I thought the tutorial was fine. Then I watched someone play it.

The first tutorial TwinThrust ever had told you that you have two engines, that the left and right sides of the screen fire them, and that you should go and land on the pad. I built it, I played it, and I was completely satisfied that it was enough. It was not even close.

The version I was happy with

It was one open pad, a couple of lines of text on screen, and a rocket you could fly the instant the level loaded. Use the left engine, use the right engine, go and land. Job done.

It made complete sense to me. I had spent months in this game. I knew that a short tap on one side tips you, that holding both sends you up fast, that the whole skill is in small corrections. Reading my own tutorial, every line landed, because I already knew what it was describing.

That is the trap, and I walked straight into it.

Then I sat someone in front of it

Watching a person who had never seen the game play that tutorial was uncomfortable in a very specific way. They were not reading anything. They were staring at the rocket, because the rocket was the moving thing and the only thing they actually wanted to touch. The instructions were on screen the whole time and might as well not have been there.

And then they flew off. Not into a wall, which would at least have been a lesson. Straight up and out into empty sky, holding both sides of the screen down, gone, with the pad somewhere far below and no idea that any of this was going wrong.

My first instinct, which I am not proud of, was that they had not read it properly.

If nobody reads your instructions, you did not write bad readers. You wrote bad instructions.

They had done exactly what any normal person does with a new game: pressed the thing and watched what happened. The tutorial had asked them to read and fly at the same time, and given a choice between those two, everybody on earth picks flying. That was my fault. I had never translated the game out of my own head and into something a stranger could pick up.

What changed

It took several goes, each one prompted by watching somebody else struggle with the last one. The rule that came out of it is the one thing I would carry to any other game:

Text and control are never live at the same time.

Anything you actually have to read now happens on a card. The rocket is held still, the world dims, one short line sits on screen, and the button to continue does not appear for about a second, so a reflexive tap cannot skip a line you never saw. Everything else is a task, with control handed back and at most one short line kept up out of the way.

The tutorial is now seventeen steps that alternate between those two states, and every lesson gets a room built for it that can only be used one way: a tall shaft to climb, a sealed box to crash in, two long low rooms with a lit marker at the far end, an open yard with a pad. The cards move the rocket between rooms, which means a teleport only ever happens while you are reading, and control always comes back exactly where the next lesson needs it.

A few other things fell out of watching people, and all of them are obvious in hindsight:

• You cannot die until the game has taught you death. The first presses, the free flying and the first climb are all invulnerable, so a beginner cannot fail out of the opening minute. Then the game asks you to crash into a wall on purpose, and from that point crashes are real.
• There is a stretch with no goal at all. Twelve seconds of just flying, no pad, no timer, no instruction. People need to mess about with a new toy before they will accept a task with it. The pad is hidden outright during this, because a pad sitting there that you are not meant to use is just confusing.
• The game coaches while you fly, and the advice stays up. Everyone pins both engines and rockets skyward, so after a few seconds of that the line changes to say small taps beat holding the screen down. The first version of this cleared the advice as soon as you stopped holding, which meant it vanished at the exact moment you had reacted to it. In other words it disappeared while you were reading it.
• Nothing ever starts you hovering. Every room hands control back with the rocket sitting on a lit stand, legs down. Taking off is a choice you make, not a situation you inherit.
• A bad landing gets coached, not just reset. Muff the first touchdown and a card interrupts to say come down straight and slowly, then puts you back in the same task. There is one more that I like more than all of them. The very first instruction asks you to fire the left engine, and deliberately highlights nothing, because highlighting a side would be telling you the answer to the question being asked. Whichever half of the screen you reach for becomes your control mapping for the whole game. If you instinctively pressed the right side for the left engine, then that is how the game works for you from then on. The tutorial is not just teaching the controls, it is asking which controls you meant.

The whole lesson in one line

What I find easy, because I built it, tells me nothing about what anybody else will find easy. The only way I have found to close that gap is to sit next to somebody who has never seen the game, hand them the phone, and say nothing at all while they play.

Saying nothing is the hard part. Every instinct is to lean over and explain. But the moment you explain, you have patched the player instead of the game, and the next thousand people who download it will not have you sitting next to them.