For Rain World, the whole narrative kicks off because you're a slugcat who's lost his family, right? Not sure how feasible it would be, but could you make that a tutorial? A "monkey see, monkey do" kind of thing? Traveling with an older/slugcat partner going through a linear area, the other slugcat performing moves and such, thus demonstrating to the player what to do?
Ideally, yes! This was my first suggestion waaaay back when we were starting the tutorial stuff, but apparently Rain World's character movement and AI are done in a manner thats completely opposite to "sockpuppeting": the movement AI is completely tied to pathfinding and a million other systems, so we can't just plop in another slugcat and ask it to act without rebuilding a bunch of super low level systems. Very annoying, but also not atypical for "Rain World problems." With our tools and engine it's easy to do weird Rain Worldy stuff, and hard to do normal basic gamey stuff.
So! As you may have surmised from earlier posts, we're using a friendly Overseer, who we call "Iggy", to fill in that role and show the player the ropes, and that aspect is working out really well.
In my experience as a player the best alternative to text is animation of the button(s) being pressed. If you combine it with animated holograms you seem to already have, you'll end up with demonstration of input needed to perform an action, which is an equvalent of "press X to jump" thing. It will also be more useful than text for combinations of keys and for actions where timing is important, such as backflips: it's harder to understand "move in one direction, then change the direction of your movement and jump" in text than in visual form. Basically show how the hologram does what it does, not just what.
Yep, totally! Iggy projects context-appropriate gamepad and button-presses if the player isnt able to quickly progress through certain level puzzles, plus offers hints, etc. I think my "press X to jump" example was misleading, as that basic stuff is going relatively well, its more teaching the player to understand the relationships between the various game mechanics: hunting food, eating food, finding shelter, the map system, the rain cycle countdown, and of course... the weird and confusing "karma system" which will probably never make sense to anyone but us.
Right now we have it so that Iggy takes the player through a cycle, shows them the controls, some slugcat moves, shows them some foods sources, shows them to a shelter, and players are totally fine completing that no problem. But without being told explicitly "you need X food to survive" and "the rain is coming, which will kill you, so you need to find a shelter" they don't really see how those puzzle pieces connect.
So! I think we'll try adding just that and try how that goes, fingers crossed. Thanks for the suggestions and links!
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But hopefully to the outside observer it looked natural enough.