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分享为触屏设计游戏控制方式的3个建议

发布时间:2013-04-17 14:33:44 Tags:,,,

作者:Anna Marsh(Lady Shotgun Games设计总监)

数年前,我所有的设计经验都来自控制器/键盘—–仅接触过一些Wii体感控制以及跨平台游戏的DS触屏设计。我喜欢DS设备,经常在上下班途中用它玩游戏,但对它的使用仅局限在公交车上。

之后我得到了一个iPod Touch和iPad,发现自己彻底沉迷于移动游戏和触屏界面。

我这击玩过Wii U版本的《蝙蝠侠:阿甘之城》,这是款出众的游戏,设计精良,恰如其分地再现了成为蝙蝠侠的感觉。

但仅在几分钟之内,我就失去了对其控制方式的耐心。

我得按压这个键,然后才能从滑翔中降落?我得触发哪两个按钮才能激活侦查模式?在战斗中同时点击两个摇杆?

这并不是在指责游戏开发团队Rocksteady,他们确实制作了一款杰出的游戏,以这种游戏控制器瞄准了特定用户群体,但也让我意识到自己居然已经不再从属于这一群体,只想通过点触界面与游戏互动。

Buddha Finger(fromladyshotgun)

Buddha Finger(fromladyshotgun)

最便捷的途径

便捷性通常是驱使用户转变消费方式的刺激因素,例如城外的超市就已将街头小店赶尽杀绝,而家庭主机也取代了街机。

许多人都已经指出,移动设备的便捷性构成了主机游戏的最大威胁。

那些弃主机而选移动设备的用户,多数是看中后者的便捷性,而未必是性能、质量或其他因素。但对我而言,移动设备的吸引力不仅仅是数字发行方式及便携性,触屏界面也是其便捷性的来源。

触屏设备移除了用户与游戏之间的关键隔层,意味着你无需通过键盘、鼠标或控制器就能直接“触摸”游戏。

游戏手柄对经常玩游戏的群体来说并不陌生,但对于不熟悉游戏的人来说则难以上手,这也导致游戏仅局限于“游戏玩家”这一特定群体。

但现在不一样了,几乎每个人都可以在数少内理解触屏的操作要领。

我的建议

如果你仍然不知如何更好地使用这种很棒而亲密的界面,可以参考我们Lady Shotgun针对触屏设计首款游戏《Buddha Finger》所总结的三个经验。

令其富有生气。相对控制器,触屏针对玩家输入的响应性更为重要,因为它没有前者那种摁压到实体按钮上的那种触感。

无论玩家是否准确输入,都要尽量创造更多技术或视觉上的输出结果。

在《Buddha Finger》这款游戏中,玩家每次的正确或错误操作,都会触发10-20个事件——包括音效、玩法屏幕和HUD上的视觉效果。

有些事件几乎是潜意识的,例如敌人遭遇损害时身体会瞬间闪光;有些事件则极为明显,例如敌人痛苦的表情会变得比默认表情大150%。

玩家实际上只用相对较少的输入,就可以获得大量输出结果。

游戏速度越快,点触区域就要越大。你不能像使用实体按钮那样,感知屏幕点触区域的大小。点触区域越小,你就越需要花时间重新调整触点。

《Clash of Clans》和《Hay Day》的游戏屏幕上都有大量你可以一次点触就选中的物品,每个元素在屏幕上都相对较小。

但由于这两款游戏的节奏都较为从容不迫,所以你不会面临完成某项操作的时间压力。如果你不幸按错了,也还可以移动手指重新选择。

《Super Hexagon》和《Punch Quest》则将屏幕右侧或左侧作为整个点触区域。

对于这种游戏来说,设置这种大型的输入区域是必要之举,因为点错区域或者速度太慢,都会严重影响游戏进程。

在《Buddha Finger》中,我们在Retina分辨率或与之相当的屏幕上双倍扩展了点触区域(约100像素直径)以便让玩家在短时间内找到和定位点触区域。

允许灵活移动手指。我喜欢针对触屏设计游戏的原因之一就是,玩家无需像手持控制器一样将手固定在同一个位置,而是允许玩家在屏幕上自由移动手指。

在《Buddha Finger》这款游戏中,你可以快速定位屏幕上出现的点触区域,我希望让玩家获得一种可以用手指在屏幕上练武术的感觉。

我用了一些模式来定位屏幕上的点触区域和触碰类型——例如,假如点触区域螺旋式分布在屏幕左侧,下一个就会出现在右侧,然后在屏幕顶端出现一些,之后在底部出现一个大点触面。

点触区域快慢相间的出现速度(游戏邦注:最快时2/10秒,慢时5/10秒)为游戏创造了一种节奏感。我的目标就是重现经典功夫电影中的那种节奏和移动艺术。

结果很成功,即使是在现实生活中最不敏捷的玩家,也能在游戏中获得像《Finger Ninjas》那种体验。

总结

主机手柄和控制方式历时15年发展,才形成了今天这种控制单个玩家的良好效果,AAA领域能够发挥这一效用的游戏却基本上是第三人称和第一人称游戏。

触屏则极大解放了这种局限于单个角色的控制方式,给予玩家全新的互动体验。

我认为针对移动设备设计游戏,最重要的就是,不要受限于沿袭前人的做法,而是尽可能挖掘界面的潜力。

探索一切可能性,打破常规,确保游戏呈现丰富的玩法!(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

Top 3 tips for designing play for touchscreens, by Lady Shotgun Games

by Anna Marsh

Anna Marsh is design director at Lady Shotgun Games, a co-operative of freelance game developers.

It’s supposed to be spring, so what better time to embrace some positive energy.

This month I’m going to write about how awesome touchscreens are, especially since veteran designer Warren Spector recently admitted to having “no idea” how to design for them.

A few years ago all my design experience had been for controller/keyboard – bar some dabbling with Wii motion controls and the DS touchscreen for cross-platform titles. I did love my DS, which was constantly with me on commutes, but my use of it was confined to public transport.

But then I got an iPod touch and an iPad, and found myself completely converted to mobile gaming and the touchscreen interface.

Here’s how much of a convert – I was playing the Wii U version of Batman: Arkham City this week. It’s a fantastic game, really well designed and totally captures the feel of being Batman.

Nevertheless, within a few minutes I was running out of patience with the controls to the point where I thought “screw this.”

I have to press this and then what to drop from a glide? Trigger which two buttons to initiate investigation mode? Click both thumbsticks together in the middle of combat? Pffft!

That’s no dig at Rocksteady. The team has made an excellent game, targeting a demographic at ease with game controllers, but it made me realise how quickly I’ve moved from being part of that demographic, to wishing I could just damn well TOUCH things to interact with them.

Path of least resistance

Convenience is often the driver of customers from one way of consuming things to another – out of town supermarkets decimating high street shops, for instance, or home consoles replacing arcades.

Plenty of people have already pinpointed the convenience of mobile as the biggest threat to console gaming too.

Punters historically massively favour more convenience over greater performance, quality, choice or other factors. For me, it’s not only the digital delivery of mobile and its portability but also the touchscreen interface that provides this convenience.

The touchscreen has removed a crucial layer between user and game, meaning you don’t have to mediate through keyboard, mouse or controller. Instead, you are directly in touch with the game.

The use of a gamepad is a convention which seems natural to those that play games regularly but presents a learning curve to the uninitiated which has helped keep games confined to ‘gamers.’

Well, NO MORE! Absolutely anyone can understand a touchscreen in seconds.

Take my advice

If you’re still with Warren Spector in wondering how best to use this awesome and intimate interface, here are three things I learned about designing for touchscreens while we at Lady Shotgun worked on our first game: Buddha Finger.

(Incidentally, there’s plenty of far more in-depth touchscreen design advice out there: take a look here and here for example)

Make it Juicy – Response to player input is even more important on touchscreens than on controllers where the player has tactile sense to confirm that they have pressed a button.

For every right or wrong input the player makes, try creating as many outputs as you can technically and aesthetically get away with.

On Buddha Finger, for every correct press or mistake the player makes, between 10 and 20 events are triggered – audio effects, visual effects on the gameplay screen and the HUD.

Some of these are almost subconscious – flashing enemy bodies white for two frames when they take damage – and some are very obvious – enemy pain expression faces are150 percent larger than the default face.

I recently heard the term “juicy” to describe this, which I love. The player is essentially squeezing a heck of a lot out with a relatively small input.

Faster the game, larger the touch areas – You cannot tell by feel alone of the extent of touch areas on a screen, as you can with a physical button. The smaller the touch area, the more time you need to co-ordinate a touch to it.

Clash of Clans and Hay Day have a myriad of items on screen you can select with a touch, and each element is relatively small on screen.

But since the pace of both games is leisurely, you’re never under any time pressure to complete an action. If you happen to slip up with a touch it’s easy to move your finger a little and reselect.

Super Hexagon and Punch Quest, meanwhile, give you the WHOLE of the right side and the WHOLE of the left side of the screen as two great big touch areas.

These vast input areas are necessary, though, as the games move like the clappers and mis-touching an area would be incredibly frustrating.

On Buddha Finger we more than doubled the touch areas to –on a ‘retina’ resolution or equivalent screen – about 100 pixel diameter to get a size that players could find and target in less than a second.

Jazz Hands – One of my favourite things about designing for touchscreen is that, unlike a controller where the player has their hands in a fixed position, you can actually make player’s hand movements across the screen part of the experience.

For Buddha Finger, a game where you target touch areas appearing on screen as fast as possible, I wanted the player feel as if they were actually doing martial arts with their fingers.

I positioned the touch areas and touch types across the screen in patterns – for example, if the areas were distributed in a spiral to the left on one screen, I’d spiral to the right on the next, then have a bunch at the top of the screen followed by one large on at the bottom, and so on.

A mixture of quick (2/10th second) and slow (5/10th second) delays between the appearance of touch areas provided a sense of pace. My aim was to recreate the kind of pacing and movements you see in classic Kung-Fu film choreography.

The result was pretty successful in making even the least agile in-real-life players feel like Finger Ninjas – I was happy.

Brave new world

Console joypads and controls have evolved over 15 years to be very good at controlling single characters, and the triple-A world has become almost all about third- and first-person titles that play to that strength.

Touchscreens make possible a whole bunch of new interactions that can give us new experiences and stories not necessarily confined to what you can do with a lone character.

The most important thing about designing for mobile is, I think, not to be too bogged down by trying to create what has gone before but to embrace what the interface can do.

Explore the possibilities, push against the boundaries and above all, make sure it feels great to play!(source:pocketgamer


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