Shipping a game without any onboarding. The first feature cut and the one that most directly hurts ratings.

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What It Looks Like

Hour 44. The game works. The team is exhausted. Someone looks at the tutorial they planned and says there is no time, players will figure it out. The tutorial gets cut. The game ships.

Players open it cold. They do not know the controls, the win condition or what the feedback means. They play for two minutes, feel confused and rate the game as unpolished or unfinished. The game that took 44 hours to build gets rated on the first two minutes of confusion.

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One Room Factory

One Room Factory (LD36) shipped without a tutorial and received worse ratings than the underlying game deserved. [1] Players could not access what was there because there was nothing to explain it to them.

This is the pattern. Teams cut the tutorial because it feels optional. Players rate the game as if it was not.

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Why It Always Gets Cut

Tutorial is almost never in the Must Have list. Teams assume players will figure it out and it is one of the last things added, so it is one of the first things dropped when time runs short.

Most cuts hurt the developer by removing features the player would not have seen anyway. Tutorial cuts hurt the player experience directly. It is the first thing a new player encounters. Kaitila makes the point more bluntly: if players cannot see what the game has to offer in the first 30 seconds, most will quit and try something else. [2]

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Minimum Viable Tutorial

A tutorial does not have to be elaborate. At 48-hour scale:

• One screen of text explaining controls and objective
• A single introductory section with forgiving margins
• On-screen prompts on first action

One screen of text takes 30 minutes. It changes how every player experiences the game.

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Fix

BP #3 — MoSCoW: put a minimal tutorial in the Must Have category at hour 6. If it is in Must Have it does not get cut at hour 44.