Finishing the Game - Learning C# by Programming Games - page 323

If the player has finished the level, we set the 'solved' status of the level to true , and
we change the current game state to the 'level finished' state.
Tutorials— As you have probably noticed, the first few levels of the Pen-
guin Pairs game also serve as a tutorial that explains how the game should be
played. When you create a game, players have to learn how to play it. If you
do not tell the players what the challenges and goals are and how to control
the game they will probably get frustrated and stop playing.
Some games provide extensive help files with long texts explaining the
story and the controls. Players no longer want to read such documents or
screens. They want to jump right into the game. You have to educate the player
while playing.
You can create a few specific tutorial levels where the player can prac-
tice the controls without drastically affecting the progress of the game itself.
This approach is popular with casual gamers as an introduction to your game.
Seasoned gamers prefer to immediately dive into the action. Be careful not
to explain everything in the tutorial levels. Only explain the basic controls.
Explain more advanced controls during the game as they are required, for
example by simple pop-up messages, or in a visible spot in a HUD.
It works best when the tutorials naturally integrate into the game story.
For example, the game character might start running around in his safe home
town, learning the basic movement controls. Next he/she practices fighting
together with a few friends. And after that the player goes into the woods
trying to shoot some birds with his bow. This will provide all the practice
needed for the fights later in the game.
You should really make sure that tutorial levels actually work and that the
players remember the controls, even if they put the game away for a couple
of days. Because otherwise, they may never come back to the game.
24.3.4 Music and Sounds
To finish the game, we should add sounds and music at the right spots. As you may
remember, one of the options in the options menu was changing the background
volume. We did that using the following line of code:
MediaPlayer.Volume = musicVolumeSlider.Value;
In the PenguinPairs class, we start playing the music, using the methods available in
the AssetManager class:
AssetManager.PlayMusic("Sounds/snd_music");