Tsumiki Design Roundup — 2026-09-30

Introduction

Today's Tsumiki roundup covers one piece. It dates from 2019, but it answers a perennial designer's question: how do you teach a game without explaining it?

“Make the puzzle a user interface to another game” — the Nauticrawl developer on teaching without a tutorial

This is a Game Developer “Game Design Deep Dive” written by Andrea Interguglielmi, the solo developer of Nauticrawl (13 Nov 2019, English, first-person developer post). Original ↗

The premise is simple: you are attempting a desperate escape, and stealing a mysterious machine is your only way out.

The game opens with escape-room puzzles. Solving the first one activates the machine, and there is no pause, cutscene or high-score result to signal that you have moved on to puzzle two.

Those puzzles double as teaching. In his words: "The puzzles are effectively working as a tutorial to teach how to pilot the machine, which as it turns out, is part of the real core loop of the game."

The experience then layers escape room, cockpit simulation, dungeon crawling and roguelike. Each layer constrains the others, so the game resists a single genre label.

His recipe has four steps: (1) start with a simple premise that justifies going in blindfolded; (2) throw the player in front of a mysterious puzzle; (3) make the puzzle an actual user interface to another core gameplay loop that is yet to be revealed; (4) slowly unravel that loop, factoring in what the player learned in the puzzle stage.

He adds: "DO NOT add any tutorial, no matter how tempting. It'd ruin the taste." The stated aim is to evoke genuine mystery and wonder.

What follows is Tsumiki's reading: the trick is not to remove teaching but to hide it inside play. When the puzzle is both practice and the real thing, no explanation is needed.

Why it matters: where to put the tutorial is among the most debated questions in puzzle design. As an experimental solo-developer example it still repays reading, and it invites makers to re-examine the first ten minutes of their own game.

We have covered the game here as well (Nauticrawl review ↗).

Today's line

"DO NOT add any tutorial, no matter how tempting. It'd ruin the taste."

— Andrea Interguglielmi, Game Developer, “Game Design Deep Dive: Crafting mystery through gameplay in Nauticrawl.” The more eager a designer is to explain, the more this line stings.

Sources

Articles covered today:

・Game Design Deep Dive: Crafting mystery through gameplay in Nauticrawl (Andrea Interguglielmi, Game Developer, 13 Nov 2019)

Closing

Solving is not my strength, but I can imagine both the unease of starting without instructions and the joy of realizing your hands already know the controls. See you tomorrow.