I've received some feedback regarding confusion about how the controls work in my game.
I really have no idea how I could insert a controls tutorial into my next games.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
I can't play your game right now :p, but I could probably give some tips for a controls tutorial.
1: Make your game simple. Simple games often have simple controls, and as such, will make it easy to play.
2. Force the level design to teach it. By that I mean there may be a tall cliff that can only be gotten over via double jumping, which teaches the player that "Hey, bud, you can double jump"
3. Add an in-game tutorial. By that I mean force the player to go through a tutorial in-game which has some speech bubbles saying what you can do and why you would use it. For example, Cuphead, a game I hope you would have heard about, has a tutorial like this.
That's all I can think of really.
Hope this helps somehow!
For games like this I'll usually add the controls on the pause screen.
Adding tutorials in games is more time consuming that it looks. You need to make a system that pauses at triggers (i.e. player hits one of the movement keys), then displays next tutorial text, then next trigger (i.e. player uses weapon key). For jams most people find this to be a waste of time vs improving other parts of the game.
Some people add in when the game starts a dialog box that says the controls, i.e. WASD to move, A to shoot, B to jump. I sort of did this with my game, but was more to just list out the win conditions of the game quickly.