作者：Brice Morrison

计算机专家对“困难”有一个正式的定义。如果一些问题是你的智力，计算机能力，或者算法式也解决不来的，那么这个问题显然“难”于其它问题。本质上来看，困难问题与简单问题是根本不同的。尽管没有人知道困难问题的解决方法到底是什么，但是人们却都会认同它的复杂性与高代价。

游戏设计者经常会遭遇到我所提到的复杂设计问题。这些问题看起来都拥有一定的规则性，每次出现都具有类似的属性，并且让人感到畏惧，也就是：

当你在设计游戏功能，关卡或其它部分时，你将会意识到你的计划并不一定会如愿以偿。

每一个你可以立刻想起并做出回应的设计问题都没有太大效益。

你将会发现并不是没有人做过这些，或者人们曾经尝试过，只是并未取得好结果罢了。

首先你并不知道该如何开始。你没有任何主意，或者你的所有想法都是错的，没有多大帮助。而这时你便会栽倒在困境中不可自拔。

困难的设计问题总是会让设计者感到畏惧。你虽然付出了努力，但是却陷进了一个无法脱身的处境，而唯一的解决办法便是随便提交一款低于标准的游戏，或者放弃整个游戏。而这时你便会开始质疑自己的设计标准。你也许会认为“我肯定漏掉了些什么。”，但是在耗费2个小时与团队成员进行商讨，或者一个人待在办公室里看着白色书写板发呆你也不会有任何进展。相反地，你应该合理地利用这两个小时的时间找出能够帮助你走出这个窘境的方法。

如果你在迄今为止的设计生涯中还未遭遇到困难的设计问题，那么我敢保证在不久的将来你也终将会遇到。

hard design problem(from thegameprodigy)

我便遇到过这个问题。在我参与制作的一款游戏中，我设计了一个对话系统，让玩家能够了解电脑生成的游戏角色有何特性。理想情况下，这个设计应该提供给玩家有趣的对话，且脱离开发者设定好的内容。玩家可以跟非玩家角色进行对话，进一步了解它们。这款游戏的原型设定很成功而且也进行了测试，如此看来发行前的准备已一切就绪了。

然而，我后来突然意识到了复杂的设计问题。因为如果这个对话文本是自动生成的，那么玩家必然会很快对其感到厌倦，而如果我让这些文本更显随意，那么它们也许看起来就不像是一种对话了，而是一种匹配型游戏了。

我对此展开了研究。我进一步剖析了游戏，将游戏的接下去几个序列具体化，并观察其变化，但是结果却让我大感失望。当我在研究其它游戏是如何处理这种对话系统时，我发现没有一款游戏能够成功征服它。我瞬间感觉自己已经陷入一个窘境中。

当你遇到一个困难问题时，你并不会觉得这是一种有趣的体验。但是困难的设计问题却可以让你塑造一个英雄形象，即设计者可以借此展露自己的技能，想出别人从未想到的解决办法。如果你有勇气和毅力，那么你就有可能解决这个问题。可以说困难的设计问题可以明确指出职业设计师与业余设计者的区别。

处理困难的设计问题办法很多，但是其中有一个办法更是帮助我和队员们解决了许多麻烦。尽管这个方法一开始听起来很简单，但是当你一步一步去落实它后，你便会发现它的奥妙所在。

首先，你需要理解这个问题

这是一个很漫长的步骤，你需要明确这个问题是什么并深入探析它是如何对你的工作产生影响。

困难的设计问题会慢慢地靠近你。在一切都风平浪静之时，你在自己的空间里操纵着游戏并与其它游戏进行竞争，突然，你遇到了一个小漏洞，然后你便会围绕着它进行弥补，并仍是提供给玩家预想的体验。在这一阶段你可能会遇到90%的设计问题，但是如果是在设计窘境里，你的这种方法不仅不能解决问题，而且有可能让它进一步复杂化。

一旦你意识到自己处在设计问题的窘境里，你便需要去探索这个问题。与他人讨论游戏设置，发掘到底错在哪，为什么会不可行。制作一些图纸原型，或者在白色书写板上画出一些样本，将程序编写在一起并进行操作。尽可能地尝试不同方法，并确保你了解这是怎么一回事，以及导致这种你不希望看到的结果的原因。参考其它游戏，看看它们是如何解决（或者未能处理）类似的问题。

game design whiteboard(from gamesauce.org)

在我的交流原型中，我尝试着用几种方法去理解设计问题。我快速编制了一个原型，让我能够反复且快速地进行游戏。我还列出了玩家的游戏过程，进一步考虑他们可能产生的想法（游戏邦注：“首先让玩家阅读所有对话框选项，其次猜出哪个是正确的。”）。最后，我还观察了其它游戏，并揣摩它们是如何处理对话问题，其中包括《ELIZA》，《暴雨》以及《质量效应》。

不要轻视这个部分，你需要投入大把的时间去思考这个问题。你只有在这一阶段搞清楚所有问题，才能在今后走得更远。在遇到困难的设计问题时，最糟糕的情况便是你认为自己已经解决了这个问题而继续开发游戏，但是因为疙瘩还留着，所以你必定会再次陷入相同的困难设计问题。

其次，列出所有可能的解决对策

这部分很有趣。只要你能尽可能地理解你的设计，那么你便可以开始思考解决策略了。但是不要想出一个对策就停下，你应该罗列出所有可能的方法，以便回头能够挑选出最适合的一个。显然这是一个头脑风暴阶段。

为了解决我的对话问题，我一个接一个地罗列出了解决对策。我可以将文本中的对话框选项转变成图标，如“生气”或者“幽默”，以此让玩家能够了解非玩家角色的性格。我也可以自己编辑对话或者分支树。甚至我也可以取消游戏中的对话系统等等。

但是要注意，你必须好好考虑你的每一个解决方法，即使是你认为最不可能会用到或者说是最没有帮助的一个也不例外。为什么？因为这些所有的方法，甚至是最差的那个都有可能帮你解决问题，并让你了解到自己到底陷得多深了。

对于这些解决方法，你不能只将其记录下来然后就继续往前走，最好能将其一一落实行动。想想游戏中的其它部分会受何影响？你需要花多长时间才能解决问题？清晰地量化每一个解决方法，以便你能更好地做出决策。

最后，选择最佳解决方法

罗列出了所有可能的解决方法后，接下来你便需要做出选择。仔细观察所有可能的解决方法，如果你在前面两步都做对了，那么就放心做出选择吧。此时的你已经完成了功课，现在只需要去落实它便可。

关于我的对话系统，我最后想出了一个能兼容文本，多样性以及每个游戏角色特性的系统。虽然付出了很多努力，但是我真的为这个方法感到骄傲。我就不在此加以描述了，但是你们也许可以在我未来发布的游戏中发现它。

你还需要明确自己是否真正、完全摆脱了困难的设计问题，不要留下任何残渣让其再次滋生。在抛弃任何可能的对策之前你都应该认真地加以考虑，不论它看起来是多么愚蠢。要知道，正是这些探索和决策造就了最棒的游戏和最棒的游戏设计者。

不惧挑战！

困难的游戏设计问题始终不可避免，但是失败的游戏设计却完全可以避免。坐下来，拿着你的笔记本好好思考，并学习如何做才能帮助你更好地制作游戏。而如何解决困难问题正是你迫切需要学习的一课。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Tackling Hard (really hard) Design Problems

by Brice Morrison

Computer Scientists have an official definition of a problem that is “Hard”. Some problems, regardless of your intelligence, the computing power you have, or the algorithms you can come up with, are mathematically Harder than other problems. They are fundamentally different in nature from simpler problems. In Hard Problems the solution, even though no one knows what the solution is yet, can already be predicted to be very complicated and costly.

Game Designers also often run into what I like to call Hard Design Problems. These problems seem to come up with some regularity, they share similar attributes each time, and they’re scary. Namely:

When designing a feature, level, or part of your game, you realize the design you were planning won’t work out as you had imagined.  At all.

Every design answer that you can immediately think of as a response won’t work.

You realize that either no one has done this in games before, or people have tried and it turned out to be a poor game experience.

At first, you have no idea how to proceed. You’re out of ideas, and the few ideas that you do have seem to all be bad ones or disqualify themselves in some other way. You have fallen down a rabbit hole.

Hard Design Problems are scary for a designer. You break out into a sweat, fearing that you’ve already tumbled past the point of no return and your only solution will be to either deliver a sub-par game experience or scrap the whole project. Your mind starts racing, questioning your design judgement. You think “There has to be something I’m missing,” but after two hours of discussion with teammates or alone in your office looking at the whiteboard, you have made no progress. Instead, those two hours have only served to help you truly understand how deep the rabbit hole goes.

If you haven’t encountered a Hard Design Problem in your design career yet, you will.

I’ve been there. In one game I was working on, I had designed (what I thought) was a dialog system that would allow players to get to know the personality of a computer-generated character. Ideally the design would allow for interesting dialog without the developers having to author specific content. You could walk up to a non-player-character and have your conversation, with the experience that you were “getting to know them”. Prototypes had been mocked up and playtested, and everything seemed ready to go.

However, after plotting out the character generator, I soon realized that this was a Hard Design Problem. If the text was generated then it would quickly become stale to the player. And if I scrambled the text or made it random, then it didn’t feel like a conversation at all, it felt like some kind of matching game.

I searched for an out. I looked at the game, fleshed out the next few sequences, and saw how it was going to go, unhappy with the results. After doing some research into how other games handled dialog systems, I saw that no one had successfully attempted what I was trying to do. I felt like I had designed myself into a corner.

When you run into a Hard Problem, it doesn’t feel like a great experience. But Hard Design Problems are where heroes are made, where Designers can show their true skills, coming up with ideas that have never been implemented before in a game. It takes guts, and it takes perseverance, but it can be done.  Hard Design Problems are what separate Pro Designers from the hobbyists.

So how do you tackle a Hard Design Problem? There are many ways, but one method has consistently helped me and many teammates work through a problem.  Though it may sound simplistic at first, you’ll be amazed at what you can tackle one step at a time.

First, Understand the Problem

Often, this is the longest step; you need to find out exactly what this problem is and explore it completely to wrap your head around how it works.

Hard Design Problems can sneak up on you.   Things are going perfectly well, you’re working on your space attack game, driving your ship around and shooting other ships, nothing innovative. When suddenly you see the flaw, and so you try to design around it in a way that still provides that player experience you want.  The first step usually takes care of 90% of design issues. But in a design rabbit hole, this does not solve the problem. It may even exacerbate the problem.

Once you realize you’re in, at this point you need to explore it. Talk through the gameplay experience. Understand exactly what is wrong, and why it isn’t working. Make some paper prototypes, draw some demos on the whiteboard, or hack a program together and play. Try as many variations as you can think of and make sure that you absolutely understand what is going on, and the steps that are leading to the result you don’t want. Look at other games and see how they have handled (or failed to handle) similar problems.

In my conversation prototype, I tried to understand the design in several ways. I progammed a quick prototype that would allow me to play through multiple iterations of the game quickly. I also mapped out the player flow on the board, seeing what they were thinking, (“First, read all the dialog options. Second, try to guess which is the right one.”). Finally, I looked at other games and how they handled dialog, from branching trees, to ELIZA, to Heavy Rain and Mass Effect.

Don’t take this section lightly; you should be spending quite a long time noodling and thinking the issue over. The point of this stage is to make sure that before you go any further, you know how deep in you are already. The worst thing that can happen in a Hard Design Problem is to think you’ve solved it and continue forward on your game, only to run into the same Hard Design Problem again because you didn’t fully grasp the issue that was in front of you.

Second, List all the Possible Solutions

This is the fun part. Once you understand the design as much as you can, it’s time to start coming up with solutions. But not just one solution, you need to map out each possible solution so that you can THEN go back and pick out the best one. This is still a brainstorming stage.

For my dialog problem, I listed off each solution one by one. I could turn the dialog options from text into icons, like “Anger” and “Humor”, and have the player pick those to get the NPC’s personality. I could author the dialog myself. I could make branching trees that were randomly generated. Or I could get rid of dialog in the game.

Note, particularly from that last one, that EVERY solution must be considered, even ones that you know you aren’t going to pick, or ones that are impossible given the circumstances (time, content generation, etc). Why? Because picking all the solutions, even the bad ones, will help to further map out the problem and let you understand how deep it goes.

With each of these solutions, don’t write them on a board and move on. Flesh out what it would really mean to implement that solution. How would the rest of the game be affected? How long would it take you? Quantify each solution clearly so you can get ready to make a decision.

Third, Pick the Best Solution

Once you’ve mapped out all the solutions, it’s time to decide. Look at all the solutions, every possible solution, and take heart that if you have done the first two steps correctly, then this is all that you can do. You have to play with the poker hand that you’re dealt with, and this is your hand. You have done your homework and now it’s just time to pick one.

For my dialog system, I eventually came up with a system that would allow both text, variety, and mapping personalities on each characters. After nights of long work, I was really proud of it. I won’t go into detail here, but you guys might see it in a future game I’ll release.

Make sure that when you leave the Hard Design Problem, it is truly finished. Don’t leave any loose ends or anything to chance. Every possible answer, no matter how stupid, should have been seriously considered before being discarded. These explorations and decisions are what make great games and great designers.

Don’t Be Afraid!

Hard Design Problems are inevitable, but failed designs are not. Put on your thinking cap, sit down with your notepad, and prepare for one of the best lessons that you can get in making games. Tackling tough problems is the best way to learn and grow.（source:thegameprodigy）