Months ago after launching the beta version of Aerolitos, I received a few feedbacks saying that the goal and features of the game were not very clear and an in-game tutorial would be very important for the next version. Having that in mind, I decided to focus on that and started to look for tools to design a tutorial with ease and with the minimum amount of code.
I found only a few in the Unity Asset Store, but they were expensive or not good enough for what I had in mind. So I decided to write my own tool, which I called K-Tutorial. K-Tutorial is a tool for the Unity engine which helps game developers and designers build in-game tutorials writing a minimum amount or no code at all. The main feature of the tool is the ability to design in-game tutorials visually by leveraging the use of UnityEvents and providing a graph editor for creating and connecting tutorial steps with its exit conditions.
The video above shows K-Tutorial in action in the game Aerolitos. It contains basically two parts, the first is the explanation of the UI components, while the second focus on teaching the player the basic controls of the game. Given that, I decided to create two separate tutorials, although they happen sequentially, because it is more manageable and organized.
The picture above shows the design of the UI tutorial. As you can see, it is not hard to understand. Basically the black nodes hold the actions to be taken in each step of the tutorial, while the purple ones are responsible for checking if a given condition is met during a step, so the tutorial can transition to the next step. For example, the Show health step animates out the Welcome text (from the previous step) immediately, after 2 second (as defined by the Delay field) it animates in the health explanation text (plus its corresponding arrow and circle) and when the exit node is activated (when any key is pressed, in this case) it plays a sound effect and the tutorial transitions to the next step (Show timer).
The controls tutorial is way more complex, as can be seen in the image above, but you can see that it is not hard to have a basic understanding of the steps and events which trigger transitions. As the goal of this article is not to explain everything the tool provides, I will not dive into details about this tutorial.
But where does all this information reside? It is held by the Tutorial components in the scene, which is shown in the image below. It additionally provides events for the starting and the finishing of the tutorial, as well as for when you try to start the tutorial, but it has already been completed previously.
And this it it, it took me a lot of work to create this tool, but I really feel like it was worth the time, as it will be very easy for us to create in-game tutorials for our games here at Kansus Games. We also wish to sell it in the Unity Asset Store for an affordable price, but given that we are very focused in our game projects at this moment, maybe it will take a while, unless we see a good demand. Thank you very much for reading and tell us what you think, we will be pleased to respond!