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Guy Lima谈创造优秀益智游戏的经验

发布时间:2013-04-13 15:30:19 Tags:,,,,

作者:Herman Tulleken

在关于益智游戏设计的访问中,我们与Ragtime Games的其中一位创始人Guy Lima进行了交谈。Ragtime Games为我们创造了《Continuity》这款滑动砖块的平台益智游戏,还将为我们呈现出其续集,《Continuity 2》。

在《Continuity》中,游戏的平台环节是关于找到一把钥匙,并打开门从一个关卡进入下一个关卡。但是游戏世界是建立在砖块之上,平且这些砖块都很混乱。而游戏的谜题部分便是滑动砖块让角色可以在游戏世界中到处走动。与许多滑动游戏谜题不同的是,《Continuity》的关卡并未设有静态的解决方法——玩家必须连续移动砖块才能让角色朝着出口前进。

《Continuity》在2010年的Independent Games Festival上获得了“最佳学生游戏”奖,并在IndieCade 2010上获得游戏玩法创新奖。

continiuty_banner(from devmag)

continiuty_banner(from devmag)

Guy Lima回答了我们所提出的一系列问题。

Dev.Mag:一款优秀的益智游戏的质量是怎样的?

我认为真正优秀的谜题总是能够长时间困住玩家,但是当玩具想出解决方法时,他们也并不清楚自己之前为何会那般迷惑。

Dev.Mag:你们是遵循何种过程去设计益智游戏?

我不确定在《Continuity》中我们是否遵循了特定的关卡设计过程。不过以我个人来讲,我在创造关卡时会遵循两种方法,一种便是我已经明确知道自己想要创造出什么样的内容,而另一种便是我在创造过程中所探索到的。

回首之前的创造,如果在创造关卡前我能更明确自己想要创造的目标关卡,那么最终我便能够创造出更棒的关卡。也就是这些关卡将更有侧重点。并且它们也会比我在前进过程中所创造出来的关卡更加独特。

对于《Continuity 2》,在设计前我们便投入了大量时间去考虑每个关卡的设计。而游戏测试将帮助我们做到这一点,因为它将预示着难度曲线何时出现偏差。

Dev.Mag:在创造基于较少机制的益智游戏的续集中,你是如何保证谜题的乐趣?并且你是如何在未引进任何新元素的前提下维持前进感?

拥有较少机制的一大优势便是我们能够尽早地通过它们获得盈利,并更快地转向关卡设计。所以,尽管开发过程经历了不到2个月的时间,我们却能够投入大量的时间去设计关卡,而无需担心机制会发生改变。因为机制足够稳定,所以我们能够想出一些更有趣的使用方法。

为了推动玩家继续前进,我们采取的另一种方法便是有效地管理关卡,如此便不会出现随着玩家的前进而关卡越变越复杂的情况。我们发现,如果你在玩家刚刚完成一个复杂的关卡时立即呈现出一个更复杂的关卡,他们便会失去继续挑战的兴趣。而如果你提供一个能够让他们觉得“足够简单”的关卡,他们便会更乐意继续挑战。而当他们再次找回自信后,你便可以继续呈现出复杂的关卡了。

Dev.Mag:你们是如何判断一个谜题是否有趣,以及解决该谜题的难度是怎样的?

因为我们已经致力于《Continuity》很长一段时间了,所以即使未进行游戏测试我们也能很轻松地做出判断。我们所需要做的便是相信自己创造的机制足够有趣便可。为了做到这点,我们只需要尝试着让不同关卡侧重不同的元素或机制结果便可。而最后,我们还是需要游戏测试的帮助,即从中明确玩家是否受挫还是感到开心。

Dev.Mag:在访问中你说过,在《Continuity》中,你们希望玩家能够通过游戏掌握到各种内容。你们是否在关卡设计中使用策略去创造清晰的游戏玩法并引导玩家去解决问题?

在创造《Continuity》的早期我们便明确了一件事,即我们想要避开帮助文本,因为许多玩家都不会去阅读这一内容(游戏邦注:特别是在Flash游戏中,即玩家只要通过点击便可以跳到下一个内容)。我们如果在玩家开始游戏前呈献出大量文本,他们便不会愿意长时间游戏。

删除文本后我们决定利用玩家对游戏规则的误解去进行内容传达,即我们让玩家能够意识到他们关于游戏的假设和猜想都是错误的。

举个例子来说吧,在《Continuity》,当两个砖块的共享边缘完全匹配时,我们只能移动角色从一个砖块前进到另一个砖块。这一规则不一定是玩家所预期的,所以我们便尝试在在游戏早期阶段设置一些关卡而诱导玩家进行尝试,并让他们不能穿越非匹配型砖块。我们便是通过这种方法去设计关卡,即让玩家多次遭遇这种情境,从而希望他们能够思考为什么有的边界能够顺利通过有的却不行。

能否为那些想要设计属于自己的益智游戏的人提供一些建议?

我发现当别人在测试你的游戏时最好把嘴闭上。当然了,看着测试者采取相同的方式而屡次遭遇失败是件非常痛苦的事(游戏邦注:你会认为人们在失败后将采取不同的方法,但是他们却并未这么做)。一旦你张开嘴巴,你所获得的反馈便会带有偏见。甚至当你问“为什么你要这么做时”,玩家也会做出不同于自己真正做法的反应。所以请在测试时安静地在旁边观看,并记录下每个你需要为其设计解决方法的问题。

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

How are puzzle games designed? Guy Lima

By Herman Tulleken

In this instalment of our puzzle design interviews, we talk to Guy Lima, one of the founders of Ragtime Games. Ragtime Games brought us Continuity, a sliding-tile platform puzzler, and will soon bring us the sequel, Continuity 2, as well.

In Continuity, the platform part of the game is finding a key and unlocking the door to escape from one level to the next. But the world is put onto tiles, and the tiles are scrambled. The puzzle part of the game is sliding the tiles so that the character can move around in the world. Unlike many sliding game puzzles, Continuity levels do not have static solutions – players must move tiles continuously to get the character towards the key or the exit.

Continuity won Best Student Game at the 2010 Independent Games Festival and the Gameplay Innovation Award at IndieCade 2010.

Guy Lima answers our questions below.

Dev.Mag: What are the qualities of a good puzzle?

I think a really great puzzle stumps you for a long time, but once you’ve figured it out, you just can’t understand how you didn’t get it before.

Dev.Mag: What process do you follow to design puzzles?

I’m not sure that we ever had a specific process of level design in Continuity. Personally, I’d say my time was split evenly between making levels where I’d have a very clear vision of what I wanted and those where I just kind of explored while creating.

Looking back, I think the more concrete a level was in my mind before I started making it, the better it turned out. Those levels just seemed to be more focused. They also feel much more distinct than the ones I created by just making it up as I went along.

For Continuity 2, we’re trying to spend more time considering what we want from each level before we design it. Playtesting really helps with this, as it indicates when our difficulty curve is way out of whack.

Dev.Mag: In a sequence of puzzles based on a small set of mechanics, how do you make sure the puzzles stay interesting? How do you maintain a feel of progression without introducing new elements later in the game?

One of the good aspects of having such a small set of mechanics is that we were able to finalize them early and move on to designing levels. So, even though development was less than two months, we were able to spend a large portion of time designing levels without being concerned that some mechanical change would come up and render a bunch of levels obsolete. Since the mechanics were stable, we were hopefully able to figure out some of the more interesting uses.

Another way in which we tried to keep the player motivated to continue was to arrange the levels so that they didn’t just get harder and more complicated as the player progressed. We found that, if you presented another level that looked harder directly after the player had completed a difficult level, he or she would just lose interest in continuing. If you gave the player a level that made them think, “Oh, this looks easy”, they’d be more likely to play. Once they got their confidence back up, you could confront them with a really hard level.

Dev.Mag: How do you judge whether a puzzle is fun and how difficult it is to solve?

We’ve been working on Continuity for a while now so it’s not really easy for us to do either in the absence of playtesting. What we have to do is just trust that the mechanics that we’ve created are fun. Using that, we just try to make diverse levels that emphasize different aspects or consequences of the mechanics. In the end though, it all comes down to playtesting and whether people find something frustrating or fun.

Dev.Mag: In an interview you said that, in Continuity, you wanted the player to learn everything by playing the game. Do you use strategies in your level design to make the gameplay clear and to guide the player towards the solution?

(http://www.bitmob.com/articles/continuity-developer-interview)

One thing we decided very early on in Continuity was that we wanted to avoid help text, because many players just won’t read it (especially in Flash games, where the player can just click on to the next thing). Our thought was that if we put up walls of text before the player gets to play, people wouldn’t bother playing for long.

Our main strategy for teaching the game without text was based on trying to anticipate misunderstandings of the game’s rules. Then we’d put the player in a position where he or she could realize that what he or she assumed about the game was incorrect.

For example, in Continuity, you can only move the character from one tile to another when the two tiles match exactly along their shared edge. This rule isn’t necessarily something you would anticipate, so what we did was put some levels really early in the game that enticed the player to try and fail to cross such a non-matching edge. We tried to design levels in such a way that players would be confronted with this situation several times, hoping that they’d reflect on why they were able to cross certain borders but not others.

Do you have any advice for those who want to design their own puzzles?

I’ve found it very helpful to just shut up when someone is playtesting my game. It’s often excruciatingly painful to watch as someone just completely fails over and over again in the exact same way (you’d think after failing, people would try a different approach, but they often don’t). Once you open your mouth you’ve biased your study. Even asking, “Why’d you do that just now” leads the player to reflect on their actions in a way they normally wouldn’t. So just watch and note down every moment that you cringe as a problem for which you need to design a solution.(source:devmag)


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