Hello. Ricardo here. 

Between last week and this week I've been working on a tutorial for our game's controls.

It was a fun and stressful experience at the same time?

First off, I made a level specifically for our tutorial.

I wanted our story to start in this weird place in space that our player was sent to and this NPC character is there to gauge your skills, see if you're worthy for what's to come. Right there is where everything would start and as the player you have to follow prompts to understand the controls.

When it comes to Unreal Engine 5, as far as I know at the moment, there are two ways to tackle a kind of playthrough for the tutorial.  

You can either use a Game Instance, or just edit the Level's blueprint instead.

The Level Blueprint:

• Holds references to the objects placed in the level through the editor.
• It's best known for scripting events and logic specific to a single level.
• Can be used to trigger cutscenes, handle puzzles or environmental changes specific to the level.

The Game Instance:

• It's best used to manage data that needs to be persistent across multiple levels.
• Can be used to track the player's progress, inventory, global game stats like leveling up, story progression and abilities unlocked as an example.

I think both could work in par with the Game Mode/Game Mode Base:

• It's best used to manage the rules of the game, player spawning, and game state.
• Can be used to set up the game's rules like it's win and lose conditions.

Since I had both the player and NPC placed in this specific tutorial level, I decided to use it's level blueprint.

I got the reference for the player's UI and then I changed a text variable that I set depending on the actions taken by the player. First I told the player to walk with WASD and hit F to interact with the NPC. Using booleans and an interaction integer count, I tracked in the blueprint what the player was doing. Right after he spoke with the NPC and was given the beginning of the story for the game, he was given a different prompt to press a key unfamiliar to him, I kept repeating this process until all inputs where "learned". 

It's very rudimentary in my opinion, so far it's just text followed by inputs repeatedly until done.

Later I really want to make it so the player has to fight with this particular NPC, maybe test jump with an actual object that has height, add sounds every time the player does the input prompted correctly, just make it even more interactive in general.

It was my first time making a tutorial and I had fun learning, but stress executing...

Here is how it came out, hope you like it!

(Video is currently Unlisted)

By Ricardo Rodríguez (06/28/2024)