Tutorial design for a survival game: Quest-driven, Contextual, or Open Manual?

[u/Typical-Cat73]

Hey everyone!

I'm working on a 2.5D survival game and trying to figure out the best approach for the tutorial, balancing dev effort vs. player experience.

I'm torn between three options:

A) Quest-driven: Step-by-step tasks. You get a tip/quest, and the next one won't show up until you complete it.

B) Contextual / Reactive: Tips pop up based on what you do. (e.g. you craft a furnace for the first time -> a tip shows how to place it).

C) Open Manual / Codex: A basic in-game guide always accessible in a menu or corner that you can check whenever.

My main worry with B (Contextual) is that if a player skips an item or action, they'll miss the tip entirely. On the flip side, A can feel too hand-holdy/linear for a survival game, and C might just get ignored by most players.

What system do you usually prefer to implement or play with in survival games?

Thanks!

[u/KodelkaEnchanted]

Whichever mix you choose, I'd want it to recognize things I've already done. If I build a furnace while exploring and the tutorial later tells me to build one, having to make a second would feel worse than a missed tip. I'd rather get credit for it and keep the instructions available to reread.

[u/Dartillus]

I'd go for B while simultaneously adding in some kind of mission/quest/whatever that requires you to interact with the most important objects. That way players understand how the game delivers information, hopefully teaching them to seek new things out to interact with.

[u/SoulloopDev]

I'd mix A and B rather than pick one. a short quest chain for only the first few minutes (move, gather, craft one thing, survive one night), then switch to contextual tips that fire the first time the player actually needs something, like the first time they're cold or their tool breaks. survival players hate being held by the hand for long, but they also hate dying to a system nobody showed them.

the open manual (C) works well as the backup: one place to reread a tip you skipped. the cheap win there is logging every contextual tip into it automatically, so you write each one once.

[u/loulo88]

One thing that helped us on Forgebound (a medieval survival game we're making) was tracking what players actually did in the first 20 minutes. Most tips nobody saw weren't skipped, they were for things players hadn't realized were possible yet, like that a forge could repair gear. So we ended up with B plus a small "you haven't tried this yet" nudge that only fires after a few in-game days if a core action never happened. It feels a lot less naggy than a quest chain and catches the people who would otherwise miss stuff.

[u/The_Laser_Lad]

I'd lean contextual with a light quest spine. Short prompts that appear the first time you actually need something (cold, hunger, a broken tool) stick far better than a manual read upfront, and a couple of early quests can nudge people toward the systems they'd otherwise miss. Keeping an optional manual for the details helps the players who like to dig in.

[u/Far-Gene-5806]

Missing a tip in B only hurts for things the player needs but can't stumble onto, so trigger those on the problem (first night, first time freezing) instead of on the item. Valheim's raven also keeps reappearing next to you until you actually read his message, which covers players who ignore the popup.

[u/BlueGnoblin]

balancing dev effort vs. player experience.

In the same boat here...

A) Quest-driven: Step-by-step tasks

This should be your bread'n'butter approach, as it is pretty easy to implement and guides the player through the early game. An option to skip this could be added later on.

C) Open Manual / Codex:

My tip: create your gamedesign document inside your game. Instead of finding tools etc to manage your game content, add a way to view this in game, so this is a more or less an pretty cheap way to manage your game design doc and have a benefit for your players.

I did this with my tech tree. As my tech tree in my game get more complex, it was pretty hard to keep track of it. Most tools just do not really have the right approach to display my tech tree, so I thought about how I can display the tech tree in a better way and added this directly into the game.

Now I have a tech tree I can manage easily, while automatically have a good overview inside the game. Win-win and a lot cheaper than managing in-game and gdd.

[u/loulo88]

For survival, I'd lean contextual over a big open manual, with a thin quest wrapper only for the first hour.

Players already have scarcity anxiety; a wall of systems up front makes them freeze. Contextual prompts tied to the first shelter / first tool / first resource loop teach by doing, and you can gate the next tip on completing the previous one so it never dumps everything at once.

On a medieval survival base-builder I'm iterating (Forgebound), the bits that stuck were "build the forge because you just got ore," not a handbook chapter on metallurgy. Quest-driven works as a spine for that first base, then fade it out once the player starts inventing their own goals.