Playing to Learn: Designing Diegetic Onboarding for Creative Software

Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) often offer rich yet complex features, making onboarding overwhelming for novice learners. While prior research has explored interactive tutorials to ease the learning curve, less work has examined gameful approaches such as diegetic tutorials to support early engagement. To address this gap, we examine the use of diegetic onboarding, using a novel multimodal game-based prototype for Unreal Engine as our case study. Our prototype uses Unreal Engine to apply diegetic onboarding, introducing key software features such as manipulating visuals and sound, and navigating interactions. A mixed-methods preliminary evaluation evaluated the system by gathering feedback from seven experts, including three professional game developers and four educators, to collect useful insights on the onboarding experience `by proxy' to assess the tools' readiness for use with novice learners. Our findings suggest that diegetic onboarding can provide a more immersive and engaging entry point for learning, while illustrating key design tensions around clarity, pacing, and the transfer of knowledge from play to tool use. From these preliminary insights, we suggest design implications combining both usability and instructional design strategies for developing more approachable and inclusive creative software onboarding experiences.