作者：David Baumgart

我想要引用某段简洁地概括我想要阐述内容的话语。Brenda Braithwaite发表的题为《Design Truth 1》的文章中有如下内容：

首先将注意力放在每秒的游戏玩法上。随后移到每分钟、每次、每天和每月上。如果你的每秒玩法都无法发挥作用，考虑其他都是毫无意义的。按照这个思路，如果你的每天玩法失败的话，也没有人会关注你的每月玩法。

这似乎是优秀游戏设计中极为重要的层面，尤其是那些以机制为基础的游戏。所有游戏的构建目标都在于吸引玩家做长期的投入，这种投入包括情感、社交或时间，而不是将某些短期和低层次游戏玩法或某些玩家不顾游戏玩法而投入的游戏故事（游戏邦注：如《最终幻想》系列游戏）进行精制。我认为，可以利用高层次设计哲学将游戏进行分类。

我们将游戏玩法循环视为考虑的主题，从“每秒玩法”到“每分钟玩法”并依次提升。最小的循环在较大的循环中不断重复，而后者在更大的循环中重复。将较小循环与不同的大循环配对所引起的动态就可能创造出有趣的游戏玩法。这不需要“开放世界”，此类体验可以完全线性化（游戏邦注：类似于电影中同时存在多线剧情）。游戏《地下城冒险》可能正处于二者之间，或许更偏向于开放世界，因为游戏可以随机生成地下城系统。游戏玩法循环可能以最低层次（游戏邦注：构建自最基本的游戏机制）到最高层次来安排，如下所示：

地下城冒险(from demodownloads.blogspot.com)

1、个人行动（攻击、控制物品、拾取或扔掉道具）

2、完成与某个实体的互动（屠杀怪物、拉杠杆并获得战利品、解锁/攻击箱子、拆除/踩上陷阱）

3、完成某个房间的互动（与房间中的所有实体发生合理的互动，包括所有的陷阱、所有的怪物和所有的黄金等）

4、完成一系列房间的互动（接受并完成任务，完成所有主题相关房间的互动）

5、完成一个地下城关卡（通过地下城关卡获得高级角色属性、道具和财富，然后在下个关卡中面对更高层次的怪物）

用这种方法来确定游戏设计的过程，使我可以通过剖析游戏玩法来看看是否在每个关卡中都能够获得成功。甚至还可以考虑应该去除或添加哪些机制来提升关卡的质量。

现实世界的复杂性当然不允许我们采用Braithwaite那种理想的方法，也就是从最低等级的游戏玩法开始构建原型。以上只是可能影响到现实开发的部分游戏设计理论而已。（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）

Gameplay as a Hierarchy of Cycles

David Baumgart

I’m going to quote a post in whole that covered most of what I was meaning to write on this subject but far more succinctly than I imagined possible. Brenda Braithwaite’s post “Design Truth 1″:

Focus on second-to-second play first. Nail it. Move on to minute-to-minute, then session-to-session, then day-to-day, then month-to-month (and so on). If your second-to-second play doesn’t work, nothing else matters. Along these lines, if your day-to-day fails, no one will care about month-to-month, either.

This seems like an excellent imperative to good game design – especially a mechanics-based game. In counterpoint, (though I could quibble about “good” vs “successful” design) whole games are built on hooking players with long-term investment, be it emotional, social, or time (read: sunk cost fallacy), rather than refined short-term, low-level gameplay (see: grindy MMOs, Zynga), or some kind of story that players get invested in despite the gameplay (see: Final Fantasy games). I think an argument can be made for classifying games according to higher-level design philosophy. But yes, Dredmor’s core is certainly in the mechanics. Well; the mechanics and the insanity, which might count as “story” content though ours is decidedly nonlinear. But I digress. I’ll be doing a lot of that.

[It just struck me - I think this attention to the fundamentals of gameplay is what Jonathon Blow was getting at in a response to one of our earlier trailers. Strong iteration of mechanics is clearly something he is focused on, as evidenced by his work.]

But yes, to bring this back around, the Dredmor beta, at 0.90 coming on 0.91 very soon here, is just breaking through the stage of everything being horrible and horribly crashy and not-fun into a stage where we must consider game balance and pacing in larger, longer cycles of gameplay.

Let’s consider these cycles of gameplay as a subject in itself, from “second-to-second play” to “minute-to-minute play” on upwards. The smallest cycles repeat within larger cycles which repeat within yet larger cycles, all in differing combination. The dynamics which arise out of matching smaller cycles with different sets of larger cycles presumably create interesting gameplay (“emergent gameplay”, if you like). This does not require an ‘open world’; such an experience could be entirely linear and planned (the prime example perhaps being the various arcs at play in a film). In Dredmor’s case we’re somewhere between the two, probably leaning toward open world, what with the roguelike random dungeon generation. (As for digression, from the mention of films, there’s a hell of a lot that should be said about pacing in games. It’s certainly something we need to give some attention in Dredmor.)

Right, well: gameplay cycles can perhaps be usefully arranged by scale from lowest-level (built from the most basic game mechanics) to the highest-level (contingent upon the dynamics between all lower cycles working together) like so:

An individual action (attack, manipulate object, get/drop item)

Complete interaction with a single entity (slay the monster, pull a lever and gather loot, unlock/bash chest, defuse/step on trap)

Clear a room (deal appropriately with all entities in a room, perhaps full of traps, perhaps a squad of monsters, or just steal all the gold)

Clear a series of rooms (take on & complete a quest? negotiate the dynamic between themed rooms? This is a stage I’d like to do better with.)

Clear a dungeon level (advance character stats, items, and wealth through the course of a dungeon level, then deal with a leveled-up set of monsters in the next level.)

edit: 5.5. “Improvise successfully against the unexpected” situations you meet across levels [for Brian] Not sure what this means just yet, but we should probably do something with it.

Run the course of the game (Start as a weak, poor adventurer; Over the course of the game find the inner strength [read: phat loot] to defeat Lord Dredmor! Or die in a disgraceful dead-end, corpse surrounded by gibbering blobbies.)

Quantifying the game in this manner lets me break down the gameplay to see if it is actually succeeding on each level. Or, even, to consider what mechanics should be tweaked or added to enhance this or that level.

The real-world messiness of the Dredmor project did not of course allow us to take the ideal approach as suggested by Braithwaite, to start at the bottom and build up from a prototype of the lowest level gameplay. It happened more like we stuck a few globs on a rough armature that Nicholas dragged out of the back of his closet, expanded outward, poking, finding weak spots, and filling in; stepping back to consider the experience (of ourselves and others), then adding, cutting, or changing as seems appropriate; ripping out the heart of the game with a spoon then replacing it with some jury-rigged assemblage at the last minute, whatever. Such is theoretical game design hitting real life development.

It’s fun.

Update: I just found this post by DanC (of Lost Garden), “Creating a System of Game Play Notation”, which fits closely with what I was getting at above – that is, a methodology for looking at gameplay. And he’s got a chart with a hierarchy of gameplay elements. Clearly this thinking has been around for a while. (Source: Gaslamp Games)