The first five minutes of gameplay is responsible for hooking your user. And within those first five minutes you need to teach your player about what’s going on.

Becoming hooked on a game relies on engaging the person. You have to show off the start of the game and show that there’s more, sparking curiosity. Tutorials don’t just need to teach the user how to play, but they also need to quickly hook the user- especially if you’re relying on them  to make a purchase after playing the tutorial.

One good place we’ve looked has been

this and similar articles on Gamasutra.

Our goal for the tutorial in Solaro is to introduce the key controls in a rapid fire fashion. The basic controls in Solaro are pretty simple, so we can fly through these pretty quickly. After about a minute of very little reading and a lot of doing, you’ve got the controls down.

The tutorial also covers targeting and combat, and it gives you a shot at the arena system. The next step with the tutorial is to finish up the final hooks. The tutorial will award you with some new pieces and introduce you to the ship editor.

The tutorial needs to accelerate the player into the game- so it need to provide a taste of the progression in the game. When you complete the tutorial, you should feel like you’ve accomplished something, and you should leave wanting more. In the case of Solaro, you want to win more arenas, you want more rewards, and you want more cool pieces to add to your ship.

And all this needs to happen in the first five minutes, or you lose players!