Here's a small commitment I wanna make, primarily to myself :
I want to get the hell away from thinking about teaching the player when designing my game.
I think the idea of teaching players x or y is a constant nuisance that gets in the way of more interesting game design. It's not about tutorials, they are the least offensive example of this. Designers try to teach players by slowly dishing out moves. They try to slowly ramp up intensity & complexity. They structure games in layers progressing through which is meant to create a slow natural learning curve.
It's not a modern phenomenon, arcade games are just as guilty of this, albeit in a different, less annoying way. For example, developers tried to give players a "guaranteed playtime per coin" of sorts, and to do this they deliberately made earlier stages easier before adding spikes.
But these are arcade games. They are meant to be played over and over and over again, starting from the beginning. So why do they have smooth, slowly escalating difficulty curves? Why do stages go from easy (s1-3) to hard (stage 5-7)?
Difficulty scales with familiarity/skill, so the early stages will always be the easiest because that's what you'll replay the most doing full runs of the game. Tension is built up over the course of a run since the further you are, the more is at stake. The later parts will always naturally be more intense than the early ones, even if they're not much more difficult. Especially if a game has persistent resources with no caps, since you're sure to lose a bunch of them.
Perhaps it's because resources gained early on can trivialize later sections, so games have to ramp up. But this only justifies the curve going up towards the end, not it starting low.
I don't think there's a real, artistic reason behind this - it's a $imple Practical Concern. You don't want to alienate players by throwing them into the lion's den, that's it. Does it help veterans? No. Does it make for more interesting gameplay? Nope. Does it make for some kinda interesting emotional experience? FUCK no, it just gets boring to repeat the easiest stage on the planet to get to the good stuff.
I wanna break away from this somehow, but the problem is the $imple Practical Concern still 100% applies to me and the shit I make - I obviously want my games to be played and even, dare I say, make money from them. So I need a good, low effort method for appealing to new players that won't distract me from making the game I want to make, but is also effective. The closest thing is going with an obvious solution - making a normal mode that's accessible to people, and then completely ignore any sort of flow, difficulty curve or teaching on hard mode. Except without the unlocks.
Maybe a better solution though would be going all in, and making the uncompromised difficulty a unique selling point for new players - so they know exactly what they're getting into. I don't think I'm talented enough to figure out how to do this in a way that doesn't come off as offputting though, so I dunno. This is still WIP but I wanna make a concrete commitment that I'll try to figure something out.
Whatever solution I end up settling on though, I want to get away from teaching.
