Practical Game Design

Start from the middle

Remember when we spoke about the vertical slice (the practice of making a high-quality snippet of the full product)? It's not a secret that they rarely include the actual start of the game. There are a few reasons behind that. For one, you obviously want to show the game with its wings fully spread. You want to try showcasing how fun and engaging the mechanics can be, rather than being constrained to the slow and steady pace of the tutorial sections, which would do the game a disservice. Also, with content and mechanics likely to change, you can expect the early tutorial (or any other on-boarding experience you have) would have to evolve multiple times over the course of development.

However, there's another more important ...