Tutorial campaign - general discussion

EDIT: PROJECT DISCONTINUED.

This thread is now the discussion about my Campaign Tutorial idea. I have split the general discussion into its own thread. Feel free to discuss the why, how, when, who and where of my idea here.

This is the idea:

I started working on a tutorial campaign for Xonotic. I am not part of the dev team of Xonotic, so this is basically for A. my own enjoyment and B. possibly other people's enjoyment.

The levels will be small and will try to teach the main concepts about Xonotic gameplay. The levels are race maps with a start and finish, where normally - at least in the first few levels - any time will make you pass that level. Unless of course that is the only way to check if the idea came across, for example in levels about gaining speed. The reason I went with a campaign consisting of smaller levels is so that it can be aborted at any point and be picked up again later, which allows more time, more levels and more depth.

The goal is to have it as self explanatory as possible, without walls of text needed to explain the idea to the player. Walls of text get ignored anyway and would need translating too. No use.

For example: I have made one small concept map that is about item pickup. Between the start and finish there is a hurt brush that takes 100 health. This means you can not make it to the finish without dying. Down some stairs is a mega health. Easy to find, but not clearly in sight. After picking up the megahealth the hurt trigger does not kill you anymore and you can finish and go on to the next level.

Feel free to add you won ideas for levels in this thread about level brainstorming.

This means you can not make it to the finish without dying.

On a serious note, I think you should wait till the 1.0 prerelease (=0.9 probably) with that.

u should release with 0.7 imo.

I don't think there will be a 0.7 release.. but lets not draw this offtopic

I have split the small discussion into its own thread, so hurray it's no longer off topic! To split it correctly I had to split your first post too asyyy, I hope you don't mind.

I enjoyed that picture and I think it has a valid point too. I think it would be better then to rename the project from "Tutorial campaign" to "Xonotic Training Center" or something like that..... errrm... yeh don't abbreviate that.

If the tutorial was a single, large level incorporating different techniques, connected by doors or teleporters, yes then I would say too that perhaps it was too premature to do it now. I think it's OK though, for the following reasons:

• The way I plan to structure it is to have many seperate small maps. That way when something changes in Xonotic gameplay, a small level is easy to open up and change. Or even take out completely/replaced by something else, without a huge amount of work being lost.
  
• We have a valid complaint now that players are not sticking with Xonotic and more than a couple of people have said that one of the reasons is probably that we do not have a tutorial, so newbies have no idea what is going on and leave too quickly. I can see the point of not going all out on the publuc relations until 1.0, but if we can retain players that find Xonotic already by adding something like this now, I think we should.
  
• The whole 'campaign' should be of high quality in both looks and the learning strategies that will be used. I don't plan to let myself off easy here. This will take time to develop properly. So even if we end up with something radically different for 1.0, I suppose a lot of ideas we get from starting now can be used in the end.
  
• It seems FruitieX is coming back to Xonotic development (I sure hope so!) and has already expressed his interest in this small project. So if small code changes could make this tutorial campaign work better, it's best to request (and hopefully implement) those now.
  

While working on the first map(s) yesterday I noticed a new entity that I had not seen before that is capable of changing the level when touching it. That gives the opportunity to structure this project a little differently. My idea is now to have a campaign consist of different levels, all dealing with a particular part of the gameplay. Each level will consist of a couple of different maps, connected with a changelevel entity. This means I can drop the "race" format already, which as FruitieX on IRC rightly pointed out might confuse a new player, and just use DM or any other gamemode instead. I'm not sure how to let the last map end the level yet and if this will kick you out of the campaign format, but perhaps a final timed map to use what you've learned in a timed setting would accomplish that.

If it helps, I could make a demo based on the structure I use for live tutorials. Is it possible to playback voice recording during a demo? Otherwise I could do text based explanations, but that might be boring to watch.

I figure such a demo tutorial by me would be only a placeholder until we get some proper tutorial map(s), but I can't map and it would be at least SOMETHING in the meantime...