Found an incredibly embarrassing oversight in the process, but other than that and the initial pain of getting the messages to show up on screen in any form, the whole process was fairly simple.
The way things will work is that the game won't tell you anything, unless you trigger a specific condition, or a certain amount of time has passed with you being somewhat near to the thing you're currently stuck at. If either of these conditions are triggered, the game will show a text that (hopefully) enlightens the player enough to proceed. Also the message will stay on screen until the players have actually performed the required action at least once. So at least there won't be any "oh shit I missed the text prompty and now I don't know what to do! Guess I better refund the game and leave a negative Steam Review" moments.
There are some actions that require some additional explanation and for those the game will actually pause and display a screen-sized text box. There will also be two occasions where I will refuse to let players proceed until they've performed the action that is required of them.
It's their decision to ignore this stuff from then on out, but I won't just let you go on without at least urging you to take a look.
I'm hoping to have enough time to build something like a "training mode" into the core game, where you either just mess around without any threat, or can practice very specific move sequences and challenges.
This way I can give players some space to figure stuff out on their own, while also giving them the option to learn about some of the more weird concepts and interactions that the game has.
Anyway, I'm happy with this set up, and I hope it'll make things less awkward for players. I probably have to adjust some of the teaching things as the game gets more and more complete, but I also don't fall into the trap of re-doing the tutorial over and over again, just because one person ran into a very specific problem. Nothing will ever be perfect, not every teaching method works for everyone, and as good as it is to make an effort, there are still limits to what you can do.
It's stuff like this that really makes me miss manuals for games. One reason why older titles rarely had large introductory sequences, is because you had a booklet that told you what to do and what to expect.
If you think about it, playable tutorials are such a weird way to teach people anything. Imagine you want to teach someone to play the guitar, but the only way to communicate your lessons is via the instrument itself. I'm sure it's possible, but it's also very hard to do correctly.
