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开发者应通过技术探索更多游戏设计空间

发布时间:2013-06-09 17:17:07 Tags:,,

作者:David Rosen

作为一名独立开发者,以技术谋生真是令人生怯。技术难道不是AAA游戏领域的优势吗?我们该如何与拥有丰富技术和才华出众工程师的大型团队相抗衡?他们当中的任何一人至少都和我们一样擅长编程,并且他们有更多在一起合作!

秘密就在于我们并不需要与他们竞争,因为他们的开发过程增加了许多惰性。有了这样大规模的团队和预算,他们就不得不避免出现阻碍内容输送的瓶颈,并且要尽量最小化实现开发目标的不确定性。最有效的方法就是确保各部门都能完美配合,在最低沟通要求的环境下,避免设计难倒技术,技术制约内容。从计划和预算角度来看,这一方法甚为可行,但却限制了工程师执行优化和迭代等“无副作用”的技术。

halos(from wolfire)

halos(from wolfire)

这一方法可以鼓励开发者以设计为中心实现技术创新,而不是让游戏设计以技术为先。例如,《光晕》系列中有许多为视觉保真树立了新基准的杰出技术创新。但是,《光晕》设计全部是关于在30秒的小冲突中射击外星人。

其所有的迭代都用于渲染技术和创造美术资产,这当然稍微提升了游戏体验,但这并不意味着其技术创新接近于游戏设计。

indie_tech(from wolfire)

indie_tech(from wolfire)

另一方面,独立游戏通常没有大规模团队或苛刻的截止日期。我们可以更连续地工作,允许设计和技术彼此紧密合作。《Antichamber》拥有制作非欧几里得空间的高超技术,而设计则关于探索空间。《Spelunky》拥有过硬的程序生成关卡制作技术,确保游戏拥有重复可玩的趣味性,其设计则是通过反复失败和尝试掌握每个环境的规则。在这两款游戏中,技术居于设计中央,并极大提升了玩家体验。

journey(from wolfire)

journey(from wolfire)

这并不是说图像技术就毫无价值,而是说如果它能运用于设计会更有效果。在《Journey》这款游戏中,敬畏、美丽和沉浸感是游戏设计中的关键元素,如果没有其独特的渲染技术,则难以实现这一效果。如果你移除了这些技术,这款游戏不但视觉保真度会呈现数量上的显著下降,其质量也会发生变化——它就不再是原来的游戏体验了。

成为设计核心的新技术总能让游戏玩家大为兴奋。Alex Austin发布《A New Zero》的视频显示其物理步兵活动方式时,人们并不是太在意它没有很高的视觉保真度,只是为其第一人称射击游戏的那中更具体的活动方式而兴奋。这也正是该视频能够在毫无推广的前提下,从Youtube获得将近50万次点播量的原因。

board_game(from wolfire)

board_game(from wolfire)

我有时候会遇到技术是设计天敌的理念——纯粹的设计形式在于桌游,使用卡片、骰子和代币。这对我来说没有多大意义,因为这些工具本身就是技术,它们显然扩展而非制约了设计空间。骰子产生了随机性,代币产生了存储于玩家大脑之外的信息,而卡片则用于隐藏信息。为何数字技术不能用同样的方式扩展设计空间?

field_1(from wolfire)

field_1(from wolfire)

将上图想象成可视化的游戏设计空间,中间的距离代表新技术的使用。居于最中央的集群是并不太依赖新技术的游戏——它们专注于使用现成技术设计内容。这做方法当然有可能制作出很棒的游戏,并且也存在许多成功例子,但制作这种游戏的多为设计能手——身经百战,拥有多年游戏制作经验的开发者。

cool_games(from wolfire)

cool_games(from wolfire)

AAA游戏领域采用的是截然不同的方法。他们或多或少会使用现成设计(游戏邦注:或者说很少以新颖的设计开启新项目),并使用续作与其他游戏进行技术竞备赛,以直线方式从较低技术集群向外扩散。有一条路线是拥有再生系统的第三人称掩体射击游戏,一条是拥有线性任务的开放世界游戏,一条是拥有快速反应事件的第三人称打斗游戏。

field_4(from wolfire)

field_4(from wolfire)

我对这个图表所感兴趣的地方在于这几条线之间的空间居然空无一物。如果你部分地遵循这些路线,然后半途来个向左或向右的急转弯,你就会得到像《失忆症》或《Overgrowth》或《Natural Selection 2》这类游戏。这些游戏有点像是AAA游戏,但在设计上与后者甚为不同,所以它们之间并无直接竞争关系。这里并不存在其他非对称式的FPS/RTS混合游戏,或者任何基于物理的战略武术游戏。

field_5(from wolfire)

field_5(from wolfire)

如果延伸这一理念,你就可以得到一些类似于《Minecraft》或《Flower》或《Proteus》的游戏——它们远不同于现成的游戏题材,甚至有人争论它们究竟算不算游戏。这其实并不重要,因为玩家喜欢就好,并且它们从任何角度来看都是成功之作。

field_6(from wolfire)

field_6(from wolfire)

我建议独立开发者考虑使用技术来探索所有未知的设计领域。AAA游戏开发者很可能持续沿着自己的直线迭代游戏,但这里也存在未知的领域——如果我们不自己去挖掘这些空间,那它们就永远不会为人所知。(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

Exploring game design through technology

By David Rosen

This is a blog post adaption of my GDC 2013 Indie Soapbox talk, I hope you like it! I will link to the GDC vault video of it if it becomes publicly available.

Working with technology can be intimidating as an indie developer. Isn’t tech the domain of AAA? How can we compete with their large teams of experienced and talented engineers? Any one of them is probably at least as skilled at programming as we are, and there are so many of them working together!

The secret is that we don’t have to compete with them, because their process adds so much inertia. With such large teams and budgets they have to avoid bottlenecks that might stall the content pipeline, and need to minimize uncertainty about meeting development milestones. The most efficient way to accomplish that is to make sure that the departments can all work perfectly in parallel, with minimal need for communication, so design doesn’t stall tech, and tech doesn’t stall content. This works well from a scheduling and budgeting perspective, but restricts engineers to side-effect-free technology like optimization and iteration.

This approach encourages technical innovation at the periphery of the game design, instead of at the center where it would make the most difference. For example, there has been a lot of brilliant technical innovation in the Halo series that set new benchmarks for visual fidelity. However, the design of Halo is all about shooting aliens in 30-second skirmishes. It’s not about taking in the sights! All of this iteration on rendering technology and art asset creation certainly improves the experience slightly, but not nearly as much as if the technical innovations were closer to the heart of the game design.

On the other hand, indie games don’t usually have large teams or hard deadlines. We can work more serially, allowing design and technology to inform one another very closely. Antichamber has really clever technical sleight-of-hand to give the impression of non-Euclidean space, and the design is all about exploring that space. Spelunky has solid procedural level creation technology that makes sure that the game is fun to play over and over, and the design is all about mastering the rules of each environment by repeatedly failing and trying again. In both games, the technology is at the very heart of the design, and greatly elevates the player experience.

That’s not to say that graphics technology is worthless, it’s just most effective when the design takes advantage of it. In Journey, the sense of awe, beauty, and immersion is critical to the
game design, and it would have been difficult to achieve that without their unique sand and cloth rendering technology (one of the programmers explains their sand tech here and here). If you remove those technologies, the game would not just have a quantitative decrease in visual fidelity, but a major qualitative change as well — it would not be the same experience at all.

Gamers are always excited to see new technology that is central to design. When Alex Austin posted this video demonstrating physics-based infantry movement in A New Zero, people didn’t really care that it didn’t have very high visual fidelity; they were just excited to see a more embodied approach to movement in a first-person shooter! That’s how it achieved almost 500,000 views on Youtube without any promotion at all.

I sometimes encounter the idea that technology is a natural enemy of design — that the purest form of design is found in board games, using cards, dice and tokens. This doesn’t make sense to me, because those tools are all technology themselves, and they clearly expand the design space instead of restricting it! The dice enable randomness, the tokens enable stored information outside the players’ heads, and the cards enable hidden information. Why shouldn’t digital technology expand the design space in the same way?

Consider this visualization of the design space, where distance from the center represents use of new technology. At the center is a dense cluster of games that do not rely on much new technology at all — they focus on design and content using mostly existing technology. It’s certainly possible to create excellent games this way, and there are many examples, but most of them are by design specialists: developers who have created dozens and dozens of games over the years, often in game jams or prototypes.

The AAA teams take a different approach. They more or less use an existing design (or, rarely, start a new franchise with a novel design) and then use sequels to compete with one other in a technological arms race, moving outwards from the low-tech cluster in straight lines. There’s one line for third-person cover shooters with regenerating health, one line for open-world games with linear quests, and one line for third-person brawlers with quick time events.

The part of this diagram that I’m interested in is the space between these lines, where there is just emptiness. If you follow these lines partway out, and then take a sharp turn to the left or
right, you end up with a game like Amnesia, or Overgrowth, or Natural Selection 2. These games sort of look like a AAA game, but have major differences in their design, so they really have no direct competition. There aren’t really any other asymmetric FPS/RTS hybrids, or any other physics-based tactical martial arts games.

If you take this idea farther, you can end up with something like Minecraft, or Flower, or Proteus: games that are so far from any existing genres that people debate if they are even games at all.

It really doesn’t matter though, because gamers love them, and they are very successful by any measure!

I would like to encourage indie developers to consider using technology to explore all of this unmapped design space. The AAA guys are likely to continue iterating outwards on their straight lines, and there’s really nobody else to turn to: if we don’t explore this space ourselves, it will simply never be explored.(source:wolfire


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