GameMaker's currently running a Helpful Dev Jam, which means that we're going to be seeing an influx of tutorial-related content in the next few days. This is doubtlessly going to be a lot of peoples' first exposure to both following and creating tutorials, so here are two helpful tutorials to guide you through the process!
By the end of this tutorial, you will have read the word "tutorial" so many times that it no longer will sound like a real word. I'm sorry in advance.
If you've been on the Internet for any length of time, you've no doubt seen someone make the claim "I followed [insert popular tutorial here] but it didn't work." If you have, you know exactly where this is going. If not, welcome to the Internet, have a look around, anything that brain of yours can think of can be found.
Often times, even with the best-made tutorials, following them beat-for-beat without mentally engaging with the content won't work out. If you're not vigilant, it's easy to let mistakes slip in unnoticed that cause the whole process to break. If you can avoid that, transferring the information from the tutorial to your own project without thinking critically about it will still be a challenge.
Most tutorials are presented in a setting that's a bit like a practice arena for a self-driving car, in that they're created in a mostly-empty test setting with minimal distractions or opportunities for unexpected things to go wrong. In the real world, of course, your game is going to have a ton of other things happening in parallel, perhaps with questionably-engineered systems that run lots of red lights and throw rocks at things they don't recognize. This metaphor got away from me.
Let's say you have a question. The question can be about anything at all, but let's say you need the answer and you need it now. Depending on your question, you might need a tutorial!
For this thought experiment, let's say you have some questions about making spaghetti. Let's go over some different kinds of questions, and whether or not seeking a tutorial would be something you stand to benefit from.
Can your question be answered in one word (or a few simple words)?
If your question is simple, looking up a tutorial might be overkill, or might not even be able to answer your question in a relevant way. Is spaghetti vegetarian? or What's the plural of "spaghetti?" or If you put spaghetti in a blender, would you be eating it or drinking it? are all great questions to ask, but they all can be answered in only a few words. You would likely be better off simply looking up an encyclopedia entry on spaghetti instead of a tutorial, or just banging on your next-door neighbor's window and checking if they know.
Is your question highly specific to your current situation?
In order to be able to follow a tutorial you first need the tutorial to exist, and the more specialized your question is to the predicament you find yourself in, the greater the odds that nobody will have created material addressing it yet.
Let's say you're tasked with cooking for a big family get-together and you want to make spaghetti, but your stove is broken, you're out of parmigiana cheese, and your four-year-old niece cracks up and flings spaghetti at the wall whenever she's allowed any on her plate. If you search that question in Google it's unlikely that you'll find a direct answer. In cases like these, you should probably break your question up into multiple smaller pieces before proceeding.
Your sub-questions might include:
Alternatives to boiling water over a stoveParmigiana cheese substitutesHow to restrain and feed unruly four-year-olds
Each of these sub-questions, in turn, may or may not benefit from following a tutorial of their own (see the last section).
Does your question cover a domain of information that could be sufficiently answered with a set of step-by-step instructions?
This is where tutorials excel. How to cook spaghetti with marinara sauce is a question that can be sufficiently answered with a complete set of step-by-step instructions. If you shift the focus of the question it can still work, such as How to cook a balanced meal with spaghetti or Creating spaghetti noodles from scratch.
If your question contains superlatives such as "best" or "easiest" you start to dance into the ream of opinion pieces (Best kind of cheese to put on pasta or Easiest way to open a jar of tomato sauce). If there's one thing that the Internet loves it's Top Ten lists and you'll find no shortage of blog posts eagerly explaining why they know best and everyone else's answer is wrong. Sometimes these can be interesting, but should otherwise be taken with a grain of salt.
As it happens, cookbooks are basically big ol' compendiums of analog tutorials. Algorithms are basically recipes. You will never be able to un-think this.
For those who are curious, and haven't looked it up yet, "spaghetti" is the plural. "Spaghetto" is the singular, which means "thin string" in Italian, but nobody in their right mind would ever eat just one noodle of spaghetto. If your stove is broken I might suggest heating the pot over a grill, or just ordering take-out.
You can type your request for knowledge into a search engine like Google and you'll probably find a suitable tutorial pretty easily (assuming one exists).
You might also consider looking for an index on common questions related to your query. Sometimes you can find threads on places such as the GameMaker forums or reddit or the Food Network which serve as a hub for resources on common questions centered around a theme. Be wary that, while convenient, these hubs are sometimes not regularly maintained and there's a good chance that there are other tutorials and resources available that are not listed.
By far the most important thing to remember about tutorials of all stripes is that, while they'll probably teach you how to do something, very rarely will you be able to copy and paste the instructions verbatim. Maybe you need to make twice as much spaghetti as the tutorial calls for, or maybe you don't have a pot that's the right size, or maybe Cousin Eddie hates oregano with a burning passion and you have to improvise with something else. Refer back to what I said earlier about most tutorials taking place under ideal testing conditions which you might not be able to replicate in a real-world situation.
Instead of blindly following the directions exactly, pause at each step to make sure you understand why it was done (teachers like to call this "critical thinking," and students hate it). If something doesn't make sense, backtrack a few steps to see if something was missed at an earlier point. Generally speaking, tutorial content is 100% deterministic and won't randomly fail to work if followed under the same conditions, but sometimes details can be skimmed over without notice that can cause the whole process to break.
If you're stuck, the comments can be a useful resource to see if anyone else has run into the same problem, and how they managed to fix it. (Other times, the comments are just full of memes.)
Whatever you do, don't be this guy.
You can also try leaving a comment yourself to ask the creator directly. Sometimes you'll even get an answer!
If you learned something from a tutorial but think there's still something that you're missing, don't be afraid to run through it another time or two. (If you go through it too many times and things aren't cleared up, you might have hit a dead end and need to seek information elsewhere.)
All in all, the thing that you need to take away from a tutorial more than anything else are the concepts involved. If you dot every i and cross every t that's great, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter if you cook the spaghetti for 6 minutes or 6:30 as long as it comes out cooked properly. The exact time will depend on the brand of spaghetti and the heat of your stove anyway. Generally speaking, your end goal will be to be able to take what you've learned and apply it to a broad range of situations.
There are, of course, a few exceptional cases where the difference between success and disappointment can be a tiny amount of imprecision, but unless you're trying to do something complicated like make maple syrup that will usually not be the case. Good tutorial makers will know that these kinds of thing can easily go wrong if not paid special attention, and go out of their way to mention it.
Like many things in life - riding a bicycle, artistic endeavors, exercise, murder, even calculus - the thing that you're following a tutorial for will get better with practice. You won't instantly attain mastery over a task the first time you follow a tutorial on it. Keep practicing on your own to hone your skills!
There's a persistent attitude that "those who can't do, teach" in some circles of modern educational theory. I think this is absolute bollocks and anyone who says this was probably dropped as a baby, probably multiple times. There's a (probably misattributed) Albert Einstein quote that goes something like "if you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself," which I find infinitely more palatable.
*cough* No I'm not upset about the state of contemporary educational institutions, which have been suffering for decades from not giving teachers the respect they deserve or the resources they need to help kids succeed. Whatever gave you that idea?
ANYWAY. Have you ever thought to yourself "there's this thing that I know how to do in GameMaker, I wonder if it would be nice if I could tell other people how to do it, too?" If you have, you should probably consult a doctor for a remedy to such ideas ASAP lest you spend all your time making tutorials such that you never actually have time to make a game. If that isn't a bother to you or if you actually don't want to make a game and are just looking for a convenient excuse to get out of doing so then this is the tutorial for you!
It can be on anything you want it to be! But just like your 12th grade English teacher kept nagging you about when it came to the subject of your senior paper, it helps to be specific in what you want to target. Here are some ideas for consideration to help narrow down the scope of what you want to make.
Let's imagine that I want to make a tutorial regarding making spaghetti. We can try:
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A tutorial on something simple that's a good place for people who are just getting started to try out:
Cooking Your First Meal: Spaghetti -
A tutorial on something immensely complicated that only the most dedicated of dweebs will be interested in undertaking:
Cooking Spaghetti on The International Space Station -
A tutorial on weird stuff that might be mildly interesting in an "I had no idea that was a thing" kind of way but won't be of much use to normal people:
Cooking Spaghetti, But We Boil The Water Over a GPU Playing Crysis on Ultra Settings Instead of Over a Stovetop -
A tutorial on something that's not super difficult but you think everybody should be doing and you want to get the word out about it:
Improving Your Spaghetti By Serving With a Bit of Olive Oil -
A tutorial on common error messages that people might Google when they want help solving:
Help, I forgot to open the fume hood when I was cooking spaghetti and now the smoke detector is going off!
It's a really good idea to make sure you're well-acquainted with the subject at hand before making a tutorial on it. This is both to safeguard against creating a tutorial presenting incorrect information as fact, and so that you can answer follow-up questions that people might have for you.
When creating a tutorial, it helps to have a target audience in mind. Are you creating material for complete beginners? Intermediate users who want to learn more? Nerds who want to really push the limits of what they can do?
You might expect this to correlate strongly with the last section, "choosing a topic," but it won't necessarily be. Even "easy" subjects such as "how to round a number" can get a lot more complicated than you might expect, and if you're careful you can boil complex topics down to the bare essentials to make them easy to understand for beginners.
Anyway, the tempting answer to the audience question might be "everyone," but in practice that doesn't really work very well. The target audience you have in mind will have a sizable influence on the way you present the material. If you delve into the molecular composition of pasta and how preparing it in different ways affects its consistency in a tutorial for beginners, most of them will end up having a hard time following. If you spend too much time explaining that pasta is a food source enjoyed by many people around the world and you can probably buy some in your local supermarket in a tutorial for super nerds, you run the risk of them getting bored and skipping ahead - or, worse, looking for someone else's tutorial.
Remember writing outlines for papers in high school? Turns out they're useful for more than getting free points on homework.
Even if you know the subject matter like the back of your hand - which, to be clear, you absolutely should before you try to make a tutorial on something - you still need to have a plan for how it's going to be presented. The way that you understand something as a power user is usually not the best way to introduce it to your target audience, especially if you're targeting beginners (a shocking number of people have trouble accounting for this).
You should establish early on what the goal of your tutorial is going to accomplish. Often, cooking shows on television will show you what the final product that comes out of the oven is going to look like at the beginning before they get started. This serves as an early hook to get peoples' attention, and to set their expectations appropriately.
As you lay out each instruction step-by-step, remember your target audience and try to anticipate questions that someone with that level of experience might have. If you're writing for people with experience in the kitchen you can probably get away with saying phrases such as "al dente" or "let the water simmer" and assume that people will know what you're talking about. If you're writing for beginners, you might consider taking a moment to explain those things.
As you go, feel free to move parts around if you decide they would be better suited elsewhere. I do this fairly often. Feel free to look through the commit history of this document to see where the outline was changed, parts were moved around, jokes were inserted, deleted, or recontextualized, examples were added, and things that probably made sense when I wrote the first draft at 3 in the morning were axed because I had no idea what they were supposed to mean. You'll also notice that sections were added out of order: you don't have to create the whole thing in one shot from start to finish.
Congratulations, you're about 80% finished!
Since you already have your outline, pretty much everything that's left involves putting what you've come up with into words. A solid command of the language you're writing in helps immensely. You don't have to write in English. In fact, if you don't speak English, there might be a surprisingly large market for tutorial content in your language that has yet to be filled.
It's usually a good idea to avoid sounding too formal. You can find descriptions for pretty much any algorithm on Wikipedia, but technical articles on Wikipedia have a way of sounding like they were written by someone who's been held hostage in a theoretical physics lecture hall for the last 45 years. There's a reason most people search for tutorials elsewhere.
I'm sure these people are fun at parties.
It's also usually a good idea to avoid sounding too conversational. Some people find writing that's too conversational to ruin the immersion and it may be hard to focus on if you include too many weird jokes and self-referential, which you should be well aware if you've somehow made it this far in this tutorial.
Sprinkling in images and code samples throughout your text is often recommended. This gives people a reference as to where they should be at given points in the code, and if something starts to go wrong it gives them a way to pin down where it might have happened.
Your spaghetti should look like the picture on the left.
Congratulations, you're about 20% finished!
The good news is that when you're making a video tutorial, you don't need to sprinkle in images and samples throughout because, well, that's what your entire deliverable is to begin with. The bad news is that there are like a dozen other things you need to keep on top of.
I don't want to get too far into the technical aspects of video production because many people have already written entire books about that sort of thing [citation needed], but you will need:
- A screen capture tool; these days most people like OBS
Things you don't technically need but you'll find yourself in want of pretty quickly include:
- A computer capable of recording your screen at a steady frame rate. It might be worth checking the system requirements page on whatever recording software you're using, although in the real world you'll want your specs to a bit higher than these
- A microphone, and relevant accessories such as cables or a pop filter
- Video editing software
- Adequate hard drive space
You can always usually clean up a recording in post if something doesn't work out, but if you can get a clean recording the first time it'll save you a lot of headache in editing. I recommend making a test project and rehearsing how you're going to run through it once or twice before you hit the record button, and when I say "I recommend" I mean I forget to do this like 90% of the time because I have the memory of a grasshopper so instead I get to spend like five extra hours editing at 3 AM the day before a deadline.
Once the recording is rolling, whatever form that takes, talk through whatever it is you're doing in a step-by-step way. The general shape of a video tutorial will usually be the same as a written one. If you've made adequate preparations beforehand you should be fine, but if it helps you might also want to write down an outline of how you're going to present the material as you might with a written tutorial, in addition to the things I talked about in the last paragraph.
Most people would tell you to stay on topic and not waste the viewer's time going on unrelated and ridiculous tangents, but I'm genetically incapable of not goofing off so it would probably be a bit mean-spirited to expect other people to do the same. Instead I'll say that if you're going to goof off, keep it somewhat brief and semi-related to the topic at hand. If you do this for long enough, you'll start to develop a sense of for how long you can goof off before your audience starts to get annoyed which for most people is "instantly."
Having some level of understanding of how you're going to edit the video as you record it is nice, though if you've never worked with video before you might not want to worry about it too much. The nice thing about pre-recorded video is that if you don't like how something came out the first time, or if you trip over your words, you can just gut the video andd o it over again
The nice thing about pre-recorded video is that if you don't like how it came out the first time, or if you words over your words, you cna
The nice thing about pre-recordec video is that if you don't likeow it came out the first time
Te nice thing about pte *gagging noises*
This is why I often recommend drinking water before recording and keeping some on hand at all times to people.
The nice thing about pre-recorded video is that if you don't like how something came out the first time, or if you trip over your words, you can just cut the video and do it over again. It should go without saying is that having to do this as infrequently as possible is ideal, but it's not the end of the world if you do. Try not to make the cuts too obvious, such as by having different things on screen before and after the cut or cutting the audio mid-word, since this can be distracting and cause people to focus on the edit instead of on the content.
Once you're finished, re-watch the whole thing from beginning to end, ideally after the final video has been rendered out. Sometimes mistakes slip in, which most people would rather catch before the video goes live for the whole world to see.
Because we obviously haven't gotten meta enough yet today, I made a video tutorial on this for a channel anniversary a while ago that you might like.
Look, marketing is haaaaaaaard and anyone who says they know the key to search engine optimization (SEO; if it sounds like an annoying corporate buzzword, that's because it is, albeit a useful one) is lying not only to you but also themselves. The Internet is a chaotic system that's constantly changing, and even duplicating what one person did to get their content to appear on Google searches the world over beat-for-beat will probably lead to wildly and/or disastrously and/or hilariously different results.
The weirdest about this is that it happened to this Let's Play more than once.
With that being said, there are some guidelines which might be occasionally useful.
- Be specific in your title and metadata
People need to know what your thing is about, and by "people" I mean both the individuals that fall in your target audience and the search engine that they might use to find it. Google allegedly can read at a fourth-grade level, or a fifth-grade level, or a sixth-grade level, depending on who you ask, when you ask it, and how smart the person you ask thinks your average fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-grader is. This can be a bit of help if you're creating a written tutorial or a video with full captions, and there's a nonzero chance that Google is also capable of deriving some understanding of video by now and we just haven't caught on yet, but giving it a little nudge in the right direction never hurts. It's going to be really hard to make spg tut 01 rank higher in a search than How To Cook Spaghetti.
Think about the way that someone searching for your tutorial might phrase their question (see the earlier part of this page). Give it a title that looks something like the answer to what they're looking for.
There are a few SEO-related tools out there that you might consider trying which can do things like recommend keywords and ways to structure your titles. I haven't found one that I actually like yet but I've been assured that there are some good ones out there somewhere.
- Avoid being misleading in your title and metadata
Don't try to game the system. Summarize what you're trying to do in simple terms in a way that someone who reads your description will have a pretty good idea if it'll help them at a glance. By all accounts keyword stuffing ruined meta tags for pretty much everyone by the early 2000s, and these days if you try to outsmart the algorithm by writing out the word "spaghetti" five hundred times at the bottom of a video description it'll just push you farther down in the rankings - not to mention the fact that anybody who actually reads the description is going to start asking questions.
By the same coin, don't write misleading or annoyingly clickbaity titles and descriptions. Audience retention is currently one of the bigger (if not the biggest) factors in whether or not YouTube will recommend a video to someone. Clickbait has a tendency of making people leave a page and never come back once they realize that they've been had. This benefits nobody.
There's been an ongoing debate for pretty much the entire history of printed media about whether it's a good idea to use CAPITALIZATION and EMPHASIS and MAKE BOLD CLAIMS in titles: The BEST of RAYRACED SPAGHETTI Tutorial (2022) (HD) (Also Works for CAPELLINI), and whether that kind of thing constitutes "annoyingly clickbaity" or not.
I haven't checked to see if anyone beat my world record yet.
I'm not going to tell you not to do this, but I am going to tell you that if you that if you do this and the Internet drags you over the coals for it that I will think it is very funny and you probably deserve it.
- Tell people that you made a thing
Good SEO can get you pretty far, but it's also probably a good idea to be a bit proactive in putting URLs to your thing in places where interested parties might be likely to find it.
The fact that these are guidelines and not solid rules is exemplified by the fact that, 90% of the time, uploading a video and then forgetting it exists is exactly what I do, because I'm a lazy sod and about five minutes after I post a thing I'll probably have forgotten that I made it in the first place.
- Don't tell EVERYBODY that you made a thing
Nobody likes gratuitous self-promotion. In an amusing twist of fate, while I was taking a break from writing this post I checked the reports on the GameMaker subreddit and found someone posting crossposting something they made onto every game dev-related subreddit in existence. Their thing wasn't even related to GameMaker. They had no prior activity on the GameMaker subreddit. It is no longer found on the GameMaker subreddit, and they will not be posting there again.
- If you cover a subject that already has a lot of traffic, add something of your own to make it stand out
This isn't to say that you're never allowed to cover a topic that someone else has already made a tutorial on, but breaking into saturated markets is hard and doing it as a newcomer to the tutorial space is even harder.
Imagine someone searches for "spaghetti tutorial," and the search engine retrieves four results. One of them is Shaun's and has a million views, one of them is Cosmo's and has 500,000 views, one of them is Mathy's and has 350,000 views, and one of them is yours and it has ten views, and three of them are from your mom who doesn't believe you know how to make spaghetti. Even if yours ranks just as high in the search as the other three, people in general might be less likely to click on an unknown entity that has yet to prove itself through trial by democracy.
Let's try going for an angle that nobody else has done yet.
How To Cook Spaghetti with Pesto and Fresh Garlic
Has anybody done spaghetti with pesto yet? Probably not (don't fact check me). There we go.
As per guideline #2, don't do this unless your tutorial is actually about spaghetti and pesto and garlic, or you'll find yourself with a brand-new set of problems that you could have just avoided.
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I like having sample code for people to download so that if something doesn't work they have something to compare their code against. Unfortunately, this can be a double-edged sword, since people can and will try to download and use your code without bothering to understand it, which can cause all manner of exotic problems downstream. Other creators choose not to provide a sample project, and I know of at least one person provides sample code but keeps it behind a paywall, which you might find to be an acceptable compromise.
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Goedel's incompleteness theorum tells us that there are true statements that can never be proved by our current system of mathematics. This implies that there are questions that science will never be able to answer, and one of those questions is why so many people on YouTube think "I don't like your voice" is a useful thing to say in a comment. Ban them and move on.
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Not all tutorial content is going to work for all people; the ways that people learn and absorb information is just too varied. If a tutorial maker tries to cover every possible base to account for every possible caveat and edge case, the tutorial would be a meandering mess and, paradoxically, absolutely nobody would find it even remotely useful.
Now you know how to make a tutorial! Please don't make me regret writing this.
I'm pretty sure I've been excommunicated for doing this.
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| Height | 165 cm |
| Weight | 50 kg |
| Bats | Right |
| Throws | Right |
| Dex | 149 |
| Bunnies | One |
I've spent a lot of time in the last few years making GameMaker tutorials, mostly on subjects that normal people don't care about.
I also have a Patreon.