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分析图像冒险游戏存在的5大改进空间

作者:Ryan Creighton

我参与了一些图像冒险游戏的创作,并且贡献了大量资源创造UGAGS(无限图像冒险游戏系统)(游戏邦注:它是作者公司所采用的一种开发工具)。

ugags games(from gamasutra)

这是UGAGS所开发的游戏(from gamasutra)

我只是因为能够感受到角色的想法而喜欢图像冒险游戏。我喜欢这种不只是“杀死某人”或“针对某个点”的故事情节。我喜欢身处图像冒险游戏空间里,感受着自己的想法,而无需担心任何时间限制或者游戏中会突然冒出的各种特效。《猴岛故事》开发者Ron Gilbert在2010年GDC中宣传《疯狂大楼》时曾表示:

“冒险游戏的神奇之处就在于玩家只要盯着屏幕,想着接下来会发生什么即可。这是一种安静的思考。”

Tim Schafer、Ron Gilbert以及《Double Fine》通过Kickstarter成功筹资的情况证明,这类游戏仍然具有市场潜力。但是尽管如此,图像冒险游戏还是存在一些难以解决的瓶颈。以下我将列出一些常见的问题,以及图像冒险游戏设计师应该如何解决这些问题。

1.让玩家不知所措

电子游戏的神奇之处便是能够留给玩家更多遐想空间,而不是像大多数现代游戏那样,每个回合都设置了游戏指南,手把手地指导玩家的每一步操作。但如果玩家长期陷入游戏僵局,这种神奇之处也就没有任何乐趣,并且玩家会想尽办法逃脱困境。如果他们获得释放的唯一方法便是咨询GameFAQs,你就是一个真正失败的设计师。我曾经因觉得“受骗”而放弃了多款图像冒险游戏;并且发现其中不再具有任何乐趣而退出游戏。

kq2(from gamasutra)

用缰绳套住蛇将其变成“Pegasus”。为什么我没想到这么做?(from gamasutra)

游戏可以向玩家适当提供一些暗示。这种暗示行为是游戏认可的“作弊”,它具有微妙而强大的作用。现代图像冒险游戏如《机械迷城》便设置了此类游戏内部帮助系统。

机械迷城(from gamasutra)

机械迷城(from gamasutra)

(在《机械迷城》中,玩家在得到暗示之前必须完成相关对抗小游戏。)

解决这一问题的另外一个方法便是让玩家更加顺畅地进行游戏。你只要坚持通过游戏即可,不管是否遗漏了游戏所提供的线索,直到最后遇到一个不甚理想的必然结局。而如果你足够聪明机敏,你便会尝试一些不同的玩法,挑战一些困难的内容,并创造出更棒的结局。使用这一方法的游戏包括《Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Priestess》,《东方快车谋杀案》以及《上校的遗产》。

东方快车谋杀案(from gamasutra)

东方快车谋杀案(from gamasutra)

(不了解侦探小说,不知道故事情节或者持枪的女人是谁都没关系,玩家都能顺利地进行《东方快车谋杀案》。)

在某一年的GDC大会上我曾经听过一个女性玩家倡导者的演讲。她认为如果我们购买了一款游戏,但如果是因为设计师的过失而无法在磁盘上访问所有游戏内容,我们就应该回到店里要求退钱。也许在多年前,我会因为这一问题而崩溃,但是现在,当我在创作《Spellirium》时,我纠正了这些问题,让不具有相关技能的玩家也能顺利通关。而对于那些更加出色的玩家,我则会提供额外的奖励。

2.“地毯式搜索”的无聊设置

当图像冒险游戏从基于文本的解析器转换到彻底受鼠标驱动的界面时,它们也因“指向点击”(point n’ click)一词而与早期的解析器划清界限。“指向点击”这个术语后来又演变成了“hunt n’ peck”,因为很多图像冒险游戏并未提供给玩家有趣的谜题,而是常在2个像素单元的区域中隐藏一些重要道具,让玩家只能像一台人体点阵式打印机一样,通过移动鼠标在该区域中的每个角落挨个进行搜索。如果我创造的是一些寻物解谜游戏,我可能已经成为个大富豪了。因为这是一种非常受欢迎的游戏类型,但实际上这类游戏却多扎根于图像冒险游戏的这一缺点,其玩法实际上是考验玩家的像素搜索能力。

寻物解谜游戏(from gamasutra)

寻物解谜游戏(from gamasutra)

(在一个杂乱的小房间里寻找一对镊子并不是我所认为的游戏乐趣——这只是我们生活中的繁杂琐事罢了!)

我们该如何解决这一问题?最简单的方法便是扩大隐藏区域。我也发现一些采取更巧妙解决方法的游戏。如Telltale针对于iPad平台的《回到未来》,让玩家能够用多个手指在屏幕上摆弄,并点亮所有热点区域。但是这与我之前提过的“让每个玩家都觉得自己是获胜者”策略一样,这个方法太过广泛且难以付诸实践。我的意思是,这时候还不如让游戏自己正常运转。

当我更深入地进行思考时,我便会想起自己之所以会陷入游戏困境中主要是因为我不知道屏幕中的某一部分就是另外一个位置的出口。冒险游戏的真正乐趣应该是玩家扮演游戏中的角色,经历游戏故事,并聪明地解决游戏中的问题,而不是发现你自己可以点击看起来像是背景组成部分的植物。

3.设置障碍

在图像冒险游戏中最让人反感的情况便是弹出“你做不到的——至少现在不行”之类的对话框。就像你在玩《国王秘史》系列游戏时会在绝境时刻反复听到类似的话。当设计师并未仔细想出足够的互动可能性,只给玩家一些隐晦的信息时,图像冒险游戏便会出现此类设置障碍问题。从本质上来说这是一种计算机程序代码处理错误的问题,它所提供的信息也并不比计算机程序代码出错对话框更有意义。

程序出错对话框(from gamasutra)

程序出错对话框(from gamasutra)

而设置障碍之所以在图像冒险游戏中如此普遍,主要是因为开发者想少费些功夫,不想投入大量精力考虑玩家可能执行的所有操作。的确,对于一款带有文本解析器的游戏来说,设计师根本不可能预料到玩家会组合哪些词语,玩家会输入哪些无意义的混字。

如果玩家尝试着使用一个长而坚硬的道具但却不是设计师预先设定的道具去撬开某物,那么这就是游戏中的道具使用设置障碍。棍棒——没用;竹竿——没用;扫帚把——这就对啦!这就是图像冒险游戏开发者及学者Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw在系列文章《Depressingly Common Adventure Game Design Flaws》中所提到的内容:

“我玩过的最有趣的直觉型谜题游戏是《异形大进击》。游戏中有许多具有创造性的道具,我可以用各种解决方法解开所有谜题。例如可以使用活动扳手叫醒公车司机,或者选择库存中的其它长而硬的道具,甚至也可以播放一首轻快的卡祖笛唤醒他。除此之外,玩家可以使用黄油刀或者任何的几张纸去获取桌子底下的现金卡,而这些道具同样也可以用来绘制地图。而如果玩家选择用黄油刀去撬开地板,将会发现这种刀太脆弱了,只会逐渐弯曲。游戏为玩家的探索创造了各种可能性和方法,既向聪明的玩家提供奖励,同时也不断鼓励玩家进行更多尝试,而推动着他们前进直到游戏结束。”

在我们创造《Spellirium》之前,UGAGS游戏通过隐藏道具互动性去解决这一问题。当你点击热点时,游戏就会显示可与其互动的库存道具,而你也会不经思索地使用正确的道具。在《Jinx 3》中,如果你拥有叉勺,你便能够用其敲打监狱的墙壁。而如果你持有香蕉,你便可以将其冲到马桶里制造出堵塞情况。如此设置便能够隐藏我所面临的任何谜题设计问题。如果只让玩家自主支配道具,他们还会不会知道可以用叉勺敲打墙壁?但如果提供了这种道具自动使用设置,我就不用担心这一问题了。

jinx3(from gamasutra)

jinx3(from gamasutra)

(当界面上的道具作用很明显时,何需再迫使玩家输入“使用出入卡开门?”)

鉴于《Spellirium》玩家可以在热点中使用道具,我便创造了一种新系统以减少设置障碍。假设热点中有一扇上锁的们,我能明确地定义玩家在使用铁匙后会发生什么。但是我同样也列出了其它可供玩家使用的道具,如金属杆(强制敲击门?),并且Todd会答道:“金属杆太脆弱了不足以击倒这扇门。”玩家愿意接受这种设置,因为至少我肯定了他们的选择,并且这比跟他们说“我不理解你为何这么做”好多了。

还有一种解决方法便是使用一般道具指令。如果我未明确特定道具的相关回应,那么系统就出呈现该热点的一般回应,例如“我不能使用这个道具打开这扇门”。尽管比起特定回应,这种一般回应会让玩家稍显沮丧,但是总归是一种有效的解决方法。《风语世界》在这方面表现出色,它为每一个潜在的道具/热点组合提供了富有针对性的特定道具回应。

风语世界(from gamasutra)

风语世界(from gamasutra)

4.无法响应操作的图像元素

冒险游戏中一个非常普遍也是极度让人沮丧的问题是让玩家去寻找与背景元素相同的内容,但是该背景元素却并不能响应游戏玩法。我最近玩了《塞尔达传说:天空之剑》(并非图形冒险游戏),其中有个角色要求我去寻找一张纸——或者说是“任何一张纸”。而探索的对象包括图书页,羊皮纸,卷轴,以及任何可想象得到的纸张。但是我却不知道哪种纸才是我应该收集的。所以我便需要继续寻找游戏所指的那张纸。

塞达尔传说(from gamasutra)

塞达尔传说(from gamasutra)

(不要在玩家周围安置一些非交互式书籍而让他们去寻找所谓的“任何”一纸张。)

问题主要出在背景图像身上,玩家可能会不断点击游戏背景内容,但是你却未为对这些内容进行详细说明。玩家可能会猜想某棵植物所隐藏的摄像机一定有什么玄机,但是事实却并非如此。

为了解决这一问题,我们在《Spellirium》中创造了热图系统,用于分析玩家的点击行为。如果我们发现屏幕上那些未提供互动设置的特定区域热度显著上升(游戏邦注:即玩家疯狂地点击该热点),我们便会适当隐藏某些内容。

《光晕》热图(from gamasutra)

《光晕》热图(from gamasutra)

5.无意义的对话选项

我们再次以《天空之剑》为例。在游戏中,NPC角色会要求你做出选择。“你能否帮我从树上求下小猫?”而作为英雄,你肯定会义无反顾地这么做。然而你也可以选择说“不”。但是如果你这么做,故事也就不会继续向前发展。你不得不再次面对NPC,并重新给予肯定的回答,并拯救他的小猫。而这样除了创造一种互动错觉,究竟有何真正的互动意义?

emeraldCity(from gamasutra)

emeraldCity(from gamasutra)

设计师之所以这么做也还是同个原因——节省功夫。只要你设置了一个二元决策,这些决策分支将会朝着两个不同的方向而发展,因此会衍生出一款篇幅巨大的游戏。但是我最不能忍受的是,不管我做出何种选择,这些对话都会引向同一个结果。

解决方法便是在文字撰写上多花点心思,可以让对话结果趋于一致,但不可让玩家发觉这一点。通过巧妙写作,可以让玩家产生自己的选择所产生的影响,即使事实并非如此。如果你足够聪明,也可以让玩家做出一个输入内容完全不同,但最终却会促成相同结果的二元决策。以下是《Spellirium》中Todd和Lorms的对话:

todd And Lorms(from gamasutra)

todd And Lorms(from gamasutra)

Todd:呃,好吧。我想你可以跟着我。[C1]

或者

我觉得还是自己独行会更好。[C1]

[C1](Todd向屏幕边缘走去)

Lorms:你要去哪?

Todd:我不知道。可能那里?

Lorms:你有什么计划吗?你知道如何做才能找到你的朋友吗?

玩家的一个选择是,让Lorms跟随着他;而另一个选择则是自己独行。Lorm是《Spellirium》中的一个主要角色,自然要跟随着Todd的旅程。而不管玩家做出了何种选择,他都能够感觉游戏是尊重自己的选择,对话和行动也总是非常自然地进行——尽管玩家选择的是两个完全不同的回应。

结论

图像冒险游戏还不甚完美,但是作为有领悟的设计师,我们能够不断改善玩家的游戏体验,以弥补之前游戏所存在的不足之处。

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

5 Graphic Adventure Game Goofs (and How To Fix Them)

by Ryan Creighton

It’s no secret that i love graphic adventure games. They’re the reason why i’m in this industry today. i’ve worked on a number of them (including Jinx 3: Escape from Area Fitty-Two, Heads, Summer in Smallywood, Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, and the upcoming Spellirium), and have devoted considerable resources to developing UGAGS: the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System (our company’s answer to SCUMM), which has helped me to build that list of games. i’ve also written lots of articles about the genre (check the “Further Reading” section at the bottom of this post!)

The UGAGS oeuvre to date.

Call me a snob, but i like graphic adventure games for the mere fact that their characters have something going through their minds other than “shoot”. i like that their plotlines boil down to more than just “kill mans” or “glorm points”. And i like standing in a room in a graphic adventure game, alone with my thoughts, without having to worry about time limits or pyrotechnics wizzing past my face every few seconds. As Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert put it during his Maniac Mansion postmortem at GDC 2010,

“The magic of an adventure game is staring at the screen, wondering what to do next. It’s that quiet contemplation.”

With the massive Kickstarter windfall for an unspecified graphic adventure game, Tim Schafer, Ron Gilbert and Double Fine proven that there is still a market and a fondness for the genre. That being said, there are some legitimate and persistent problems with graphic adventures. Here’s a short list of the most common ones, and my thoughts on ways in which we, as graphic adventure game designers, can fix them.

1. Not Knowing What to Do

True, it’s magical for a video game to leave you guessing, instead of ramming a tutorial down your throat at every turn like most modern games do. But if you get stuck enough, long enough, that magic turns to salty poop and you really just want to get unstuck. If the only recourse for the player to get unstuck is to consult GameFAQs, you’ve failed as a designer. i’ve abandoned numerous graphic adventure games because i “cheated”; solving the rest of the game became a lot less enjoyable and i gave up, thoroughly racked with guilt-derived stomach cramps.

Throw the bridle on the snake to turn it into Pegasus. Why oh WHY didn’t i think of that??

But if the game gives you a way to cheat, or to get a hint, it’s somehow legit and i don’t feel as bad. It’s game-sanctioned cheating – a subtle, but powerful, difference. Modern graphic adventure games like Machinarium use an in-game help system.

Machinarium puts you through a twitch-based minigame before giving you a hint.

Another interesting way to handle this is to design your game such that the player can never get stuck. You just plod through the game, missing cues left and right, until you crash into the inevitable, unsatisfactory ending. But if you’re keen and clever and aware, you can strike out off the beaten path, do all the difficult things, and get a much better ending. Games that use this approach include Kult/Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Priestess, The Last Express, and The Colonel’s Bequest.

It’s possible to coast through The Last Express without ever figuring out whodunit, whatsgoingon, or whosthatladywiththegun

One year at GDC, i heard a woman speak who was an advocate for female gamers (if you know her name, speak up!) Her heartfelt conviction, ladies, is that if you buy a game and you can’t access all of the content on the disc because the designer won’t let you, take the game back to the store and ask for your money back. Years ago, this struck me as utter blasphemy … and yet here i am, developing Spellirium so that all of the challenges are no-fail, and you can sail through the game from beginning to end without the game requiring you to be awesome. It’s awesome-optional. But for those players who DO excel, there are treats and rewards.

2. The Pixel Hunt

When graphic adventure games moved from using text-based parsers to entirely mouse-driven interfaces, they were distinguished from their parser predecessors by the term “point n’ click”. This term was later twisted to the pejorative “hunt n’ peck” because numerous graphic adventure games, in lieu of offering clever and interesting puzzles, would hide important items in a 2-pixel-square hit area so that the player’s only recourse was to slowly scan each and every location by trawling the cursor slowly over the screen in rows, like he was a human dot matrix printer. Listen: i could be a very rich man today if i had built HOGs (Hidden Object Games). They’re immensely popular. But the entire genre is based on this one terrible flaw of graphic adventure games. HOGs, by definition, are . i can’t do it. i just … no. You know?

Finding the pair of tweezers in the messy bedroom is not my definition of a fun time – it’s my definition of every goddamn day of my life

How do you fix this problem? The obvious answer is to make bigger hit areas. But i’ve seen other games go even farther. Telltale’s Back to the Future on the iPad enables you to multi-finger diddle the screen to make all of the location’s hotspots light up. Like the “every player’s a winner” strategy i mentioned above, this seemed too broad and too giving. i mean, the game might as well be playing itself at this point, right?

The more i thought about it, the more i thought back to adventure games where the only reason i got hopelessly stuck was because i didn’t know that that part of the screen was an exit to another location. The joy of an adventure game should be in being a character, playing through a story, and feeling clever for solving some problems – not in discovering that you can click that plant that looks like it’s part of the background.

3. Cock-Blocking

One of the most despised phrases in the annals of graphic adventure gaming is “you can’t do that — at least not now” which, if you’ve played through the King’s Quest series, you’ve read at least a few hundred times in your miserable existence. Graphic adventure game cock-blocking occurs when the designer has not thought through enough interaction possibilities, and has thrown up a vague, generic message to the player. This is essentially computer programming error code handling, with messaging that’s barely more helpful than actual computer programming error codes.

The reason why cock-blocking is so common is that it takes a lot of effort to account for every possible thing the player might try to do. Indeed, for games with a text parser, it’s nigh-impossible for the designer to anticipate every single combination of words, including gibberish, the player may hurl at the parser. With verb-based adventure interfaces like the one in Maniac Mansion, the permutations shrunk significantly.

Sidenote: this is the exact moment in Maniac Mansion when the majority of players wet their pants.

A corollary to item use cock-blocking is a situation where the player tries to use a long, rigid item to pry something off another something, but he doesn’t use the correct long, rigid item that the designer was thinking of. Stick – no good. Pole – no good. Broom handle – ding ding ding! Here’s how graphic adventure developer and wittily snarky pundit Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw puts it in his Depressingly Common Adventure Game Design Flaws series (the rest of which i’ve avoided reading, for fear of being wittily snarked at for plagiarism):

“The best game I have ever played for intuitive puzzles has to be the aforementioned Zak McKracken And The Alien Mindbenders. There’s a whole horde of inventory items in Zak McKrack, and I could give a thousand examples of puzzles with several alternative solutions. How about using a monkey wrench to wake up the bus driver, but also being able to do the same with any other long, hard item in your inventory, AND having the option of waking him with a merry kazoo interlude instead? You can use a butter knife to get a cashcard from under a desk, but you can also use any of the several pieces of paper, all of which can also be used for drawing maps. Then, when you try to lever up floorboards with the butter knife, it’s obviously too flimsy, and you get left with a bent butter knife. Having so many possibilities and so many avenues to explore not only constantly rewarded the player’s intelligence but provided the vital encouragement needed to make them push through to the very end.”

Before Spellirium, UGAGS games got right around this problem by not offering any item interaction whatsoever. If you clicked on a hotspot, and you had the inventory item that interacted with it, you automatically used the right item. In Jinx 3, if you were carrying the spork, you could tap on the prison wall with it. If you held the banana, you could flush it down the toilet to create a flood. This covered off any puzzle design blunders that i may have committed. Left to his own devices, would the player really know he should tap on the wall with the spork? With auto-item use, i never had to worry about it.

Why force the player to say “use keycard on door” when the interaction is obvious?

Since you can use items on hotspots in Spellirium, i’ve developed a new system to minimize cock-blocking. Given a hotspot like a locked door, i can obviously define what happens when you use the iron key on it. But i can also list other items the player might try to use, like the metal pole (to bash the door down?), and i can have Todd respond in kind: “This metal pole is too flimsy to bash the door down.” That makes the player feel good, because i’m acknowledging that he had a good idea, and it’s so much more satisfying than “i don’t understand that” or “i can’t do that.”

The next line of defense is generic item commands. If i haven’t written an item-specific response, the logic falls through to the hotspot’s generic response, like “i can’t use that to get through the door.” This is a little more frustrating than a specifically-written response, but at least it’s something. One game that i noticed did a LOT of work to provide an item-specific response for every imaginable item/hotspot combination is The Whispered World. Very well done.

4. No – Not THAT Paper

A very common and frustrating mistake that adventure games make is to send the player off in search of something that is represented in the background artwork, but the background element is not wired for interaction. While it’s not a graphic adventure game, i was recently playing the abysmal Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, and a character asked me to go find a piece of paper – “ANY piece of paper”. The setting for this fetch quest was an academy packed to the teats with books, parchments, scrolls and papers of every imaginable kind … but i couldn’t pick any of them up. i had to go hunt down the exact piece of paper the game wanted me to find.

Don’t surround the player with non-interactive books, and then ask him to find “any” piece of paper.

A related problem is the too-damned-interesting-background-art error. This is where you have something in the background that every player clicks on, but you haven’t written a description for it. And the player figures there MUST be something up with that video camera hidden in the plant. But there’s not.

In an attempt to address this, we’re developing a heatmap system for Spellirium where we can analyze players’ clicks. If we notice enough heat on a particular area of the screen that we haven’t wired up for interactivity, of if there’s a hotspot that gets clicked non-proportionally to its relevance, we know we have some splainin’ to do to the player.

Heatmaps: they’re not just for Halo any more.

5. The Pointless Conversation Option

Again, while it’s not a graphic adventure game, there’s a lot we can learn from the steaming pile that is Skyward Sword. Throughout the game, non-player characters ask you to make a choice. “Link! Will you save my kitten from the tree?” You know that, as the hero, you kind of have to save the kitten. Yet you’re given the option to say “No.” And when you do that, the story does not move forward. You MUST re-engage the NPC. You MUST say “Yes” this time. You MUST save the kitten. What was the point of the interaction, other than providing the illusion of interactivity?

The reason why designers do this is, of course, to save work – a LOT of work. If, whenever you made a binary decision, the ramifications spun off wildly into two alternate timelines, you’d be building an impossibly large game. But i can’t stand it when it’s obvious during a conversation that no matter what i “choose” to say, the conversation is always going to go a certain way.

The solution is a trick of good creative writing. It’s fine for the conversation to always lead into the same funnel. It’s not fine for the player to know that. Through clever writing, you can make the player think he’s affecting the conversation, even when he’s not. If you’re crafty, you can even give the player a binary decision with two seemingly opposite inputs, but steer them both around to the same outcome. Consider this conversation snippet from Spellirium between Todd and Lorms:

Todd:

Uh … okay. You can tag along, I guess. [C1]

It’s probably better if I go alone. [C1]

[C1] (Todd walks to the edge of the screen)

Lorms: Where are you going?

Todd: I dunno. That way?

Lorms: Do you have a plan? Do you even know how you’re going to find your friends?

With one option, the player decides that Lorms can come with him. With the other option, the player decides to go it alone. Lorms is one of Spellirium’s main characters. Make no mistake: he’s coming on the journey. But despite what the player chooses, he feels like the game is honouring his choice, and the conversation and actions that flow from that point feel natural – even if the player chooses two completely opposite responses.

The Sins of Our Fathers

The graphic adventure game genre is far from perfect, but there are many things we can do as savvy designers to account for the crimes perpetrate on players past. We have been bad, but we will atone. But will it be enough to resurrect a genre that’s been on life support for the past twenty years?(source:GAMASUTRA)


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