Teaching game features
One of the eternal dilemmas of every game designer is: How do I teach players how to play the game?
In the early days of video games, there was a physical instruction manual that players had to read in order to understand how to play a game. Most players, of course, never bothered reading it and just jumped into the gameplay, figuring things out by themselves. That has been the standard for years.
With the video game audience growing larger and the medium spreading through more affordable and mainstream technology, the average video gamer is today pretty much anyone. It is therefore impossible to take for granted that they’d be able to learn a game just by immersing themself in it.
On the other hand, video games themselves have become quite complex systems. Learning a game such as Doom back in 1993 was a straightforward task: use the arrow keys to move, Ctrl to fire, and the spacebar to use objects. With those controls in mind, all you have to...
