Learning from mistakes

I am seeking my knowledge from the amazing book The Art of Game Design: A Book of lenses by Jesse Schell, and right when I was stuck in my ideas and my lack of skills I read something that cleared my mind and helped me to get over it:

1. Prototyping Tip #2: Forger Quality - this is something that I have been always doing, I already want to make everything perfectly since the first line of code. To look very appealing right away so I spent hours and hours learning how to work with materials, textures, modeling, how to use some modifiers. Every time that I put something on my mind I tried to make it work - the problem is that more than half of them were only important to a final product and I was not focusing on my prototype, on the game itself. That consumed me a lot of time and after one week I realized that I still had nothing to work with.
2. Prototyping Tip #3: Don't Get Attached - That is very complicated when you have to develop a project and at the same time learn the technology that you are using, I wanted to make a lot of different things but I kept finding barriers and barriers to climb, seeking tutorials, watching videos and reading forums. That took me a lot of time that I could have been productive in another way, instead of trying to make all the ideas from my first brainstorm with friend become reality. I definitely believe that not getting attached to your ideas is a hard work, sometimes you truly believe that they are the best and that is going to work perfectly, they are a total success, but that is not how it works and I learned it on the hard way, hitting the same thing over and over again for the past few days without going anywhere.

Without giving any signal to Prof. Dr. Gordon Erlebacher, I had to give up all the utopian ideas (I will not be able to do them by myself on time) and focus on what matters, doing step by step and not rushing to build an amazing skyscraper without learning the basics to build an ordinary house. So this week I decided to give fully attention on my Directed Individual Study and I could come up with what I think it is a nice prototype and it allows me to design a new track (scene) in no more than 2 hours.

Tutorial: Training the players

The reason to have a Tutorial Area is to train players that have never played the game before so they can understand the input buttons, how to control the ball and the goal of the game.

This map is intended to be very intuitive and simple, a message will be shown before the user starts to control the ball explaining how to do it and what is his goal at that point.

The Tutorial Area's map -

1. Straight line;
2. Curve to the left;
3. Curve to the right;
4. Curve to the left and then right: 'S';
5. Ramp on straight line;
6. Curve after a ramp on straight line;
7. Curved ramp to the left;
8. Curved ramp to the right;
9. A whole map including everything above.

Before the final version, the testers will try two different versions of the area, one with walls to help the ball not falling down, another one without it.