作者：AJ Glasser

Zynga本周发布的隐藏物品游戏引起广泛关注，咋看之下，游戏从画面风格和背景到谜题类型都和Playdom的《时光花园》和Game Insight的《神秘庄园》极其相似。但细究游戏起源，我们发现游戏深化隐藏物品主题。

几个月前，Zynga聘请游戏设计师Cara Ely担任公司创意总监。此时电子游戏领域出现两大重要变化——主打可下载游戏的公司纷纷转投社交和手机领域；《时光花园》在Facebook平台大受欢迎。显然Zynga意图涉猎已被证实可行的隐藏物品类型。问题是，他们是要简单复制竞争对手的机制，还是重新制作自己的作品。

这正是Ely背景的重要性所在。她从I-play Games（游戏邦注：I-play Games是个大型可下载游戏门户网站，主要瞄准女性群体，平台具有丰富的隐藏物品游戏）跳槽至Zynga。Ely在I-play Games任职5年，主要负责开发隐藏物品游戏，其中最受关注的是婚礼主题的《Dream Day》系列。她在《Hidden Chronicles》所做的决定主要基于自己的经验，而非参考Playdom或Game Insight举措，从而吸引同样族群。

hidden chronicles from insidesocialgames.com

下面是Ely在《Hidden Chronicles》所做的一个决定：每次玩家试验相同谜题时物品是否处于相同位置？在《时光花园》中，每次玩家尝试相同内容，物品都会处于相同位置。会发生改变的唯一内容是玩家寻找物品的顺序，列表有时会增减物品。相反，《神秘庄园》会改变物品位置，通过融入文字调换或文字含义，而非传统的物品列表提高游戏挑战性。

从自己的经验来看，Ely认为最好每次都将物品置于相同位置——就如《时光花园》的模式。这款游戏通过改变玩家所需寻找的物品列表提升每个关卡的难度。在她看来，只是在新关卡中改变同个物品的位置“太过简单”，因为玩家会自动寻找与之前内容存在视觉差异的地方。

下面是另一例子：通过提示机制创收。《时光花园》和《神秘庄园》都通过系列提示或优势道具（游戏邦注：例如通过货币或好友馈赠获得额外时间）创收。Ely没有透露《Hidden Chronicles》具体营收方式，但表示游戏的50关卡体验可通过支付货币进行加速，玩家可通过馈赠获得提示。她表示，游戏将融入排行榜，显示玩家获得最高分数的好友，这算是个“竞争模式”，这样好友们将进行一对一竞争，争取在最短时间内完成谜题。

Zynga没有透露公司日前在旧金山Unleashed大会所发布游戏的具体发行日期。据悉，《Hidden Chronicles》在大会举行时还尚未上线。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

A Closer Look at the Origins of Zynga’s Hidden Chronicles

By AJ Glasser

Zynga raised some eyebrows earlier this week by announcing a hidden object game that, at a cursory glance, has an awful lot in common with both Playdom’s Gardens of Time and Game Insight’s Mystery Manor from visual style and setting to puzzle types. A closer look at origins of the game, however, reveals a deeper level of investment in the hidden object genre.

Several months ago, Zynga hired on game designer Cara Ely on as creative director. At that time, two significant things were happening in the video games industry — downloadable games-focused companies were scrambling to get into social and mobile distribution and Gardens of Time was killing it on Facebook. It’s not hard to imagine that Zynga wanted to get in on the hidden object game now that other companies had proven it to be a viable genre for a social network. The question was, would they simply copy the mechanics that worked in competing games or try to build a hidden object game from scratch.

This is where Ely’s history is important. She came to Zynga from I-play Games, one of the leading downloadable games portals oriented toward women with — you guessed it — a massive catalog of hidden object games. Ely spent five years at I-play developing franchises of hidden object games, most significantly the wedding-themed “Dream Day” series. Her design decisions in Hidden Chronicles are based on her learning rather than on the need to do what Playdom and Game Insight did in order to capture the same audience.

Here’s an example of a design decision Ely made for Hidden Chronicles: Do objects remain in the same place each time players attempt the same puzzle? In Gardens of Time, objects remain in the same locations each time the player attempts the puzzle. The only thing that changes consistently is the order in which the player is asked to find the items, and sometimes there are different items added to or subtracted from the list. In contrast, Mystery Manor changes the locations of objects between puzzles and uses word scrambles or silhouette recognition instead of traditional object lists to add challenge.

Based on her experience, Ely tells us it’s best to leave objects in the same place each time — as Gardens of Time does. Difficulty scales with each playthrough of that level by changing the list of items the player needs to find. She says it’s “too easy” if the same objects simply change locations with each playthrough because the player will go into the puzzle automatically looking for what’s visually different from the last time they player tried it.

Here’s another example: monetizing the hints system. Both Gardens of Time and Mystery Manor monetize a series of hints or gameplay advantage items like time-extension with premium currency or through friend gifts. Ely declined to get into specifics for Hidden Chronicles’ monetization, but did confirm that progression through the game’s 50 levels could be accelerated with premium currency and that hints could be gifted. She also confirmed that the game would feature leaderboards to track which of your friends finished puzzles with the highest score, and possible a “racing mode” where friends compete one-on-one to finish a puzzle in the least amount of time.

Zynga declined to provide any launch date details for any of the titles announced earlier this week at its Unleashed event in San Francisco. Hidden Chronicles was not playable at the event, but you can view the trailer shown to journalists here.（Source：insidesocialgames）