Okay, boys and girls, listen up. There have lately been a lot of very poorly-written and/or uninformative tutorials in this forum. I'm going to go ahead and lay the blame on us for not having a sticky with some clear guidelines. I'm giving you guys the benefit of the doubt here, so please don't go and post shitty tutorials after I've made this topic. Really. You'd only be making yourselves look bad.
A good tutorial has at least these three things going for it:
To further help you guys out, here are some examples of good tutorials (as in well-written and clear) that you might want to take a look at:
The following are some examples of BAD tutorials that you want to avoid.
Good luck. And hopefully we won't have to see any more shitty tutorials after this thread. I look forward to seeing you all post good ones and making the best out of this forum.
A good tutorial has at least these three things going for it:
- It explains the why, the how and the what.
Instead of just listing a bunch of steps, a good tutorial will explain why things work the way they do. Typically each step comes with a short paragraph of information, rather than a simple "now do this". It is in this way that the reader will actually learn something from your tutorial, rather than simply copying what you've done.
- It is well-written grammatically, and makes use of good formatting.
This one should be obvious, at least the well-written part. But I've also seen far too many tutorials with horrible formatting -- blocks of text, long lines of text, etc. The forum has bbcode, so make use of it. Bold tags, size tags, and list tags are all good ideas to keep your topic clear and organized (look at this very topic for example).
- It has images to illustrate the points that it is making.
This isn't as important as the first two. It is entirely possible to make a good tutorial without the use of images, but it depends on the content of the tutorial. If your tutorial could be made clearer with images, then use them. This includes screenshots of the editor during the process as well as screenshots or even demos of the finished product.
To further help you guys out, here are some examples of good tutorials (as in well-written and clear) that you might want to take a look at:
- How to use RGSS2 with RPG Maker XP
- RMVX Panoramic Map Tutorial
- Basic Woods Mapping
- Corporate Thinking
- How to Make Looping OGGs
The following are some examples of BAD tutorials that you want to avoid.
Good luck. And hopefully we won't have to see any more shitty tutorials after this thread. I look forward to seeing you all post good ones and making the best out of this forum.