Tutorial contents

[takkaria]

So, I want to make an in-game tutorial for V. At the moment my plan is to start in a custom dungeon, take the player through combat, running away, picking up items, 'u'sing them (universal use command), Word of Recall and then the shops.

I'm looking for suggestions for other things to include. What was confusing when you started playing? Do you have experience of showing Angband to new players and what did they find unintuitive?

[Nick]

Die. Not you personally

[Antoine]

Switch between ASCII and tiles?

Set up multiple windows with e.g. monster/object lists?

Set up a macro and use it?

A.

[Hajo]

Originally Posted by takkaria

I'm looking for suggestions for other things to include. What was confusing when you started playing?

Hardest was to learn the commands. Oh, I've become hungry - how do I eat something? How can I wield/take off equipment?

It took years for me to find out that I can combine torches for a longer lasting light.

And I was confused about the versioned spells (not sure if they are still named this way) like "recharge", "recharge II" and such - I wanted to know the differences, but without reading the code, it was seemingly impossible to find out.

The actual throwing damage for items is a bit obscure too.

And I must admit I'm still not entirely clear about the difference of "identify" and "*identify*".

A thing that puzzles me till today is why wands are used differently from rods and staves. If an item has multiple uses, it's clear that one needs different keys to distinguish them, but from a players view a rod, a staff and a wand are similar enough to use one common key - at least in my head.

[Mondkalb]

Look around (using the overhead map), look at monsters and items, inspect equipment and inventory items, browse books; disarming / tunneling / use of stairs.

[quarague]

Originally Posted by Antoine

Switch between ASCII and tiles?

Set up multiple windows with e.g. monster/object lists?

Set up a macro and use it?

A.

If you want these, I would put them in an optional second part. I agree that they might be useful to know but personally I've never used any of them.

Maybe also show where to find the help file and the key bindings, ie teach to help yourself.

[eMeM]

I think few videos on youtube would be better than new written tutorial.

[takkaria]

Originally Posted by eMeM

I think few videos on youtube would be better than new written tutorial.

It's not going to be a written or a video tutorial; it's going to be in-game.

[Mondkalb]

I take it that you have something similiar to the tutorial in Sil in mind? It is quite well done.

[Raajaton]

Teaching players to 'l'ook at monsters around them and 'r'ecall monster memory seems to help a lot of people. I have a little bit of experience in getting a couple of people into the game, and teaching them how to discern how dangerous monsters are before they try to take them on seems to help quite a bit.

For my first several playthroughs I had no idea how to 'A'ctivate items, so that could be useful to include.

* targeting for magic and archery. Showing them some of the commands to speed up play like 'h' for auto fire and 'n' to repeat previous actions.

I assume you had all these in mind already, but these are all things that helped me a great deal when I was first learning the game.