In-Game Tutorials

More just chatting about them than anything else. I am sure we all do them differently. Do you split yours up? Give them all to the player at the same time? What do you include, basics stats or only things that are a little different for your game?

For my current project, I have it broken into 2 sections, with room for a third. I am going to do a basic tutorial which  talks about stats, saving, etc. Then I have one later in the game when the skill system becomes active.

On my current project, I'm separating them via parts. The player can skip them in case they already know how to play the game...

I personally like to have a manual in the inventory that I can consult fastly and in every moment (or a whole guide section like in FFVIII), I don't like pictures appearing suddenly during the game or huge walls of text. I want to pause the game whenever I want and read everything carefully. Random things appearing ingame can distract me too much from the dialogues\action, just a text popup in the upper right\left corner of the screen that says "the manual is updated" is perfect.

I'm with Dalph here. The problem with forced tutorials / sequence of images is twofold: first, you're risking cramming too much information into one event. Second, if it's not easily viewable later, you risk people forgetting it and being frustrated when they need the information. Some games try to solve this by having very long and thorough tutorial "chapters", to make sure the information is hammered in properly, but this runs the risk of offending players who "got it" ages ago.

Whenever I think about solving this problem, I come back to the two approaches I prefer personally:

• Depending on the game mechanics and if it's possible, naturally introduce complexity and choice gradually but without being too restrictive. An example of doing this right is Pokèmon: If you level your team slowly, you'll be introduced to complexity slowly. If you level fast, you'll get the complexity faster. It starts out truly simple but never forces those simple sections to take too long.A side note to this is to not force players to play less complex sections for extended periods of time, it's just as annoying as a long-winded tutorial.

[*]If you can't slowly introduce complexity in a way that feels natural to the game's flow and mechanics, have an in-game manual of sorts that is always accessible and easy to navigate.
For The Vendor, the first option doesn't make much sense, so I'm opting for the in-game manual / documentation solution in addition to introducing core concepts through naturally occurring dialogue.

Another option that I sometimes like in games is having an official guidebook file together with the game.

For mine, I plan t add a manual to the final product. That way people can look up the details as they wish. For a couple of major things (skill learning, etc) I have a moment where someone in the party asks if you would like them to explain how to learn skills (as it comes up in a conversation early in the game), if you say no then the game assumes you already know how. Though, I may axe that part when the manual is complete.

I put the tutorials of my game in a special room in the first town, sort of like Final Fantasy in its early games.

I'd like to weigh in a bit on this too!

I think that a problem with adding in frequent guides is that they patronize the player, particularly if they're explaining elementary concepts. Any kind of feature that you could consider a hallmark of the genre can be thrown into a help file that's distributed alongside the game. Most people don't want to be told that you stand on a shiny circle or go to an inn to save, but if you have any features that are unique to your game then it probably needs explanation in some form. 

When you have to introduce new concepts in the game, it's considered good design to reveal organically without breaking flow and immersion (don't speak, demonstrate, etc). A kind of mini-game that deviates from standard gameplay is a situation where you may have to actually pause the action briefly, but in this case it's best to allow players to either listen to the explanation or continue ahead without it.

A great deal of old games in particular did not contain any documentation in the game itself and relied completely on its players to read the manual. I still think this is one of the best methods, but if you want to really break down the fourth wall and add things like tutorial rooms, that's also fine. Just don't forget about the tone you're trying to establish for your story in the process, because it should directly affect how you communicate instructions to your players.