Hey everyone! You saw the title so you know it's me, Jorden. I'm here with another quick update on how those tutorials are coming along. The good news is, we're almost done with the first draft! The bad news is, the word "draft". To explain more, we're pushing to try and get the tutorials completely finished as soon as possible so that we can show off the game publicly more. To that end, I've very nearly completed writing the city building tutorial. What has slowed me down in the past has been the lack of certain mechanics which are necessary to the basic game and therefore need to be taught in the tutorial, but which weren't actually in the game yet. Most of these mechanics are now a part of the game and those that aren't have been fully defined such that I can write them as though they are in the game. So I expect to have the city building tutorial, the second of our main tutorials, completely written by the end of this week at the latest and by the end of today at the abolute earliest. Once that's done Matt needs to code it into the game and squash any bugs that arise (I've often joked that everything I do is fanfiction until Matt actually brings it to life). I will probably be playtesting the tutorial the whole time that he does that. Then it should be playtested by the rest of the team and any of our friends outside the project that we can blackmail into helping out.

Our primary slowdown at that stage is best described as a lack of infrastructure. I've mentioned before that my job also (mostly) entails writing scenarios and events for the player to encounter over the course of the game. The tutorial is basically just our earliest scenario which is focused on teaching the player the game while also establishing our basic narrative. Right now we're also trying to develop some tools that can allow our scenario creators to work together more efficiently as opposed to the current system where, frankly, Matt does almost all of the hard/tedious work. We're still a new team working with a custom engine so infrastructure has to be designed as we think of it rather than being in place in advance.

When the tutorial is fully written and coded it will have to be edited based on the feedback we get from playtesting. Additionally I need to go back to the flight tutorial (our first tutorial) and make adjustments based on mechanics that have been added in since it was created as well as things I didn't understand when I was first starting with the project. The flight tutorial will need playtesting and feedback-based adjustments as well. Then the tutorials will be truly complete.

Unfortunately, this is why I say we're only nearly done with the first draft. All that being said, I sincerely expect that the draft of the city build tutorial will be completed very soon and once that's done editing is much easier to accomplish. Then we're hoping to present our build with completed tutorials (which we're thinking about labeling as "Prologue") to interested parties who can play our build and review it and tell us and their followers what they think. It looks like a lot of work when I lay it out like this, and it is, but we've got a lot of skilled people working together on it. Keep your eyes peeled, public demonstrations of Rank: Warmaster are closer than you think.