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举例阐述开发者设计游戏难度的难处

发布时间:2013-07-26 10:14:26 Tags:,,,

作者:Muir Freeland

《活克人之无限》于上周发布。从名称上看,它的粉丝应该是《洛克人》系列的玩家。这款做了五年才问世的游戏令人眼前一亮:迷人、聪明,完美地再现了经典原作的风韵。对于一支由一人领导的小团队,它简直就是一项辉煌的成就,值得钦佩。

我唯一不满的地方就是它的难度。这款游戏太狠了——敌人伤害太高、一碰就死的地刺和无底洞太多、保存点间隔太远,以至于当你做错某事时,(你会经常)不得不穿越相同的一大片地图只为跑回去争取把事情做对。甚至按《洛克人》的标准来说,这款游戏也太苛刻了,拖累了整个游戏体验。

我敢说,游戏的设计师完全没有发现这一点。

Unlimited Spikes(from gamasutra)

Unlimited Spikes(from gamasutra)

这是一个可怕的念头。作为设计师,知道自己永远不会像其他人那样体验自己的游戏,是很可怕的。当我玩《Blowfish Meets Meteor》时,我看不到潜水员探索水下城市是为了寻找他失踪的美人鱼女儿;我看到的是有效射击区,绿色、粉色和蓝色的色块,以及使它们移动的物理公式。我听不到音乐;我只是偏执地觉得它会突然停止或有一个循环播放的间隙,或者评估音乐是否合适。总之,我不觉得困难;我对这款游戏了如指掌。当你可以准确地预测时,游戏的某个对象就只剩下单一的像素了,无论它是玩家、敌人还是场景,没有神秘之处,也正因为没有神秘之处,也不会犯错误。

当游戏在你眼中只剩下这些时,它的任何东西都会让你觉得太容易了。BOSS战简直是小孩子的把戏:当你已经非常熟悉BOSS战开始的确切时间点时,还需要动画来提醒你危险即将来临吗?关卡太容易找路了:当你不仅知道出口在哪里而且还能主动决定它的位置时,甚至最曲折的迷宫也像线性路径一样简单。你自己的角色的机制就更是小菜一碟了:毕竟花了那么多时间微调每个姿势、动作和攻击的帧和数字,当你最终拿起控制器玩游戏时,你对最佳操作已经产生第六感了。

作为设计师,我希望我的设计是有趣的、平衡的、公平的。我想让难度刚刚好。对我而言,那意味着友好和坦率,以可控的方式引导玩家,然后逐渐增加难度,使玩家得到更好的游戏体验。为了达到这个目标,我不断地调整关卡和深层机制,试图切中那个平衡点。我认为这是件好事,而且是件要事。设计师应该渴望平衡,而要达到平衡,就必须不断修改和测试。

但,你的第六感会干扰你。

Blowfish Meets Meteor(from gamasutra)

Blowfish Meets Meteor(from gamasutra)

如果你已经知道游戏的方方面面,那么你就精通游戏了。当你已经掌握某物,你就觉得它简单了,而且是太简单了。所以,在追求平衡时,你要增加难度。

奇怪的是,这么做似乎是负责的表现。

我对《Blowfish Meets Meteor》的设计感到内疚。我太希望游戏显得巧妙、平衡、公平和有挑战性了,所以我增加游戏的难度,因为我觉得这么做是对的。出于这种奇怪的观念,我把“邪恶”当成“高明”、“立即死亡”等于“礼貌的打招呼”。我没有认真考虑许多客观上看是糟糕的东西——如需要反复尝试才能避免失败的益智空间,或者在玩家发觉前就杀死他的陷阱。我知道这些是可怕、懒惰的设计支撑。但因为我对自己的创作产生了歪曲的理解,我认为它们很不错。

在《Blowfish Meets Meteor》中有一个关卡叫作“食人鱼之患”。不说它的真正优点,但它是并且总是我在游戏中最喜欢的关卡之一。它很可能是我为这个项目制作的第一个益智题型关卡;在一款关于快速爆炸和傻大个BOSS战的游戏中,加入这种要求玩家慢慢思考的关卡,确实让人觉得眼前一亮。

这个关卡的目的很简单:有一群美人鱼和一群吃美人鱼的食人鱼,美人鱼必须游到屏幕底部,也就是你的水下圆屋所在之处。玩家作为深海潜水员父亲,有一块四处飞弹和破坏障碍(注意,不是水虎鱼)的陨石和大量可随处放置并破坏一切的TNT炸药。

Piranha Peril,MK.I(from gamasutra)

Piranha Peril,MK.I(from gamasutra)

美人鱼的移动路线是可以预测的,即沿着平台左右移动,遇到墙或食人鱼就转向,否则就会立即被一口吞掉,尽管美人鱼跟一头小牛差不多大。按严格的标准来说,这款游戏的机制确实不太聪明。

你在这里的作用就是,用陨石掩护美人鱼——有可能,但并不太有趣,也可以使用TNT改变地形和/或阻断食人鱼的进程。你通过连续快速破坏障碍来积累TNT,因为你附近的障碍数量有限,这意味着你只能获得少量的TNT,所以你必须非常谨慎地使用。

这个关卡的第一个版本非常糟糕,只有设计师本人才会喜欢。关卡开始时,两只美人鱼会直接朝食人鱼走去,玩家只有几秒钟进间来执行正确的活动,否则就美人鱼就会被吃掉。当朋友帮我测试时,他们大多立即就失败了,且他们的第一反应通常是“怎么回事”。这个关卡的难度设置错误了:惩罚玩家没有超人般的反应能力或没有预知关卡以及危险。

Piranha Chomp 2(from gamasutra)

Piranha Chomp 2(from gamasutra)

奇怪的是,我花了好一段时间才明白自己的偏见。当我看他们玩这个关卡时,我没有想到“不公平”,我想到的是“狡猾的”。我没有想到“反复出错”,我想到的是“巧妙”。我看不到“游戏结束”的画面,我看到的是食人鱼吞掉美人鱼的滑稽动画。甚至当别人非常直接地告诉我,这个关卡太折磨人了,我也很难接受他们这么说;我认为那是他们自己对游戏不熟悉,或反应能力太差,需要手把手教他们。

如果听他们的是错的,会怎么样?如果我听了他们的话,降低关卡难度以至于完全没有难度,那又会怎么样?如果玩家通关太快、太轻松,那么他们不就看不到我花了那么多时间设计的关卡的高明巧妙之处了?在我看来,这个关卡就是完美的,要我破坏完美,我绝不答应。

我发表“食人鱼之患”的截图至今约有一年时间了,直到一个月前,我才开始考虑改变关卡,甚至是那时,我也不太肯定我为什么突然开窍了。也许只是因为已经过了好一段时间,足够我更加客观地看待最初的设计;也许是因为做了许多新关卡、或从头到尾玩了接近完工的游戏,启发了我;或者也许是因为我对自己的要求更加严格了,学会倾听了。无论是什么原因,现在的“食人鱼之患”已经没那么“虐”了。美人鱼不会死得那么快了;我在她们前进的路上添加了障碍,这样玩家就有更多时间熟悉关卡以及思考下一步行动。另外,现在的食人鱼是静止的,这样玩家要应付的变量就更少了。至于能给玩家提供有增益效果的河豚,我把它移到屏幕中央,使玩家更容易使用到它。

updated Screen(from gamasutra)

updated Screen(from gamasutra)

我希望这些改变能达到效果、是正确的,但也许我永远也不知道是否如我所愿。我可以向玩家征求意见,但我永远也不能像他们那样玩我的游戏。我对自己的作品的体验是并且总是间接的。

所以当我玩像《洛克人之无限》这种创意、才华和热情毕露但稍微有些“虐”的游戏时,我就非常理解了。难度是一种暂时的、变幻无常的东西,特别是如果你正是掌控难度的人。当我玩别人的游戏时,难度问题暴露得非常快非常明显,但玩我自己的游戏时,我常常要花几个月甚至几年才能看到难度问题。讽刺的是,越是了解设计,一定程度上也意味着越不了解;无论你花了多长时间制作某物,你的体验永远不如第一次体验它的人的那么多。这一直是一个非常难接受和领悟的真相,但它是并且将永远是我的游戏设计师生涯中最重要的学习经验之一。(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

Designing Difficulty

by Muir Freeland

This past week saw the launch of a game called Mega Man Unlimited. As the name hints, it’s a fan game based on the Mega Man franchise, and one that’s been in the works for over half a decade. It’s an incredibly impressive project: it’s attractive, it’s clever, and it positively nails the classic Mega Man feel. For a small team spearheaded by a single person, it’s nothing short of a beautiful achievement, and it’s something I have nothing but admiration for.

The only thing I can’t get behind is the difficulty. The game is simply too spiteful; its enemies do too much damage, its instant-death spikes and bottomless pits are too numerous, and its checkpoints are too far apart, ensuring that when you screw up – and you will, often – you’ll have to slog back through the same huge, deadly stretches of terrain just to get another shot at doing things right. The game is cruel, even by Mega Man standards, and it drags the entire experience down.

And I’d wager that this was completely invisible to the game’s designer.

Everything is better with instant-kill spike ceilings.

This is a scary thought. As a designer, it’s terrifying to know that I will never, ever play the same version of my games as everyone else will. When I play Blowfish Meets Meteor, I don’t see a diver scouring an underwater cityscape for his lost mermaid daughters; I see hitboxes, all green and pink and blue and rigid, and I see the formulas behind the physics that make them move. I don’t hear the music; in its place, I feel a constant paranoia that it will suddenly stop, or that there will be a gap where it’s supposed to loop, or that a sound effect will trigger improperly. Above all, I don’t feel difficulty; I’m too intimately familiar with the bones and guts and impulses behind this thing. When you can accurately predict – or premediate, even — the behavior of every single aspect of a game down to a single pixel, be it the player, the enemies, or the environment, there’s no mystery, and without mystery, there’s no error.

When you see a game in this light, everything feels too easy. Boss patterns become child’s play to recognize: who needs a fancy windup animation to warn them that an attack is coming when you’ve internalized the exact time interval that precedes it? Levels become a cinch to navigate: even the most obtuse, gnarled maze feels like a linear path when you not only know where the exit is, but actively influenced its position. And your own character’s mechanics are the easiest thing of all to wrangle: spending hours or days fine-tuning the frames and numbers behind every motion, maneuver, and attack gives you a sixth-sense about how to best handle things when it’s finally time to pick up the controller and play the damn thing.

As a designer, I know, somewhere up in the more logically-wired part of my brain, that I want my creations to be fun and balanced and fair. I want the difficulty to be tuned just right. To me, that means being friendly and accommodating up-front, showing the player the ropes in a controlled way, and gradually making things more difficult to push them to get better and more comfortable with the game itself. To that end, I’m constantly fine-tuning both the levels and the base mechanics to try and hit that perfectly-balanced mark. I view this as a good thing, and an incredibly important thing. Designers should aspire for balance, and doing so requires constant tweaking and testing.

But then your sixth-sense interferes.

Blowfish Meets Meteor bares its hitboxes.

If you already know everything there is to know about a game, that makes you a master of playing it. And when you’ve mastered something, it feels easy. Too easy. And so, in pursuit of proper balance, you make it harder.

In a weird way, it feels like the responsible thing to do.

I’ve been guilty of this a lot with Blowfish Meets Meteor. I want so badly for the game to be clever and balanced and challenging-yet-fair that I’ll make things incrementally more difficult because it’s what feels right to me. From this bizarre perch I’m sitting on, “devious” simply looks “clever.” “Instant death” looks more like “polite punch in the arm.” I flirt with a lot of things that I objectively recognize are bad – things like puzzle rooms that require trial-and-error to avoid instant Game Overs, or traps that kill the player before they’ve even had a chance to get their bearings. I know these are horrible, lazy design crutches. But from up here, with this skewed sense of understanding of my own creation, they look amazing.

There’s this level in Blowfish Meets Meteor called “Piranha Peril.” Regardless of its actual merit, it is and always will be one of my favorite levels in the game. It was quite possibly the first puzzle-style level I created for this project; in a game about rapid-fire explosions and stupidly-big boss battles, making a level that focused on slowing things down and asking the player to think critically felt incredibly refreshing at the time.

The goal of the level is simple: there are a bunch of mermaids, and a bunch of mermaid-eating piranhas. The mermaids need to navigate to the bottom of the screen, where your underwater dome-house is. You, in the role of their deep-sea-diver father, have a meteor, which bounces around and destroys blocks (but, critically, not piranhas), and a bunch of TNT, which can be placed anywhere on the screen and will destroy pretty much anything. Go.

Piranha Peril, Mk. I

The mermaids move in a predictable pattern, walking left or right along solid ground until they hit a wall, which causes them to turn, or a piranha, which immediately devours them in a shower of blood and whatever the mermaid equivalent of veal is. If we take the game’s mechanics as canon and gospel truth, they’re simply not very smart.

Your options here are to break them out with the Meteor – which is possible, but not very fun – or to accrue TNT, and use it to destroy the terrain and/or piranhas impeding their progress. You get TNT by destroying blocks in rapid succession, and since there are only a limited number of blocks in your immediate vicinity, that means you’ve only got a few pieces of TNT to throw around, and you’d better use it carefully.

The first version of this level was terrible in a way that only a designer could love. Each of the two mermaids started the level by walking directly into the piranhas on their tier; players had a matter of seconds to start the level and flawlessly perform the exact right set of actions to liberate them or face a Game Over. When I asked friends to playtest it for me, most of them immediately lost, and their first response was often to ask “what killed them.” It was difficult in all the wrong ways, punishing players for not having superhuman reflexes or advance knowledge of the level and its hazards.

Chomp.

The weird thing is, it took a while for that to sink in. When I watched people play the level, I didn’t think “unfair;” I thought “devious.” I didn’t think “trial-and-error;” I thought “clever puzzle.” I didn’t see “Game Over screen;” I saw a goofy, entertaining animation of a piranha chomping up a mermaid. Even when people outright told me that the level was frustrating, it was hard for me to accept it; I chalked it up to them being inexperienced with the game, or poor sports who needed things spoon-fed to them.

What if listening to them was the wrong thing? And what if, in doing so, I made the level so easy that it removed the puzzle? What if people blazed through it so quickly, so painlessly, that they never got to see that wonderful, clever brain-teaser that I spent so long bringing to life? To me, the level felt perfect, and messing with perfection was a tough sell.

It’s been nearly a year since I originally posted that first screenshot of Piranha Peril. It took until maybe a month ago for me to consider changing the level, and even then, I’m not sure what exactly triggered it; maybe that was simply the amount of time it took for me to distance myself from the original creation enough to be objective about it. Perhaps creating dozens of new levels, or playing the game from start to finish in its currently near-complete state, helped give me perspective. Or maybe I just became more critical of myself, or learned to listen more. Whatever the reason, today’s Piranha Peril is a much less masochistic affair. The instant-kills are gone; there are now blocks preventing the mermaids from walking straight into the piranhas, giving the player as much time as they need to initially process the level and figure out how to handle things. These new piranhas are all stationary, giving players one less variable to contend with. And the blowfish, who gives the player a useful power-up, has been moved to the center of the screen, where it’s much easier to utilize.

Piranha Peril Mk. II

I hope these things make a difference, and I hope they make the right one, but ultimately, I’ll never know. I can solicit feedback from people, but I can never experience what they do. My understanding of my own work is and always will be secondhand.

So when I play games like Mega Man Unlimited – games that ooze creativity and talent and passion but feel slightly spiteful, all the same – I understand. Difficulty is a fleeting, fickle thing, especially if you’re the one in charge of it. When I play someone else’s game, difficulty issues feel immediately obvious, but with my own, they hide away, beady eyes in the shadows, for months or even years. Ironically, knowing more about a design means that, in some ways, you’ll always know less; no matter how long you spend creating something, you’ll never know as much as the newcomer who just experienced it for the first time. That’s been an incredibly difficult lesson to accept and digest, but doing so has been and will always be one of the most important learning experiences of my game design career.(source:gamasutra)


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