The left click - right click dilemma

[Babar]

A tutorial is an option, but if it's mandatory it will annoy the existing adventure gamers (again, me included) who just want to start playing, and if it's optional a lot of newbies will skip it, not knowing what's good for them.

A tutorial doesn't have to be that explicit. You could simply have a story-point advancing "puzzle" that requires looking as well as interacting, right at the start of the game, and have a message pop up like "RIGHT CLICK UNDER THE BED TO LOOK THERE", and when the player does that, "LEFT CLICK ON THE BOOK TO GET IT OUT FROM UNDER THE BED". And there, that is it.

[Cassiebsg]

You know Babar... this "tutorial" it's fine if not abused... I stopped playing BttF because it kept telling me what to do! And I couldn't find a way to turn it off. It annoyed me so much that I don't even feel like playing it anymore.

I like tzachs's solution with the timer... just as long as it only does that once, maybe twice...

Alberth... don't think any of us think of double click that way, maybe cause we grew up with Adventure games before windows created the double click... I seem to have a faint idea of some games using the double click as a "run" option though.

[Babar]

You know Babar... this "tutorial" it's fine if not abused... I stopped playing BttF because it kept telling me what to do! And I couldn't find a way to turn it off. It annoyed me so much that I don't even feel like playing it anymore.

It wouldn't be constant, of course. It'd literally be for just the first puzzle in the game, which would be the first two interactions in the game. It doesn't really require a lot of teaching and tutorialing to explain that left click uses and right click looks.

[Mr Underhill]

Yeah, I think the tut would be fine as long as it's disguised into a joke. People will be okay with a tutorial as long as they don't realise what it is, or at least if they do they'll appreciate you put in the extra effort of going "hey, I hate tutorials too, let's just both get this damn' thing over with so we can move on to the good stuff". Although I'm not sure how appropriate this approach would be in a dead serious psychological thriller AG

[Stupot]

I've just started working on a little one-room Escape game. Those games are generally made in flash or are made for mobile devices, so they don't have a right click. But a lot of them have a 'look' button on the screen, so that you click on that first if you want to just look at something (that something is usually just an item you are carrying, but there's no reason why it can't be used for looking at other other objects and surroundings). In fact, I'm going to use this approach and see how it goes.

This has the dual bonus of being obvious to all players from the outset but also being skippable for players who can't be bothered to use it (until they need to, but when that time comes the button will be there on screen so if they don't think to click it then they don't deserve to play the game).

[Etumretniw]

I had a start-up screen that told the player what the symbols showing left and right of the dynamic pointer meant, and that they were connected to the left and right mouse button (as well as inventory being available through the mouse wheel). With pictures. Felt it was the right thing at the time. I'm a sucker for clarification, though not time consuming ones.