The dreaded Dredmor tutorial

I think it's understood that the tutorials have lagged behind as the rest of the game got more and more polished, and that they'll have to be re-done at some stage when someone buys the dev team enough <insert drug of choice>, and probably when Clockwork Empires is up and running and can plot world domination on its own two (?) pseudopods. I can't find a thread about problems with the tutorials, so I'm listing issues with the tutorials here as I find them.

- In the Combat Skills tutorial, you're told about the cooldown timer on the Norwegian Axenado only after you kill the first diggle with it. This means that if you manage to use the spell unsuccessfully before killing a monster, you may end up wandering around not sure why the spell won't work a second time. This could be solved by setting the message about the spell to appear after its first use.
- Tutorial instructions are only given in pop-up windows which the player has to click "OK" on to continue, meaning that he/she can't see the instructions anymore. There should be a way of keeping track of the instructions like with quests in the main game.
- In the Combat Skills tutorial, you're given a message along the lines of "Look at those diggles over there, thirsting for your blood!" Cool, but there aren't any diggles visible on screen when this message is given.
- In the Combat Skills tutorial, after killing the first diggle you're told about the diggles in the room to the north. "You can hit Space to pass your turn and they will advance on your position" seems to imply that they'll come to you in the southern room if you do nothing, which they won't - as usual they only start to react to you once you're in the room with them.
- The Equipment Maintenance tutorial is... odd. If I drop the iron mace (that you get at the start of the tutorial) when told to leave it behind, then I pick it up again, I get the message "Excellent! Now equip the wooden sword." If I keep equipping and unequipping the axe and the starting sword, the tutorial starts thinking I'm playing with the traffic cone, which is the next item in the tutorial. The messages just assume that any item is the item I should logically be messing with next if I'm following the script.
- The Equipment Maintenance tutorial explains that "we chose swords and axes" when creating the tutorial character, but the tutorial doesn't explain why this should matter, or why it's more important than the fact that the mace has better stats than the starting sword. It sounds like it's coming from someone who already knows the game's system.
- In the Equipment Maintenance tutorial, the wooden sword you go out of your way to find is the same as the one you started the tutorial with. It would make more sense for it to be an upgrade in some way.
- The Equipment Maintenance tutorial doesn't know how to proceed if the player already has the Character menu open before being asked to open it to put the newly-acquired mace in. This can be fixed by the player closing the Character menu and opening it again, but I feel that this is an unnecessary work-around.
- In the Magic tutorial, if you somehow manage to use up your mana on the teleportation spell without reaching the other side of the moat, there's nothing other than the failed cast message at the top of the screen to explain what the problem is or what to do about it. I admit that this is an unlikely scenario.

I really hope that the more glaring problems here get fixed sometime. They rarely annoy regular players, because most people play through the tutorials only once, but they're quite capable of putting a new player off by being clunky, and these folks are less likely to report problems.

Thanks!

 

I don't know if this really counts as a 'problem' given the context of Dredmor being a roguelike, but I recall being unlucky with enemy spells and getting absolutely out-of-context destroyed in a tutorial the first time I played through them. I think it was the one involving resistances? Using non-casting enemies unless relevant might be an idea anyway.

 

I'll see if there's anything that can actually be done about these from the XML standpoint.