Hey everyone! It's Jorden! I should see if I can change my screen names so that these blogs will just say "Jorden" for who posted them. Or at least upload a picture of my face for the profile. Something to think about.

As you read from the title, I've completed the first draft of Tutorial 2. What this means more specifically is that I have a completed script which I've fully reviewed once and then sent a copy to Chris, our sound designer and the voice of Ares, who has been kind enough to agree to review the tutorial scripts further as I complete them. When Tutorial 1 reached this stage I sent the copy to Chris at the same time that I started working on implementing it in Articy. I'm not going to do the implementation for Tutorial 2 just yet because Art is still working hard on the Articy import and it's possible that some elements of the default standard will change as he works, which would have to be redone for any other Articy projects (a document in Articy is called a "project") and that's too much extra work. So I'm holding off on implementing until we have more details locked down. When that's done I will implement the tutorial, then Art and/or Matt will hook it up to the game and playtest it at least a little while they do. They'll have critique on things that came up while they worked on it and I'll combine their notes with Chris's notes when it comes time to do final review for all the tutorials. In the meantime, I've started work on Tutorial 3, the final tutorial for the Early Access version of the game. Other minor tutorials may be written post Early Access to cover more advanced topics, such as the Ship Builder, but these three tutorials will be the main tutorials for the game and will be listed as Prologue 1, 2, and 3 when the player is choosing a scenario to play.

These tutorials are labeled as "Prologue" for a couple reasons. The first is just to make them seem as important as they are because we want people to not skip the training and learn to actually play our game. I'm hoping to eventually write some tips that can show up while the player is playing for the first time but our game is very difficult to "learn by playing" as it where and we want players to have a good experience. The second reason is that we establish the basics of Rank: Warmaster's narrative in those tutorials so they do actually function as prologues. Rank: Warmaster is not what many would classify as a "story-driven game" and the focus is definitely centered more on active gameplay. We want to limit (or avoid entirely) cutscenes or long-running, expository dialogue as much as possible. The hope is that after playing the prologues the player will always be able to start up a game and know who they are, why they are here, and what they want so they can focus on the game in front of them. The narrative outside of the prologues is intended to be delivered in small chunks through scenarios the player experiences along the way.

All of this is to say, the tutorials do a lot of work to prepare the player for all aspects of the game, both mechanical and narrative. I'm excited to see people's reactions to all the work I've been doing. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to it.