It’s time to return to the topic of making video games easier to understand, and that begins (and sometimes ends) at the tutorial stage. Trying to teach someone the basics of your game is vital and can be difficult to get right, because every game is different. For today’s post, I want to focus on
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
All available May 5.
Its like the final episode of the Sapranos. You gonna go to make a comment and when you click add th-
I think the only game here for me is Nine Sols. Was always interested in that game.
Good month for me, I wanted that particular footy game and thought it might be due. Anyway who cares, shame about the site I'll miss the comment sections. All the best everyone.
The answer to that is simple; follow the example of Megaman. Or more specifically, Megaman X.
As Egoraptor explains in his Sequelitis episode all about it [ https://www.youtube.com/wat... ], the key to a good tutorial, at least in a game that's action-based like Mega Man, is all about simplistic conveyance.
If you can teach your player the rules of your game through situations within the game that make the solution obvious once experimentation takes place, you make the game easier to understand, and you make the "tutorial" more fun to play through, and less obviously a moment of "learning" rather than just "Playing".
For example, straight from the video, during the opening level of Megaman X, Highway [which btw has one of the best opening level music tracks in any game EVER!], you come across a couple of mini-bosses shaped like giant bees.
Once defeated, the first one will drop you into a pit along with its remains, with no obvious way out and two large walls to the left and right.
The first reaction for most would be to jump at one of the walls, perhaps searching for a weak point.
Mega will begin to slide down it.
And in a moment of clarity, the player will likely see this slide and think of trying to jump again.
Boom; they've learned the wall jump, a technique that remains relevant throughout the entirety of the game, in the very first minutes of the game.
And when they learned it, they didn't feel like they were "being taught".
They got the feeling of "discovering" this ability.
The game itself put them in a situation where it could convey to them one of the rules of the game, by putting them into a situation they needed to be in to learn it.
It felt natural and smooth, not something that interrupted the flow of the game.
So that's it, really; just make the tutorial feel natural, smooth, and easily-conveyed through the game itself.
There will obviously be different ways of doing this in different genres, and some might be more complex by necessity, but there should always be a way of making it feel fun, at the least, and natural at the most.