and graphics effects would attract them.
I understand that you never intended to turn Thimbleweed Park into a casual experience, if we define “casual” as Angry Birds or Kandy Krush – none of us would like that at all.
However, I got the distinct impression that you were aiming to attract a new and wider generation of players, to convince younger (than us) players to become new adventure gamers.
Amen! And nor would we want you to. We all agree that would be a mistake.
However, I think it’s a straw-man. I don’t think anybody is suggesting that you should turn Thimbleweed Park into a “Casual” experience to cater to “casual gamers.” (At least not I.). I believe some of us are suggesting ways of turning those “casual gamers” into “adventure gamers.”
In my opinion at least, there are hardcore adventure gamers in one end of a spectrum, casual disengaged players in the other end, and a massive amount of potential adventure gamers in between.
Therefore, I think that talking about one extreme versus the other does not help you much. One is a tiny niche, the other is a group that will never engage with your experiences the way you want.
In the middle we have kids like my nephew, Dante. By your definition, he would be a “Casual” player – because that’s all he knows. But in my opinion, he is a non-adventure gamer with the potential to become one. A little nurturing, guidance, handholding, and training and he is now squarely on our side (or at least on his way there).
I think that’s what we are trying to do, right?
dZ.
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He did something similar in the cave. When you don´t let the cave finish the character introductions and hover over the next one it says something like “oh, a little impatient aren´t we?”
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Yes, that is true, but what I meant was we weren’t making a “mass market” adventure game. It was designed for adventure game fans (promise of the Kickstarter), but doing as much as would could to make it accessible to a new audience WITHOUT alienating the first. Remember, we made a promise when doing the Kickstarter, and we tried to fulfill that. If we had done our Kickstarter, then made a completely modern adventure game, we would have had a lot of upset backers (and rightly so).
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Then allow the players to skip the dialogs (and don’t tell them that it is possible to skip the lines). If someone wants to skip the dialogs, just let him do this. If he/she/it can’t follow the story it’s his/her fault.
It’s a classic adventure and it has already attract a lot of new people. (For example the nephew of DZ-Jay.) And I am confident it will attract more casual gamer on mobile devices. The press was good, even a big German radio station had a report about TWP.
Is this possible? Everything you implement/add to attract casual gamers will annoy the hard core gamer and vice versa …
Yep, exactly. This is the best way to do it, IMHO. But you can’t do it (now) in TWP because you have to do additional voice recordings. (Except… Ron and/or Gary would tell the player that they will miss parts of the story The characters/sprites are in the game, they have just to move in the scene and say something funny.)
/Edit: It would be still interesting to know why the players skip the dialogs at a certain point in the game. For example in The Cave: Are the character instructions too boring? Or did the player do this only at the second playthrough? In TWP: Is the sheriff too annoying? Is his monologue too long?
I understand, and that’s what I imagined. It’s just that to me a “wider audience” means “mass market.” That doesn’t necessarily mean appeal to every single taste out there, but certainly a more mainstream appeal.
I do not think that both audiences are necessarily mutually exclusive. There is no need to pitch it as an “us gamers” vs. “them unwashed masses.” Like I mentioned before, there’s a wide spectrum of potential players that would enjoy your games without needing to “dumb down” and upsetting your backers.
I am a backer also, and I don’t consider myself a “hardcore gamer” nor “old-school adventure gamer.” I played adventure games in the past, among many other genres, but in a more casual way than most. 
For what it’s worth, I think you did a terrific job at balancing between both camps. We’re just discussing here how to take even more steps to bridge the gap without alienating the fans.
dZ.
Well, I’m a little bit late to the discussion, but nice to see that such a young kid is still able to enjoy this type of game.
My ex’s youngest (11yo at the time) was a completely different story: this one time they were over, he was hogging the PC to play Costume Quest, if I’m not mistaken. And predictably, he was skipping all dialogue. Of course, having no clue what the goal was, he had to resort to randomly trying stuff out and observe the results.
To me, this is a horrible way to play the game, so I told him to read the dialogue because he was missing all the clues and even the level’s objective. But to him, being someone who loves experimentation/exploration and who eschews structure, having to read the dialogue is boring. It didn’t matter to him that he was making slower progress; for him the game was all about experimentation, trying random stuff and see what would happen. While he did make progress (albeit at a slower rate than we would), solving the puzzle was just a secondary objective to him. Needless to say, he is crazy about freeform/sandbox games such as Minecraft.
Bottom line: especially with kids, it’s sometimes OK to let them play the game “wrong”. The goal of a game is to provide entertainment. If a kid is content with just walking around, exploring the world and randomly trying to combine objects in the hopes of being rewarded with an amusing cutscene/animation, let them. You can try to guide them, but if they resist, let them enjoy the game their way.
I think it is possible, to some extent, and I disagree that changes would necessarily annoy one side or another. Why so intent in framing this as a battle between “hardcore” vs. “casual” gamers? I think that’s a false dichotomy; it’s divisive and perhaps not very constructive.
As far as I can tell, Mr. Gilbert’s hardcore fans loved the game and praise it. Yet, it includes a tutorial, a “Casual” mode, and instruction cards. Had he asked the fans if these were a good idea, they would have probably balked at it – but when they were included, they didn’t care, because the game is still good and supports their old-school sensibilities. 
If these ideas cannot be implemented in this game, then perhaps they can inform the design of the next one; and we’ll all be better for it.
dZ.