It’s been something like three weeks since my last blog post, and I have spent the entirety of that time working on a tutorial for players to play in order to “learn by doing.” The tutorial goes through the basics of how to play GRF, walking the player through step-by-step on how to move, switch goblins, pass, use power ups, score, etc. It’s all pretty, well, basic and boring, but it seems like it gets the job done on “teaching” the player.
It took me a lot longer to make than I originally expected. Mostly because I wanted to break each component of the game apart, and in the game itself a lot of those things are kind of “tied” together and hard to show to a play separately on its own. As an example, in the regular game I have “gameplay actions” like dive, slide, punch, kick, etc. But in the tutorial I want to show these all one at a time. So, it involved a bit of re-coding stuff specifically for the tutorial. I also tried to make it so that if the player just kind of faffed about not following the instructions, the tutorial would “wait” for them to get back on track and be able to continue on without issue. I’m sure that doesn’t work 100%, but whatever. I’m hoping it didn’t break anything in the regular game, but it probably did! That’s a problem for another day though.
All told, the tutorial takes about 3-4 minutes to complete if the player follows the instructions as they are provided. Video of me going through the tutorial below:
Next Steps…
There are still some things in the tutorial to clean up, but it shouldn’t be much. Mostly things like getting the gamepad UI icons to display and some other gamepad related controls to iron out.
For the rest of the game there are a few things I want to add. More visual indicators (sigh…) like creating a outline around the ball carrier using something like shader graphs. Maybe some other visual effects like making the corner of the screen turn red and when you get punched or whatever.
After that, though, I think it should be time to switch the multiplayer over to something that will work with Steamworks.NET and release!? That would be exciting.
Smell ya later, nerds!