Plugin(s) to make an in-game tutorial

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Are there any plugin(s) that could help building a tutorial for a game?

I’m looking for something that could:

  • Hide/blur/disable some part of the UI, to highlight a specific area/button
  • Display speech bubbles and guiding (blinking arrows)
  • Guide the user from a step to another

I’ve read this post but it doesn’t get too specific.
The only thing I could find was Text Wrapper.

#2

Tutorials should be specific and tailored to their respective games. As such, I doubt you’ll be able to find a plugin or module anywhere that could be used to create tutorials for your game.

You need to figure out what the important gameplay mechanics that the player needs to learn are and how to convey them to the player in an entertaining, yet educational way. Then write some simple functions in your own game that will accomplish just that.

#3

as per XedurR:  you probably won’t find anything ready-to-go out-of-the-box.

you’ve already started listing the various “UI support” routines you’d want available, so just begin implementing them, one at a time.  you may find you need a couple more as you go along, just implement them if/as the need occurs.

the trickier part will be the control logic.  essentially you need to guide the user through a number of “steps” (and you should persist this progress in case player exits the game only part-way through tutorial, so that you can resume), where you write code to accomplish:  “is user at this step?  if so, ready to see next hint?  if so, display hint.  wait until user has properly interacted.  advance.”

that could all be accomplished with a big state machine.  (or might be a good place to use coroutines)  super-rough example:

local TSM = {} -- the tutorial state machine function TSM:setState(fn) self.state = fn end function TSM:performState() if (self.state) then self:state() end end function TSM:prepStep1() -- check if user should even be here, or if already beyond this step if (persistedTutorialStep \> 1) then -- and step 2 will auto-advance to step 3 if needed, and so on self:setState(self.prepStep2) end -- we DO belong on step 1, but are we still waiting for preconditions? -- i can't give you exact code here, you must figure out how/when to start if (StatsStuff:getTotalInteractionCount() \> 0) then self:setState(self.showStep1) end end function TSM:showStep1() UIStuff:showTutorialOverlayMessage("Keep clicking the cookie!") -- in this simple case we can immediately advance state self:setState(self.waitStep1) end function TSM:waitStep1() -- has user done the right thing yet? if (StatsStuff:getCookieClickCount() \> 10) then UIStuff:hideTutorialOverlayMessage() -- remember user's progress: persistedTutorialStep = 2 -- begin step 2 self:setState(self.prepStep2) end end -- step 2's (et al) prep/show/wait will resemble step 1's -- start it up: TSM:setState(TSM.prepStep1) -- from game loop, call it: -- (maybe just once per second is enough, depending on how "responsive" it needs to be) TSM:performState()

hth

#4

I did not expect an out-of-the box ready plugin but maybe there were some parts that could have been covered by some plugins. Of course it needs to be tailored to my game.

Thanks Dave for the example, that will be really useful.