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Developing a tutorial while you're still making the game, while you're still adding stuff to the game, that seems crazy.

TL;DRTodd Papy says the core player and ship mechanics are now settled enough that this is a good time to build the tutorial, starting with contextual controls and hints and adding more later.

Todd PapyGame Director, Star Citizen

Well, I think now we're so far along, we know what our base hero mechanics are from a player perspective, we know what our base mechanics are from a ship perspective. So I think right now is one of the best times to be doing it. But in previous games and everything like that, first level and last level were always the ones that we built. Just because you understood, here's everything that I need to teach and then I can do it at that point in time. But since we have such a high learning curve, we decided, all right, there's certain things in here that we needed done first, and we felt once those were completed... and really that to me was the contextual controls and contextual hints. Those were the biggest things and everything was built around that thought process and what we wanted to teach. And then from there we felt like we can add on certain things later on and have it be still a cohesive experience, but also at the same time drip-feed it a little bit better, because I think getting in and playing it and not having some of those hints, some of those controls, because we use all the keyboard and plus some with all of our shift modifications and everything, we wanted to make sure that the players could always remember it. Let's say they went away for two weeks or three months or whatever, and then they come back to it. It's like, how did I do this again? So on and so forth. So we wanted to kind of always have those constant reminders there. And then that really was the catalyst for us pushing forward on this.

Star Citizen Live›Gamedev: New Player Experience·
Published on this date.12 May 2023