What FGC Tutorial Content Is Lacking
It’s easier to learn fighting games now than it ever has been. But we can do better.
Stop me if this has ever happened to you before. You’re learning a new fighting game. Maybe you’ve already been playing for a while and you’re ready to hit the books, or maybe you’re completely fresh and you want to find a starting point. The in-game resources run the gamut from awful to excellent- maybe there’s absolutely no basic tutorial, or maybe it’s just missing some features like frame data. You pull up the Dustloop for your character, but it’s clearly a little less updated than some other pages. Some of the important stuff like basic gameplan and combo info is out of date, missing, or even completely empty. You explore the wiki’s forums for a deeper dive, but the threads, much like this cliché, are deader than a doornail. No one’s posted anything relevant since the game came out. “That’s fine,” you say to yourself. “I’ll just look up some YouTube videos.” You type in your character’s name, but the videos that come up are either for an older version or a completely different game, or the combo guides don’t have the moves and notations clearly labeled. Frustrated, you tear through Reddit and the Twitter hashtags. Maybe there’s a Discord server or something where you can talk to people directly. You get the invite link, and you wait for a bot moderator that manually assigns you the right role, just so you can wade through all the hentai of your character and view whatever specific channel has the secret pinned guide, that ends up being an unedited hour and a half long Twitch highlight that is apparently mandatory viewing in order to get good.
This shit sucks.
Obviously, fighting games as a genre must get better at providing in-game tutorial content themselves. (Most modern titles are getting there, but it’s still clearly annoying that indie games like Them’s Fightin’ Herds have full tutorials and things like hitbox and frame data viewer from the jump when games like Tekken 7 make you pay extra for that stuff.) But tutorial content will always be important even if the genre’s quality of life features improve. Players will always be delving into metagame concepts, optimizing their combo routes, or trying to understand how the games themselves work. This also means it’s important for the tutorial content to be relevant, easy to understand, and easy to access. If your video guides are no longer accurate past a certain version update or patch, they will not be useful. Likewise, if these same guides have no script or have little to no editing, they will be difficult to digest. Locking these important resources behind Twitter (where not everyone is organizing their discoveries properly) or Discord (where there may often be multiple servers with wildly different catalogues or entry requirements) also makes them hard to view. Fortunately, we have a few solutions to these problems that already exist.
Written tutorials and wikis
For real, I cannot stress this enough: Any time you spend writing up long paragraphs of information in a Discord-exclusive Google Doc or pinned chat message could have been spent updating your game’s wiki. Between Dustloop, Shoryuken, and Mizuumi, there is certainly a wiki or board for your game that is probably only half-updated and maintained by a handful of thankless volunteers. Wikis are free pages that anyone can access and edit, meaning that anyone can contribute discoveries or correct information on those sites. Furthermore, these same wikis are always looking for more volunteers and contributors, especially as they consolidate information from old forums or change webhosts. For instance, you can find information about how to contribute to SRK here. Even if you have valuable information collected in your Discord or private documents, you should consider transferring it to your game’s wiki page- and in the unlikely event that your game doesn’t have a wiki at all, rally your community and try to make one.
Beyond being readily accessible, written guides have a few more advantages over video content for other reasons. (I promise I’m not just shilling them because of my questionable major and career choice. Relax.) The fact that online written pages can be edited on the fly means that they can always stay current, even if new tech is discovered or if a subsequent version changes something drastically. Video content becomes out of date almost as soon as it is uploaded and cannot be seamlessly edited once posted. It also takes much longer for video content to be produced than it does to write a wiki page or an article. Unless you’re making the site for yourself, you can even rely on the formatting tools that wikis provide rather than meticulously editing together everything in a way that looks good. If you obey the wiki style guide and are providing generally correct information, your job is basically done.
That said, if you’re willing to go the extra mile, you can still produce good written content outside of the wiki format, so long as it’s easy for people to read and access. Again, the main problem with Google Docs and Discord guides are that you may often not have permission to view either or that they are difficult to hunt for. Infilament’s Killer Instinct guide at ki.infil.net is probably one of the best written guides for a fighting game that I’ve ever read outside of a few select game wikis and was a major inspiration for my own Pokkén Trainer’s School. Particularly talented writers and webmasters can collaborate with other content creators, like Infil and several others have, to put together highly informative articles with visual aides and GIFs or short video supplements. For Trainer’s School, I learned every character on my own and poured through every Pokkén Discord for relevant information, and then recorded the video clips myself.
Scripted, well edited video content
Obviously, video content is still useful for its own reasons. Being able to learn information with visual and audio aids is important and useful for people whose eyes glaze over when handed a wall of text. However, the skill and time required to put together good video content is much higher than what it would take to write up even a short guide. As a result, a lot of video tutorials arrive at common pitfalls. They may start with a general goal in mind but be unscripted, so they may meander frequently, and the narration may be difficult to parse. They may also be completely unedited, making it difficult to sift through information to find the relevant moments, especially if the video is longer than twenty minutes or so. Finally, important information may be missing entirely, such as a description of the shorthand terminology used or numpad notation captions.
Making a script for your video content will go a long way towards making your longform informative material better. A script will help you organize your thoughts in order of importance. If you’re making a full character guide, for instance, you can open with a brief gameplan primer, dive into what tools they have that make them effective, highlight some strengths and weaknesses, wrap up with some combos, and then summarize. (This is exactly what I did for my written Trainer’s School guides, in fact.) Reading your script or narration and overlaying that as a separate audio track will also set your narration’s cadence and greatly reduce the amount of mumbling or verbal tics in your speech, making it easy to understand. If you’re posting footage from a longer highlight, be sure to edit out any irrelevant moments such as menus or resetting training mode features.
Also, please include in-game training mode features such as input notation and virtual stick and include the numpad notation for your combos! I cannot stress this enough. These tools may be distracting for you when enabled, but they help people watching your training mode practice decipher what your inputs are and how you’re executing them. (And personally, I cannot fathom why anybody wouldn’t leave them on anyway, since they don’t obscure the screen most of the time.) Players new to a game cannot always decipher at a glance what moves or actions are being performed, which is why those features exist in the first place. Adding the numpad notation for combos, preferably as text overlay on the video, will also help players understand your sequence, or even let them replicate it by pulling up your video, pausing it, and entering training mode themselves. Don’t forget to add what version of the game the footage was recorded on as well. In short, anything you can add to the screen to make information easier to parse for viewers will only make your video content better.
Organize information by skill level
Regardless of the medium you’re creating resources for, it’s important to recognize that not everyone who’ll be reading your guides will be a beginner, or an intermediate, or an expert player. The scope of your tutorial content will have to be adjusted on a case-by-case basis for different skill levels, and this may often require you to make multiple guides. Think of it like you’re writing a math textbook: the foundational algebra must be discussed and understood before your students can understand proofs and advanced calculus. In the same way, if you’re creating tutorial content in a long series, it’s important to prime your readers and/or viewers with the fundamentals of a specific topic before inundating them with tech that may be abstract or difficult to execute. Players who already understand the ‘algebra’ can then just skip ahead to later chapters without having to sit through the earlier stuff.
We can even refer to the Dustloop wiki’s formatting as an example of how to move from simple to advanced information. The first entry of any character’s Dustloop page is a summary of their gameplan along with a breakdown of each move, with things like combos, strategy, and matchups tucked away on subsequent entries. Depending on the length of your guide and how much you want to cover, you don’t have to go over the entire possibility space when creating your tutorial content. Beginner players only need to know a handful of things: their character’s function, what their buttons do, and maybe a handful of easy BnBs. When making content for players who’ve been playing for a while and want to learn more beyond what they’ve already discovered themselves, you can go into things like okizeme, situational tools, or longer, optimized combos. Advanced content beyond that scope can include things like specific character matchups, in-depth breakdowns that might focus only on a single tool in a kit, or even an investigation of esoteric engine mechanics.
Organizing your scope like this when making a tutorial series also makes it easier for you to make your content without getting overwhelmed by everything you feel like you must cover. It’s important to remember- and easy to forget- that everything you know about a game now was learned over time, not all at once. Starting your tutorial content with the earlier, easier stuff will keep you at a steady pace while also making everything easier to digest for new players. This lets you prepare content at a rate where your viewers can prepare for it thoroughly.
Conclusion
Hopefully, my tutorial about tutorials was helpful. The main points that I want to drive home are to remember the value of written FGC content, especially for guides and tutorials. It’s easier to reference a wiki or a well-known written source, compared to poorly sorted tweets or hard-to-find Discords, and it’s also easier to maintain and update. Barring that, video content is a useful and popular alternative, so long as you avoid common mistakes and recognize that your information may become outdated when covering a game that still has an update cycle. Also remember that players of varying skills will require different things from the same set of guides, and breaking your series into chunks scaled across those skill levels will help you pace yourself. Good tutorial content will elaborate on information that even games with useful in-game training features don’t explore.
