When our game was ready for our first complete build, I threw together this wall of text last minute. It was better than nothing, but only barely.

We knew throughout development that Dread It would be hard to tutorialize, The gameplay loop is complicated and not similar to many other games. Getting players to understand that they needed to destroy all the fragments, which would summon the shade to chase them down, and then lure said shade to the aperture to capture it all while using traps to slow it down and stay alive was hard to get right.

While playtesting the game, I found the tutorial to be the biggest offender for people struggling with the game. They would see a wall of text, then immediately turn their brain off and say, "I don't want to read it," then go into the level having no idea what to do.

In order to get people to not skip reading the tutorial, and present it in a more digestible manner, I split it up into several bite-sized pieces of information on pages that the player would have to leaf through. This way, they still had full control of how fast they got the tutorial, but since it was in much more digestible fragments, players were much more willing to spend some time with it.

On levels after the first, the tutorial would still come up, but would default to the last page, where the arsenal of traps is listed so they could see what was new without having to go back through everything else.

Overall, this approach worked wonderfully. It conveyed all the information that players were confused about, and they actually enjoyed leafing through it because of the satisfying visuals and sounds.