下文是Funzio首席设计师Dan Chao的访谈节选内容。Dan涉足各游戏设计领域，作品遍布硬核、休闲、社交和手机平台。Dan曾担任Xbox游戏《New Legends》的玩法机制工程师，休闲游戏《Wandering Willows》的首席设计师，及最近刚推出的社交/手机游戏《Crime City》和《Kingdom Age》的首席设计师。

首先能否谈谈什么是游戏设计？

游戏设计包括很多版块。我觉得这归根到底就是具体类型的游戏设计师。有人擅长创作故事及塑造人物角色，有人喜欢和数字、调节及经济学原理打交道。

然后就出现机制关卡设计；游戏的具体运作模式。“定义核心循环机制”已变成大家惯用的说法。

但在我看来，这里的关键是如何将所有机制组合起来，构成连贯、清晰的设计。

听起来你好像更注重机制设计，这是否是你比较感兴趣的版块？

这无疑是最令我着迷的内容。我倾向让设计配合公司的局限条件（游戏邦注：编程或美工元素过多过少之类的资源局限）。正如大家所说的，这些人才有点像是公司的DNA。

目前社交领域最令我欣赏的一点是，游戏不仅仅是围绕趣味性。你需要基于其他的参数数据完善游戏，而这在有些人看来，显得有些不妥。但事实情况是，这促使游戏获得丰厚营收，得到病毒式传播。再来就是留存率，我觉得这和趣味性一样重要。

传统游戏的商业模式是，你购买一个60美元的盒装产品，然后它就会体现在你的Metacritic评分中，是吧？。若你的Metacritic评分很高，意味着游戏颇具趣味，或者你掏钱请知名评论者当托儿，是吧？也就是说游戏所维系的是评论分数。所以游戏最好是颇具趣味。

只要你购买产品，就万事大吉，是吧？他们已经向你付费。

他们也许会讨厌游戏，也许会在玩过半小时之后，将其退还给GameStop，从中换得35美元。

是的，但若游戏足够杰出和有趣，那么就会形成口碑传播，评论分数就会变高。

在社交游戏领域，情况就有些不同。因为你拥有众多免费玩家。你会促使某些玩家掏钱买东西。游戏包含众多元素， 因此我们很难下定论说在此成瘾性多过趣味性，但我觉得MMO游戏也是如此。其中有些内容也许不那么有趣，但其极富沉浸性。

这些内容在游戏创收方面发挥重要作用。如今在游戏设计中融入大量商业构思变得越发重要。这回到我在行业的最初经历（《New Legends》）。

的确。

《New Legends》这款游戏最终以失败告终。我发誓绝不让同样的情况再次发生。所以我觉得你需要考虑方方面面，但在我看来，游戏设计的本质就是机制关卡设计。

关于参数，我最近刚完成一款免费游戏，如果你去参加GDC，定会听到很多人谈论此话题，称此做法有些不当。你显然将参数看作是“如今的游戏设计世界”。在我看来，以60美元出售游戏作品也好不到哪里去。最终带来这样的商业模式：以60美元出售游戏作品，然后将数百万美元投入营销活动中。但你已习惯于满足营销部门或预算控制人员的合理要求，“牺牲”作品的“艺术美感”。

现在这一对象变成玩家。你的倾听对象是真正体验你游戏的玩家，从中获悉他们的真正所想，真正表现情况。

其中确有存在些许不当之处。我觉得和其他活动一样，其中都涉及一定的成瘾性和操控性。但我觉得这体现在各类型的游戏中。没有人会抱怨《魔兽世界》，但这款游戏也植入相同的机制。

显然这一领域还存在其他有趣的玩法机制。我觉得社交游戏正在逐步朝此靠拢。我们努力将某些内容变得饶有趣味。但另一方面，要求玩家每日返回游戏的约定机制仍旧存在。

听起来你似乎基于务实角度着手游戏设计，注重把握合作人员、团队和预算的局限性，且真正靠此激发设计灵感。

能否列举具体事例，说明你如何发现团队或公司的局限性所在，以及过去你是如何提高设计的质量？

《Kingdom Age》就是个很好的例子，游戏目前搭载Google+，即将在Facebook推出。我觉得其中的局限性在于，当时我们刚着手《Crime City》引擎。我们不敢过多偏离《Crime City》设计。

植入游戏的很多功能都是基于《Crime City》内容做出进一步完善。但对于工程师来说，落实这些内容轻而易举：不一定简单，但要避免出现重复。

《Kingdom Age》颇令我满意的一点内容是，你现在可以训练自己的单位。但之前在《Modern War》/《Crime City》中，玩家直接购买这些元素，能够立即获得。这更多像是RTS机制，所以我们在此融入训练时间。

虽然这会令玩家觉得颇为不同，但最终内容获得简化，编程方面不再显得那么令人抓狂。“我们已获得这一道具，我们需要在此道具中添加时间元素。”我们还添加许多其他元素。但游戏范围有其局限性。

我清楚我们需要尽快解决这一问题。

在制作游戏的过程中，工程师经验在游戏设计方面起到多大作用？之前担任过工程师能够起到什么促进作用？是不是体现在同工程师的沟通方面？还是能够在机制方面达成折中方案？

是的，我设计的机制执行起来很方便。所以如今我开始考虑既定功能的数据库模式。我探索出能够轻松控制内容的方式。

因此我发现，单通过添加乘数和若干沉浸性元素就能够改变游戏内容。而且工程师执行起来也不困难。

这就是许多RPG游戏的运作模式。这里仅围绕若干庞大的电子表格，我觉得若你能够在电子表格中新增一栏，情况可能就不会这么糟糕。并非所有内容都基于这一模式。但我会计算功能所需的成本，主要基于执行过程所耗时长及其中涉及人员。想想这将带来的回馈。

在外界看来，那些尚未开发过游戏的人士多半不会考虑内容的执行难度。你通常只是希望获得出色的内容。就你看来，提议开发新功能时，考虑其成本为何如此重要？

在我看来，这归根结底就是个商业决策，根本来说，就是你的投资回报。若你所开发的内容无论如何也无法收回成本，那么这就不值得你进行投资，你就需要寻找更好的解决方案，或是不同的赚钱方式。

把握开发过程所需耗费的时间，不是所有人都懂得如何进行计算。最终，你需要和工程师、美工进行沟通。但了解项目的各个方面非常重要。不仅是编程成本，甚至包括资产成本。你需要生成多少美术资产，方能促使这一功能得以形成，且带来收益？

我觉得这点对社交游戏更加重要，在此你可以直接在已推出的游戏作品中发布新功能，然后查看其创收情况。

是的，就经验来看，这就是项目各工程师、美工投入整整一个月时间制作某功能，然后将其推出，玩家在此体验一个星期后完事。你可以计算自己投入多少资金，玩家在此体验多长时间。然后你就会说：“噢，我的天啊”。这是个惨痛的教训；经历1-2次挫折后，你就会说：“我再也不要开发耗时超过1周的内容。”

就这种情况来看，尤其是在社交游戏领域，客户端功能是最佳选择。它们无需用户进行安装，你只需要对数据稍加调整。

关于游戏设计方面，什么最令你感到沮丧？

我觉得是各种决策。有时这也许是关于你是否要呈现故事内容更丰富的游戏作品，但这意味着玩家将享有较少的选择性。有时这意味着你需要在此突出虚拟交易，但你会因此无法强化游戏的真实趣味或选择性。

我觉得主要体现在决策方面。我不确定这是否一定会令人感到沮丧，但无疑是最艰难的部分。

能否列举一个当时你觉得异常艰难的决策，但现在回过头来看，“你觉得自己的决定是正确的，游戏因此活得完善。”

笑。

或者现在你回过头来看，颇为懊悔？

（笑）其中无疑存在许多遗憾。这里我举个反面例子。（笑）我觉得社交游戏的棘手部分在于病毒式传播或创收之类的内容方面，设计师很难做出着眼于这些目标的决策。和添加更多材料，建造建筑一样，你必须寻求好友的援助。显然，这其实是令人生厌的内容，你要求他们在自己的公告栏发布消息或是发出请求。这将延缓他们获得材料的时间。

但最终，这将带来更好的病毒式传播。我觉得现代游戏的另一特点是，倾向在游戏表面加载众多精彩内容，这样用户就会看到所有这些元素。就像《龙腾世纪2》，是吧？在初始的指导教程中，你会看到许多精彩内容。

是的，你变成Super Hawke。

然后你将逐步丧失这些元素。同样的情况也出现在休闲可下载内容领域。这一领域由一小时的试验内容主导，所以你必须在这一小时里植入尽可能多的杰出内容。

但这意味着你的递进设计将完全一团糟。这就像是“现在我要如何继续从此逐步前进？”，这在社交游戏领域也是如此。“他们现在接触的是指南教程。他们从中看到精彩内容。”其中包含从天而降的龙或精彩的坦克射击。

随后你开始围绕小小的粘连铁块。或者也许你向他们提供一把很棒的宝剑。但你要如何在此继续推进游戏？你如何呈现更精彩的内容？这无疑有些令人沮丧。我是从商业视角出发。这80、90年代的游戏无疑不是这个样子。

开发《New Legends》期间，《绝地武士》就已问世，它是否始终是PC玩家的游戏首选？

差不多。

《绝地武士》的设计者是Justin Chin？

是的，是Justin Chin。

当时他是全球顶级的游戏设计师。我仔细阅读其中所有期刊；在我看来，它们就像是设计宝典。配备曾经创造出杰出游戏作品的精英团队，投入如此多的时间开发《New Legends》，此后我们再没有遇到过这种情况。

你清楚没有基于商业角度考虑业务发展将发生什么情况，这是否能够让你更简单地做出病毒式传播或创收决策？因为你清楚发生什么情况？

是的（笑）。我曾接触过很多在项目结束后就关闭的工作室，例如，掌机项目结束后，你没有从中得到版税。然后你就争取下笔交易，四处给各发行商打电话。

没有人想要陷入这种境地，没有人想要失去自己的薪资。我显然想过这点，这令事情变得更简单。

但我并不觉得这有什么错，我想其他人也有可能这样想。但这就是我。（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）

“What is Game Design?” with Dan Chao

The following are excerpts from a conversation with Dan Chao, Lead Designer at Funzio.  Dan’s work runs the full gamut of design, including releases in the Core, Casual, Social and Mobile segments of the industry.  Dan has worked as gameplay engineer on Xbox launch title New Legends, lead designer on the casual game Wandering Willows, and most recently lead designer on social/mobile games Crime City, and Kingdom Age.

To start with, what is game design?

Dan Chao: There are so many different parts of it. I feel like it goes down to the talents of certain types of game designers. There are obviously people that are good at writing story and coming up with characters. There are people that are just great with the numbers, tuning, the economy.

Then, there’s the system level design; how the game actually works. I guess calling it “defining the core loops” has become the fancy term that people throw around.

But to me, that’s really at the heart of everything is designing how all those systems work together, to make a cohesive, clean and consistent design.

And it sounds like you trend towards system design, is kind of your passion at the heart.

Dan Chao: That’s definitely what I’m passionate about. I like to tailor the design to all the limitations of the company, whether that be the resource limitations of being engineering heavy or light, or art heavy or light. And just the talents and kind of the DNA of the company, as they say.

Nowadays, in Social, what I like is that it’s not just about making the game fun. You have to optimize the game around these other metrics, which some people might say is soulless. But there are just the realities of making the game monetize well, making the game viral. And then retention, which I feel is the same thing as fun.

So, with traditional games, the business model was you buy a $60 box product and then it basically comes to your Metacritic score, right? Your Metacritic score is high, that means the game is really fun or you paid awesome reviewers, right? And that’s what the game lives or dies by, is just that review score. So that game better be fun.

And then once they’ve bought the product, it doesn’t matter, right? They’ve already given you their money.

They might hate it. They might play for half an hour and then return it to GameStop for $35.

Dan Chao: Yeah. But if it’s good enough and it’s fun enough, then word of mouth will travel and review scores will be high.

With social games, it’s a bit different. Because you have all these free players. You have some people paying. You have a lot of elements that, it’s hard to say whether it’s more addicting than fun, but I kind of feel MMOs are the same way. There are these things that may not be fun but may just be addictive.

And those things are important to have the game make money. I think more than ever, it’s important for game design to incorporate a lot of business thought behind things. Which comes back to like my original experience in the industry [on New Legends].

Right.

Dan Chao: Which, that game just totally flopped [and the studio folded after not being able to land another publishing deal]. I just vowed that would never happen again. So, I think you have to consider everything, but game design to me, at the heart, is that system-level design.

With regards to metrics, having done a free-to-play game recently too, I feel like you go to GDC and there are a lot of people who crap on it and say it’s soulless. You are clearly embracing metrics as “this is the world of game design now.” It always strikes me that selling games for $60 is just as soulless. Only, someone else designed the business model for you: sell at $60 and spend millions and millions on marketing. Whereas you used to have to take on reasonable requests from a marketing department or someone who controls a giant budget, and “ruins” your “artistic vision.”

Well, now it’s players. Now you’re taking your crap from the people playing your game and what they actually want, and what their behaviors actually are.

Dan Chao: There is some truth to the soulless part. I think, just with anything, there’s a sense of addiction and manipulation. But I feel like you see that in all sorts of games. No one craps all over World of Warcraft. But it does have the same certain set of mechanics.

Obviously there are other mechanics that are very fun. I feel like social games are getting there, too. There are certain things where we try to make it really fun. While, on the other side, we do also have  the appointment mechanic which forces people to come back every day.

It sounds like you approach design from a very pragmatic sense in recognizing the limitations and constraints of the people you’re working with and the team you’re on and the budget. And actually taking that to inspire the design.

Do you have an example of when you recognized a constraint or a limitation within your team or within your company, and how you used to improve the quality of the design?

Dan Chao: Kingdom Age is a good example, which is out on Google+ right now, and is coming to Facebook. I think the limitation was that we were starting with the Crime City engine. And we really couldn’t stray too far from the Crime City design.

A lot of the features that went into it were small evolutions over Crime City. But all of them simple to implement for an engineer: not necessarily simple but not reinventing the wheel.

So, something with Kingdom Age which I thought was pretty good was that you trained units now. Whereas before, in Modern War/Crime City, you buy them outright and get them instantly. So this ended up being more of an RTS mechanic and we added the training time on top of that.

So, while it feels different to the player, in the end I’m definitely simplifying things, but the engineering side isn’t that crazy. “Okay, we have this item. We need to add a time to that item.” And there’s a ton of other things that we added, too. But it was definitely limited, more than limited in scope.

And I knew we had to get it out quickly.

When you’re working on a game, how important is your past as an engineer to helping you be a designer? What about being a former engineer helps? Is it the communication with engineers? The ability to compromise on systems?

Dan Chao: Yeah. I design the systems to be relatively easy to implement. So I actually think, nowadays, about the database schema of a given feature. And I figure out easy ways to manipulate things.

So often it’s just adding a multiplier and some additive component that I feel will change the game for players. But not be that bad for the engineer to implement.

Which is how a lot of RPGs work. There’s just some large spreadsheet and I feel like if you’re going to add another column to that spreadsheet, it can’t be that bad. Not everything works out like that. But I try to measure the cost of the feature in terms of how long it’s going to take to implement and how many people it’s going to take. And think about what the return is going to be.

For people who have never developed a game before, from the outside, you would never think about the difficulty to implement the thing. You just want the cool stuff. From your experience, why is it so important to consider the cost of developing a feature when proposing it?

Dan Chao: For me it comes down to a business decision. It’s ultimately your return on investment. If whatever you’re developing isn’t going to make its money back, then it’s not worth it and you need to figure out a better way to do it, or a different way to make money.

Being able to figure out how long something’s going to take, not everyone can do it off the top of their head. Ultimately you need to talk to the engineers and the artists. But it is important to understand every single aspect of the project. And not just the engineering costs, but even the asset costs. How many art assets are you going to have to generate in order for this feature to come to life and monetize?

I think that’s more important now than ever, with social games, where you can literally just launch one feature on your already-launched game, and see how much money it makes you.

Yeah. I can say from experience having done one or two of those features where it’s every engineer on the project, every artist, a whole month, you release it and people play it for a week and they’re done. And you can calculate how much money you’ve spent and how much time people spent playing it. And you go “Oh my God.” It was a hard lesson to learn; you do one or two of those and you say “I’m never doing anything that takes over a week again.”

Dan Chao: Yeah. With those sorts of things, especially social games, obviously the server-side features are the best. They need no client implementation and you can add a few tweaks of the numbers.

What do you find most frustrating about game design?

Dan Chao: I think there are decisions you have to make, one way or the other, you know? Sometimes it can be about whether you want a more story-rich game, but then that means sometimes you have to introduce less choices to the player. Sometimes it means you have to emphasize monetization here and you can’t emphasize the actual fun or choice of the game.

I think those choices have to be made. I don’t know if it’s necessarily frustrating or not. But it’s definitely the hardest part.

Can you give a good example of a choice you’ve had to make that you found especially difficult at the time and now, in hindsight, you think “I did the right thing and the game’s better for it.”

Dan Chao: [laughs]

Or is only a world of regret when you look back?

Dan Chao: [laughs] there are a lot of regrets, sure. I could definitely give the opposite example. [laughs] I guess the harder things in social games like virality and monetization, which feels unnatural to the game designer to make a decision in favor of. Like adding more materials to build a building you have to ask your friends for. Obviously, it’s going to be way more of a pain in the ass and you’re making them post it on their wall or do a request. And it’s going to take them longer to get.

But ultimately, it may lead to like better virality. I think something that’s also true with, especially more modern games, the tendency to front load a game with as much cool stuff as possible so the user gets to see all that stuff. So, Dragon Age 2, right? The opening tutorial, you had all this awesome stuff.

Right. You were Super Hawke.

Dan Chao: Yeah. And then you get stripped of a lot of that stuff. And the same thing is true with the casual downloadable industry. It’s ruled by the one-hour trial, so you pack as much cool crap into that one hour as possible.

But then it means your ramp is totally fucked up at that point. It’s like, “Okay, now how do I ramp from here?” And that’s true in social games, too. “Okay, they’re in the tutorial. They can see all this cool crap.” You make a dragon come by or a tank shoot.

And then you’re running around with this little pig sticker. Or maybe you give them an awesome sword. But then how do you know how to ramp up the game from there? How do you make something cooler? And that’s definitely frustrating. I get it from a business standpoint. It’s definitely not how games were in the 90s or 80s.

But, I don’t think we’re in as puritanical an age anymore.

Well, do you think that the experience of being on New Legends, where Jedi Knight was at the time, was it PC gamers’ number one PC game of all time…

Dan Chao: Something like that, yeah.

…and was it Justin Chin?

Dan Chao: Yeah, Justin Chin.

Was one of PC Gamer’s top designers in the world. I read every one of those magazines; they were like a Bible to me. To have such talented team who had previously worked on such an incredible game, to spend so long in development on New Legends and then not be able to get another deal after that.

Seeing what happens when you don’t pay attention to the business side of the business, does that make it easier for you to make those viral or monetization choices? Because you know what happens?

Dan Chao: Yeah. [Laughs] I mean, I’ve definitely been part of many studios that were either crumbled right after a game or, from project to project, like a project finishes, you don’t really see royalties off that in the console industry. And then you’re just scrambling for the next deal and cold-calling all the publishers.

So no one wants to be in that position and no one wants to miss payroll. I definitely think about that and it makes things easier. Maybe I’ve gone in totally the opposite direction where it’s like I’ve totally joined the dark side.

But, I guess I don’t see as much wrong with it as I feel like other people do, you know? But that’s just me.（Source：famousaspect）