Games such as "Go" and "Tetris" prove that a game idea can be successful with relatively few rules. On the other end of the spectrum, some games get bogged down in an avalanche of rules that hinder adoption and eventually kill gameplay. Do you want to read a 50-page booklet and watch an hour-long training video before you can survive even a day in this brave new world? Nah, you want to jump right in and explore!

If your game mechanics need a lot of explanation, try to smooth a steep learning curve by providing players with an interactive in-game tutorial. Optimally, the in-game tutorial is a simplified version of playing the game itself. Design levels so that they expose players slowly to new examples of the game mechanics, one rule after the other. Point out each pattern and give them opportunity to recognize it in context. When they understand the basics, expose them to combinations of patterns. In doing so, you teach the rules implicitly and players can get started right away—which lessens the need for long, explicit handbooks.

For example, the first four dungeons introduce the player to the four different elements of your fantasy world. While traveling through Snowingham, Volcania, Snakepit, and Teslaville, the player is introduced to ice, fire, poison, and lightning. In each dungeon, the player learns how to identify, attack, and defend with one of the elements. Thus prepared, the player ventures on to medium levels. Here he encounters enemies who are immune to more than one element, or who can use combinations of elemental attacks. Since the player is already trained to identify individual elements, he now merely needs to combine what he has learned.

In-game tutorials can take on a variety of forms. Sometimes they come in the guise of an easier, preliminary level that can be skipped or fast-forwarded by experienced players. Many games offer in-game help as tooltips, or arrows that point lost beginners in the right direction. Other games repeat hints over several levels, as it is nicely done in the increasingly more difficult puzzle combinations of the Portal series.