作者：Brandon Sheffield

Randy O’Connor是Tiger Style（代表作包括《蜘蛛：布莱斯庄园的秘密》和《火星漫步》等热门游戏）中一名场景美术师兼设计师。后来O’Connor也组建了自己的小型工作室Phoolish Games。Phoolish刚刚发行首款游戏《Total Toadz》，而这款游戏的灵感正是来源于O’Connor接触《FarmVille》时的感受。

Total Toadz(from toucharcade)

他说道：“在过去的工作中我必须试玩这款游戏以便进行市场调查。《FarmVille》是一款带有农场理念的装饰游戏。但是我不能理解的是为何在这类游戏中也有分数设置？我可以每隔一分钟随意点击一次屏幕，而不管怎样我的分数始终都往上攀升。让我恼火的是它并不能真正表现出玩家的发展，它只能代表玩家的时间投入。难道强迫玩家盲目地提高分数就是一种有趣的游戏机制？”

所以O’Connor便希望玩家能够在《Total Toadz》中真正关注于自己分数的发展。该游戏的核心机制非常简单，即玩家只需要控制三只青蛙中的一只伸出舌头去捕捉下落的苍蝇而获得分数。但是当玩家每次捕捉到一只苍蝇时青蛙的极性便会发生变化。除此之外，一些苍蝇是带有负值，所以玩家便可以使用负极青蛙去抓住这只负值苍蝇而获得正值分数。而如果你觉得这么做不妥的话，你也可以尝试着去争取负值排行榜的首位。

“我希望明确地向玩家呈现这些数值，并让他们能够加，减，乘，除这些数值。”O’Connor说道。“也许他们会在游戏中面临一些糟糕的情境，这时候他们便不得不减去自己的分数，而这也正是游戏的乐趣所在。玩家需要正视这一过程，巧妙地进行分配并向前发展。”

O’Connor补充道：“当我为了调查研究而接触一些Facebook游戏时，我发现这些游戏都很肤浅，并没有什么能够吸引力。我认为我们需要给予玩家奖励，但是这种奖励却不是非必要的。为什么玩家只是登录游戏而已，我们就要‘奖励’他们货币？如果你的游戏带有这样的机制，我认为你终将会遭遇失败。而《Total Toadz》的分数机制则有所不同。如果你真正用心去玩游戏，你便能够在游戏最后获得分数奖励。你也能够明确知道自己挣得了这些分数——特别是当你的任务随着游戏发展而变得更加紧凑之时。”

随着游戏速度的加快，即便是这种简单的游戏机制也有可能被忽略，因为如果苍蝇掉落下来而青蛙未能捕捉到它们，游戏就会结束。有些时候你只是没有过多时间去思考分数的问题。而O’Connor也不敢保证这是否是问题所在。他指出：“我们所面对的主要有两类人，一种是真正关心分数的人（程序员），而另外一种是不在乎分数的人（妈妈级别的玩家），而我们又该如何面向这两类人去调整游戏难度呢？最终我们选择了面向自己，我们调整了游戏难度让它呈现上升趋势，从而使得那些没有经验的玩家能够持续1分多种去追求分数发展，而那些优秀玩家则拥有超过4、5分钟的时间以提高分数。”

从本质上来看游戏总是会在最后阶段延长玩家的失败，而这也是游戏的目标所在。O’Connor说道：“我认为那些较短且大获成功的手机游戏都非常重视游戏的最后阶段。像《水果忍者》和《涂鸦跳跃》便很快提升到游戏高潮。而《屋顶狂奔》又拥有多长的游戏回合呢？我们希望玩家能够快速失败，但是这种失败必须是他们自己造成的，所在1分钟后他们将能够恢复能量和时间而再次进行尝试。而我们所面临的最大问题则是游戏本身的关卡问题，所以我们将不得不做出调整而确保它与心理机制的平衡。”

尽管游戏理念是源于简单的Facebook游戏中的一些元素，但它很难为游戏带来吸引力，部分原因是游戏中牵扯到了一些数学符号而让游戏整体看起来更具有教育性。而一些可爱的图像则让游戏整体更贴近年幼群体。

O’Connor也承认：“人们的确意识到了游戏的图像与核心机制之间存在矛盾。首先，我们的美术风格倾向于创造出色彩鲜艳且平易近人之感，而这也正是能够吸引大多数玩家的重要元素。我并不反对孩子玩游戏，但是我们的游戏并不只面向这类玩家。就像《翼飞冲天》是任何人都能够玩的游戏，并不只针对于儿童玩家。”

“我为这款游戏绘制了许多图像理念，但这种风格更吸引我们。”他补充道。“我们原来有一些抽象且纯粹的技术图像（游戏邦注：就像一些导弹控制类图像），但随后我试着去人格化这些元素。而关于青蛙伸出舌头这一理念对Mike这个程序员来说也是极具吸引力的挑战。让青蛙舌头能够准确且灵活地移动，并看起来更加自然便是一种相对复杂的任务。当你真正以玩家的想法去创造游戏时，就不能再想着偷工减料了。”

这种多变的分数机制是否足以推动那些看似简单的游戏攀上应用排行榜前列？但如果是针对“为何游戏不为玩家提供负值分数？”这个话题，这种做法便不失为一种有趣的尝试。（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）

Tiger Style’s O’Connor asks: Why do scores only go up?

by Brandon Sheffield

Randy O’Connor is an environment artist and designer at Tiger Style, of Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor and Waking Mars fame. If that weren’t indie enough, O’Connor has also formed his own, even smaller studio, called Phoolish Games. Phoolish has just released its first title, Total Toadz, which O’Connor says was inspired by having to play FarmVille for a contract job.

“I had to play the game as research for work at a company I used to work for,” he tells me. “FarmVille was a decorator game with this fascinating concept of farming. But why did I have a score? I could click randomly on the screen once every minute and my score would go up eventually no matter what. I was annoyed that it didn’t reflect growth in the player, just time investment. Wouldn’t it be interesting to force a player to literally play their score?”

Thus, with Total Toadz he ensured that players would have to actually pay attention to their score. The core mechanic is simple — flick the tongues of one of three toads, to catch falling flies that have point values. But every time you catch a fly, the frog’s polarity reverses. What’s more, some flies have negative values, so you want to catch negative flies with negative frogs for a positive score. Or, if you’re feeling cheeky, you can try to go for a negative leaderboard score.

“I wanted to show players the numbers and have them add and subtract and multiply and divide,” Says O’Connor. “Maybe the game gives them a bad situation and they have to subtract from their score, but that’s what’s fun about it. Deal with it, play as smart as you can, and move on.”

“When I think about Facebook games that I had to play for research, most of them rang hollow, I just didn’t care about them. Nothing excited me mechanically. I think we should reward players, but not unnecessarily,” he adds. “Why do we give them ‘bonus’ coins just for logging into the game? If that’s how your game operates, I believe you’ve failed. And it’s not like Total Toadz is mean about your score. If you care, then you will be rewarded by that score at the end of the game. You know you earned it, especially when things get really hectic as the game progresses.”

As the game speeds up, even that simple mechanic can get thrown out the window though, because if one fly drops past the frogs, it’s game over. At some point you simply don’t have time to think about the score. O’Connor isn’t sure whether this is a problem. “What ends up happening is that you have people who care about the score (the programmer) and people who don’t (his mom), and how do you tune the difficulty for both?” he poses. “You have to choose, so we chose for ourselves. We tuned the game so that it ramped up such that our inexperienced players trying to score well lasted a minute or so, and we could last several, maybe four or five minutes, as the best players.”

The endgame is essentially prolonged failure, but that was sort of the goal. “In my opinion, most of the successful quick-session mobile titles are focused on the end-game,” he says. “Fruit Ninja ramps up super quickly, same with Doodle Jump. How long is a session in Canabalt? We need you to fail quickly, but fail because it’s your fault, so after a minute, you have the time and energy for another try. The biggest problem is that our game has that visceral level, but also has to balance it against a mental mechanic.”

Though the game came from a fist-shaking opinion of simplistic Facebook games, it’s been tough to gain traction for the game, partially because it has math symbols in it, which makes it look educational. The cute aesthetic makes the title seem youth-oriented, and I couldn’t help but ask O’Connor how he arrived on that look.

“People do recognize a dissonance between the aesthetic and the game’s central mechanic,” he admits. “Firstly, my natural art style is big and colorful and friendly, why not play to that? That’s exactly the stuff that appeals to most audiences. I’m not opposed to kids playing the game, it’s just not oriented only at them. Tiny Wings is an everyone game, it’s not just for kids. But add math on top of a cute art style…”

“I drew a bunch of aesthetic concepts, and this appealed the most to us,” he adds. “We had abstract, purely technical art. We had a missile-command-like aesthetic, but then I tried personifying the elements, and it clicked. The idea of flicking tongues also appealed to Mike as a programming challenge. It’s quite a task making the tongue move accurately and smoothly and still look good. You can’t cut corners when you’re visually representing a player’s flick like that.”

Is a variable scoring mechanic enough to propel an otherwise simple-looking game to the top of the app charts? Not if people don’t know about it, which is ever the curse of the indie iOS developer. But the experiment is an interesting one, if only to begin the discussion: Why don’t more games allow negative scoring? (source:GAMASUTRA)