Brian Reynolds是在即时战略游戏设计方面颇有经验的游戏老兵，他的作品Civilization和Alpha Centauri都相当让人惊叹，现在他将引领我们走进他新晋的社交游戏作品FrontierVille，全面解析他的传统游戏开发经验是如何协助FrontierVille吸引用户，走向成功的。

Brian-Reynolds

在facebook带给互联网更好的社区交互的时候，zynga为用户带来了更加闲趣的互动游戏，从FarmVille、Texas HoldEm Poker、 Mafia Wars Game到Café World都吸引了数以千万计的用户日以继夜地奋斗在虚拟的游戏交互当中。

zynga的吉祥物是一只美国斗牛犬，现在几乎已经成为了公司理念和价值输出的标志。对于mark pincus来讲，他们最期望的就是将zynga的小狗标志发展成为社交游戏领域类似google在搜索引擎界的强势地位。

而FrontierVille是zynga今年推出的力作之一，由位于巴尔的摩的Zynga East办公室全力打造，引领用户回到美国西部狂野的牛仔时代，拓荒和创建用户自己的领域。对于
FrontierVille的主创者Brian Reynolds来讲他的工作就是将FrontierVille打造为zynga新一代的社交游戏榜样。而mark pincus也不止一次宣称FrontierVille是他们至今为止最好的一款社交游戏。

当然西部狂野的主题由Meteor Games公司率先在社交游戏领域引入使用，他们推出的作品是Ranch Town，但是事实上Ranch Town并没有取得任何的用户声誉，和FrontierVille相比它更可能是一个不成功的先驱。

Brian Reynolds是即时战略游戏方面相当有经验的行家，曾经出任马里兰Big Huge Games公司的首席执行官，其开发的Civilization和Alpha Centauri都有为数众多的用户和粉丝。因此当2009年Brian Reynolds决定加盟zynga的时候业内多数人并不能理解他为什么会去加入看起来不是很有游戏正统的社交游戏公司。

事情在转机在一年前Big Huge Games被出售之后，Brian Reynolds突然觉得他其实有机会去做任何他想要做的事情。而他在Alpha Centauri的工作伙伴向他推荐了zynga，他自然而然地和mark pincus有了会面的机会，有了一起工作的开始。

他在zynga的第一个工作就是全面开拓FrontierVille新游戏，基于Brian Reynolds对社交游戏诸如mafia wars之类的理解和他在传统游戏领域积累的经验，并最终构成了FrontierVille游戏的一些基本进程和理念，向用户还原了一个备受推崇的历史年代，让用户像当年的拓荒者一样去开拓自己的领地和探索一个全新的世界。我觉得FrontierVille的成功和他的题材与美国用户的熟悉度休戚相关起到了相当大的推动作用。在这个基础上添加了更多互动娱乐元素，比如配对结婚、建造茅屋、砍杀大蛇等等。

对于Brian Reynolds来讲这样的游戏除了要吸引年轻的男性用户去拓荒，一些老人、小孩、叔叔、阿姨、三姑六婆等等也是必要的用户。事实上，他们的市场调研显示边疆拓荒生活对于绝大部分的社交游戏玩家来讲都有相似的吸引力。

Brian Reynolds认为在这个游戏中男性玩家会很热衷于西部牛仔的相关事情而女性玩家则会在建造茅屋和饲养小动物身上花费更多的时间和心血。

FrontierVille涉及的意象和内容很快就超越了人们所习惯的西部牛仔电影英雄Clint Eastwood和Laura Ingalls Wilder所带给用户的那些感受和体验。

Brian Reynolds本身对西部狂野时代的热爱深深地影响了FrontierVille场景和环节设计，让用户很真切地有回到历史的那种感觉。

在这个人类文明暂时没有涉足的领域，每一个玩家都能领略那种原始的创造力，可以有自己的土地、牲畜、家庭、社区，营造了一个相当繁忙的生活环境。

Brian Reynolds认为节奏是他们在游戏设计初始就相当重视的一个环节，你不能让用户在游戏的过程中觉得懈怠，同时还不能觉得在重复做一些无聊的事，对他来讲这个就是一个任务，而完成这个任务有相当重要的意义。比如你砍了一棵树，这棵树对你来讲就有意义了，比如可以搭盖茅屋，比如可以用来生火等等。

另外野生的环境也让游戏变得充满变数和趣味。比如说蛇喜欢藏在石头底下或者母牛的骨骸里面，找到它对于玩家来讲就是一种惊喜。

Brian Reynolds说的一个游戏设计理念是将用户的真实生活体验带进游戏环节中，这对他们来讲无疑是有趣的。

社交游戏的时间很短暂，三年前根本没有人知道社交游戏是什么，两年前它慢慢摸索出了一些模式，而现在它已经可以全面地面向用户做更好的游戏了。对于zynga游戏来讲，它的成功除了疯狂的病毒式传播以外，充满闲趣的游戏进程和用户之间的互动也是相当关键的。

而用户间的交互也是FrontierVille的重要性能，在开始游戏前，你可以呼叫你的朋友一起进行或者你也可以对他进行一些小小的恶作剧。另外FrontierVille很重要的一点功能是推动玩家之间的互助行为，比如帮助其他人枯萎的庄稼浇水，帮助其他人获得木柴等等，这些行为都会被游戏进程所记录，用意在于提升玩家在真实生活当中的友谊。（我们这边农场游戏好像偷菜才是最大乐趣吧）

当然朋友之间的竞争也是很有趣的事情，在同样的资源环境下，过了一段时间每个人的游戏世界就完全改观了。

社交游戏的社会声誉不仅仅传统游戏开发者存在误解，就连时代杂志也对社交游戏颇有意见，time在评选50大最糟糕的科技发明时，farmville就入选了，被称为是无聊的上瘾游戏。但是Dan Fletcher 也不得不承认这些游戏创造者的天才造诣，毕竟社交游戏让数以千万计的用户从非玩家变成了游戏玩家。

对于社交游戏开发者来讲，面对质疑就必须拿出更好的产品和更好的声誉来回击这些批评。

在Brian Reynolds看来，每一个人都需要娱乐，而为了让自己的时光不至于太无聊，很多人乐意花费一大笔的钱来获得一部分的快乐。但是随着人们消费方式的改变，他们对娱乐类型需求也一直在跟进，因为像zynga这样能够开创出新游戏形式的公司而言无疑是更符合玩家的消费趋势需求的。

社交游戏公司知道如何让人们在虚拟的互联网生活中也能获得可以感知的交流互动。更关键的是它将游戏变成一种可以持续更新的状态，让玩家可以在这个游戏平台上保留游戏的新鲜感。

游戏开发者永远不会在游戏推出后留有遗憾认为哪个环节可以做得更好，因为他们可以随时更新他们认为美好的那些事物到游戏当中。而这个就是传统游戏所不能实践的环节。（本文由游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译  转载请注明：游戏邦）

Brian Reynolds, veteran game designer on numerous real-time strategy (RTS) franchises like Civilization and Alpha Centauri, discusses how he’s bringing his expertise in game development to the social game arena with titles like FrontierVille.

There are some users who fly across the Internet at 90 words per minute and land on Facebook just long enough for a quick look around before zipping off again. Other users climb onto Facebook slowly, pecking each letter into Google search before settling down to get lost in a sea of photographs and conversations. The two demographics don’t socialize much, even though Facebook, boasting 400 million active users, is arguably the Internet’s most massive gathering ground. The former group regards the latter with impatience when questions are raised about broken screens (“Turn on your monitor, grandma.”), and the latter group is intimidated by the frenzied pace of the former.

But this all makes the California-based social game developer Zynga that much more remarkable. The company has the rare talent to talk to every Facebook user clearly and succinctly through its games.

Zynga’s mascot is an American bulldog, a tribute to the late pet of founder Mark Pincus. But the pup can also be considered a totem animal that represents the nature of the company’s output. Eager to please, dogs are adaptable to different lifestyles and are capable communicators. Similarly, Zynga’s most recognizable games include FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Texas Hold ‘Em Poker, and Cafe World-if skulking around the back alleys of New York as a mobster doesn’t appeal to somebody’s tastes, they might be happier running a restaurant that their friends can visit.

Or they might try their hand at civilizing the wilds of the American Old West in FrontierVille, a Facebook game developed by Zynga East near Baltimore. Pioneers who take on FrontierVille will find themselves immediately and wholly immersed in a world where diligence, perseverance, and neighborly cooperation are necessary to successfully shape their own take on the Wild West.

FrontierVille gives the player the tools he or she needs to get to work, and suggests that clearing the land and building a house might be a cool idea. Otherwise, the wilderness is there for the player to develop, pillage, or frolic in as he or she sees fit. FrontierVille’s lead designer, Brian Reynolds, knows a few things about creating worlds for players to colonize, too.

Brian Reynolds Brings Lunch Hour Conquest to Facebook

Brian Reynolds is one of the most recognizable names in PC game development, particularly among fans of RTS titles. He’s worked alongside RTS legend Sid Meier on Civilization II, Colonization, and Alpha Centauri. In 2000, he became the CEO of Big Huge Games in Timonium, Maryland, and led the teams that developed more blockbusters, including Rise of Nations, Catan, and Age of Empires III.

Thinking back on Reynolds’ work on PC and traditional consoles conjures up images of huge development teams buzzing over careful plans that slowly take shape into a grand product years later. So when Reynolds announced in the summer of 2009 that he was leaving Big Huge Games to work with Zynga, some wondered if he’d lost his mind. Why would a RTS prodigy leave his post to work on piddly Facebook games? It was as if Shigeru Miyamoto had announced that he was retiring from Nintendo to make Tiger electronic handheld games.

Fate had one hand in Reynolds’ decision. “A year ago I was in a situation where [Big Huge Games] was sold and suddenly I had a chance to do anything I wanted,” he says. “I was touching base with a friend of mine who worked with me back in the Alpha Centauri days and I said, ‘I’m looking for something new to do. Do you know anybody I could talk to?’ And he said, ‘Oh yeah, I got this guy and stuffs going on. I should introduce you.’ So I ended up flying out to Zynga and meeting [CEO] Mark Pincus. Everything took off from there.”

But by the time Reynolds spoke to his former colleague, he was already extremely interested in Facebook, Zynga, and social gaming. “I’ve always tried to make the kind of game I’ve been playing recently,” he says, “and as it turns out, last year I was playing a lot of Facebook games. I was really interested in the way friends interact with each other [on Facebook]-there was the core stuff like sharing pictures and comments, and then I realized the games themselves give you this really neat light tool to interact with people with whom you have a casual relationship. It’s like, ‘Hey, remember me from high school? I still like you, and here’s something for your Mafia.’”

Reynolds even learned a little bit about his own family through their Facebook interactions. “One day I got this post from my aunt playing Mafia Wars and it said ‘Hi Brian, thanks for the energy packs. I love you.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, isn’t that cool? My aunt loves me and plays Mafia Wars.’”

Even FrontierVille Had to Start in the Wilderness

Reynolds met with Pincus, and the ideas for FrontierVille were formed and pitched. “Part of the reason Mark brought me on,” Reynolds says, “is because I’ve worked on a lot of different properties, and Zynga wanted to go into some new areas nobody’s done as far as social games. My first game really as a game designer-where I came up with the idea for the game as well as the mechanics-was Colonization, way back in the 90s. It was a game where you explored the new world and planned your own colony.

“I always tell new people working in game design that you end up with your best idea having the worst execution. There’s a lot about Colonization that I find charming when I look back on it, but the pacing isn’t really there. I’ve always wanted to go back to that topic with more experience behind me. We started talking about whether or not we should even do a ‘colonizing the Americas’ game, and decided it might work, but we also threw some darts around topics that were somewhat similar. One of the ideas that came up was doing a more western frontier game.”

Reynolds knows well that a successful social game has to appeal not only to young men, but to a broad swath of aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, and kids. As it turned out, the idea of clearing the rugged land didn’t just appeal to Zynga and Reynolds. A bit of market research and some subtle asking around revealed that frontier life is something that many social gamers have an interest in.

“Men would talk about Western shows and cowboy movies,” Reynolds recalls, “and women would say, ‘Oh, is it going to be like Little House on the Prairie?’ So we decided we needed to include raising families on the frontier as well as critters and varmints.”

FrontierVille’s inspirations go beyond Clint Eastwood and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Reynolds admits he likes everything to do with that bit of the past, up to and including the villainous antics of Looney Tunes’ Yosemite Sam. “I was a ‘history kid,’” Reynolds says. “I always liked reading about history, and I like games about history. I watched Western TV shows. I watched Little House on the Prairie-it came on at five in the morning and I used to sneak downstairs and catch the repeats. You can see a little bit of my own passion along with a bit of market research and some pop culture in FrontierVille. Even things like Bugs Bunny’s picture of the West were stirred into the pot. But we started with a little core of ‘way back a long time ago.’”

How to Build a Town from your Office

FrontierVille’s core gameplay is similar to FarmVille’s: Players visit friends, solicit neighbors, ask for and give gifts, and click on stuff in the game to make things happen. But when playing FrontierVille for the first time, it becomes immediately apparent that the game has a lot more to offer than its predecessor. Players tend to crops and animals, but they also build up their world, get married, and start a family. All the while, the wilderness grows relentlessly and they have to tame it-or let it do what it will. FrontierVille overall feels very busy but rarely boring and never overwhelming, all design decisions Reynolds was conscious of when he started the project.

“Coming from a game design background, my instinct was to keep the pacing really tight,” he says. “FrontierVille is a really open-ended game in the sense that it’s no more complicated than FarmVille. You just turn it on and start clicking on things that are pretty, and stuff happens, and the stuff that happens is always good. But I want to keep the player feeling like there’s a lot of variety in the tasks, not just ‘a lot to do.’”

FrontierVille, Reynolds says, is meant to be discovered as well as played. “You realize, ‘Oh, if I click on a tree, then I can chop it down and get some wood. What can I do with wood? Well, I can build a fire, I can construct a building.’ Or, ‘Oh, I can pull some weeds up. Well, now I have a place to construct a building or plant some crops.’ Or, ‘Hey, if I put a sheep here, the grass doesn’t grow back.’ We don’t tell you any of this stuff-you have to discover it.”

Even the potential hazards of the wild world can turn out to be beneficial. “[In FrontierVille] snakes like to hide under rocks and cow skulls,” Reynolds says. “You’re not expecting to find one at first, so it’s a fun surprise. People say, ‘Oh, a snake, I don’t like that.’ Then they click on it and discover they can shoo the snake away and get an experience bonus. So then everybody has a reason to like snakes. I’ve seen some people completely stop everything they’re doing to go find every single snake on the map.

“A motto I once learned was: ‘The game designer shouldn’t be having all the fun.’ It’s much more interesting to people to have this really open-world experience. We’ve certainly seen that in successful traditional video games, but we’ve tried to create an open-world experience in a social game where you just go off in the direction you want. For example, do you want to try to find all the bears in the forest, or do you want to raise your family?”

FrontierVille even features some surprising cross-pollination from Zynga games besides FarmVille. “You’d be surprised,” Reynolds says, “but there is stuff in FrontierVille that’s there because I thought it worked well in Mafia Wars. You won’t recognize it because the fiction is completely unrelated. But thinking about it as a game designer, I see forms of interaction that players really respond to. So a lot of people who wouldn’t really play a Mafia game would like to have that kind of interaction, and they get it in a new format.”

The Social Aspect: How to Win Friends and Influence Pioneers

“The flip side of getting to talk to everybody,” Reynolds says, “is figuring out how to do it.”

Flash-based social games are evolving at tremendous speed, and Reynolds admits that it takes a lot of energy and brainstorming to stay on top of what’s new and fresh. What was considered impressive in social games two years ago is positively dated today, but the social aspect of Facebook gaming and the challenge of implementing it in new ways is primarily what piqued Reynolds’ interest in the platform.

“Social gaming is taking off and changing constantly,” he says. “Three years ago, it didn’t exist. Two years ago it was just quizzes and messages asking players to ‘Please accept my zombie bite.’ A year and a half ago it was all spreadsheet games with a lot of clicking and refreshing, with more social stuff implemented. Then last year, FarmVille came out. Now there’s Flash for graphics, and those graphics have started to get better.

“We’re on a slope-we found a new platform for games, and they’re getting better and better. The bar is going up on competition. You can’t just have the same kind of social interaction you had a year ago and be successful. We’re innovating on the quality and authenticity of the social interactions in Zynga games.”

Reynolds and his team took special care to make the social aspect of FrontierVille the biggest reason to keep playing the game. “If you called on your friends in previous social games, you might get a bonus, or you might give them a thing or two. But the cool thing that we’ve added in FrontierVille is that now when you go visit a friend, you can click on the stuff they might click on. So if you need wood, you can help them chop some and you might even obtain some wood too. Or you can tend their crops and help them ripen faster. If their crops are withered, you can click on them and revive them.”

Your reward? Love, and a reason to feel good about yourself. “Then as you’re [working on your friend's homestead], little hearts pop out. The hearts increase your reputation-it’s kind of like leveling up but for being altruistic and helping people.”

Of course, the generous may find themselves as the recipients of more material rewards-and, interestingly, their real-life friendships may be strengthened too, thanks to FrontierVille’s ability to track and record what visitors have done on your farm. “The real killer app for us is the moment when someone comes back to their homestead and they see a replay of your avatar helping out. They say, ‘Oh, she chopped down a tree. She un-withered my crops.’ The owner of the homestead gets the same bonuses as the visitor, so both you and your friend get the bonuses. It’s better to be helping people than to be a recluse on your own farm.”

Visiting each others’ farms also provides an immediate emotional impact that’s exclusive to open-ended games. “It’s really interesting when you visit your friend’s homestead and notice they’ve shaped a completely different world-even though they started with exactly the same resources as you did,” Reynolds says.
Everybody’s a Critic-LiterallyBut it’s naive to assume that everybody on Facebook wants to build their own farm or harvest fake crops. Many of Zynga’s offerings are reviled by some as much as they’re loved by others. Critics complain frequently about the deluge of gifts and invitations they receive from friends begging them to become FarmVille neighbors, or a fellow denizen of the underworld. Other criticisms focus on the seemingly mindless point-and-click nature of Zynga’s games. Time Magazine even listed FarmVille among its list of the 50 Worst Inventions. “The most addictive of Facebook games is hardly even a game,” Dan Fletcher wrote. “It’s more a series of mindless chores on a digital farm, requiring the endless clicking of a mouse to plant and harvest crops.”

However, Fletcher also admitted that he, like many of FarmVille’s critics, was mostly angry at the game for stealing so much of his life. “Zynga, the evil genius behind this bizarre digital addiction, says more than 10 percent of Americans have logged in to create online homesteads. How many hours of lost productivity does that translate to? Tough to guess. But for me, personally, at least dozens.”

Rarely does a mention of Zynga’s games, FarmVille in particular, solicit a passive response. People’s eyes either light up, or they glower, even in instances where stone-faced professionalism is required.

“I was at customs at the New York border at Canada last summer,” Reynolds recalls, “and the customs guy happened to ask me what I do for a living. I said ‘Well, I make Facebook games.’

“‘Do you make that farm one?’ the officer asked. ‘Because I hate it when my girlfriend plays it and that music comes on.’”

Reynolds does contribute occasional ideas to FarmVille, but his “baby” is FrontierVille. Regardless, the association between Zynga and FarmVille is strong.

“My son plays my title up for everything it’s worth,” Reynolds says. “At school, they call him ‘farm boy.’”

Zynga does keep tabs on features that attract players, and pulls them when it seems the novelty has worn out. Reynolds cites the “Lonely Cows” that flooded Facebook last year and, with their dark, sad eyes, begged potential players to adopt them. “One of our guys out in San Francisco essentially invented the Lonely Cow. People really responded to it. Now there are lonely everything in competitors’ Facebook games: Lonely Aliens, Lonely Robots. People have had enough of the “Lonely” thing.

“We have to keep on innovating. The Lonely Cow was a great idea for last summer, but now we need to have something else. We have to keep on coming up with new interactions to keep stuff fresh.

Entertainment is about not being bored.”

Game Development Then and Now

Though he occasionally wonders if he should get a “real” job, Reynolds realizes that people ultimately need entertainment-and they’ll pay “a lot of money to not be bored.” He’s loved every aspect of game design he’s ever been involved in, and finds the differences between developing traditional games and social games to be particularly interesting.

“Back in the days of developing Civilization II, you made a game where the player sat alone with their mapboard. One of the biggest challenges of developing games like that is that you had to make it feel like there were other people playing the game. Well-developed artificial intelligence was really important.

“Gradually, the age of multiplayer dawned, followed by the age of true social games. The old multiplayer was done with strangers whereas the new era involves cooperative play, and playing with your friends in large groups and so on. The audience has changed, the technology has changed, and the platform has changed.”

And the social gaming scene stands to keep changing as more traditional game developers like Reynolds join companies like Zynga. “Some of the guys who started at Zynga East with me are from the game world, and we began tackling problems from a game design level. Zynga already knows which kinds of player interactions work well-we can design a game that loop those together. We know fun and story, and can pick all those things up and put them all together.”

Working on social games takes Reynolds back to a more nostalgic time in game development. “The team sizes are a lot more like what I remember when I started in the 90s. It’s like we’ve gone back to the early era of video games again, because we can make stuff in a reasonable amount of time. It’s not these four-year projects I was getting used to by the end of my traditional video-game run.

“It’s fantastic. We’re spending a lot more time making the game as opposed to working forever on the technology needed to make it work, like creating art assets and getting them to animate just right. I feel like at Zynga, I come in every day and I’m actually doing game design. I’m actually making something better in the game.”

Reynolds also notes that working on a game like FrontierVille is a bit like developing in real-time. Though a brisk stream of ideas is needed to keep the game fresh and a lot of work goes into keeping the servers upright, the tradeoff is an ongoing piece of work where ideas can be implemented right away, and where criticism can be responded to promptly.

“In the old days,” Reynolds says, “we would launch a game and say, ‘Okay, I guess we’re done.’ You might do a patch, but essentially you couldn’t afford to keep working on the last game because you had to go to work on the next game. Console game development was even more strict-you couldn’t do a patch, period, because you had to do months of certification. You had to create perfection on a disc, because you were never going to go back and touch that game.

“You’d start playing your game and you’d say, ‘Oh man I wish I’d done this part differently,’ but it was too late. You couldn’t respond to competitors very well, or the players’ feedback. If they liked something you’d say, ‘Oh great, when we do the next installment in four years, we’ll have more of that.’” （source：gamepro）