2026-09-25 · design-roundup
"DO NOT Add Any Tutorial, No Matter How Tempting" — The Nauticrawl Developer on Turning Puzzles into a Piloting Manual
One piece today: a 2019 Game Developer deep dive by Andrea Interguglielmi, the developer of Nauticrawl. Its escape-room puzzles are secretly a tutorial for piloting a mysterious machine; once you can fly it, you discover you're playing a turn-based dungeon crawler. We follow a design that uses its genre layers as the curriculum and refuses to add a tutorial — and the iteration headaches that choice cost.
