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Funzio游戏设计师Dan Chao谈游戏设计

发布时间:2013-11-09 15:38:25 Tags:,,,,

作者:famousaspect

本文是从与Dan Chao的谈话中摘录出来的内容。Dan Chao(在正文中简称DC)是Funzio工作室的首席设计师,他参与设计的游戏类型涵盖了硬核、休闲、社交和手机游戏等。Dan曾经为Xbox游戏《New Legends》设计过游戏玩法,并作为首席设计师参与休闲游戏《Wandering Willows》的开发,最近又担任了社交/手机游戏《Crime City》和《Kingdom Age》的首席设计师。

EL:首先,什么是游戏设计?

DC:游戏设计包含了许多不同的环节。我认为可以从某种类型的游戏设计师擅长什么来理解。显然,有些设计师擅长编剧和设定角色,有些更精通数字、微调和经济。

游戏设计中除了剧情、角色、数值、经济等,还有系统层面上的设计:游戏如何运作。我想可以将其称为“定义核心循环”,这个术语已经得到了广泛使用。

但对我而言,游戏设计的核心是,如何让上述所有系统一起运作,以形成连贯、清楚而一致的设计。

EL:听起来你好像更擅长系统设计,它才是你的心头好啊。

DC:确实是我的兴趣所在。我喜欢根据公司的限制条件来制定设计,无论资源限制是侧重程序方面还是侧重美术方面的。这就是一种才能和公司理念吧。

我认为对于社交游戏,把游戏做得有趣是不够的。你必须优化游戏的其他指标。有些人认为那些指标是没有意义的,但正是这些指标才能让游戏获得盈利,使游戏受欢迎。我认为留存率是与乐趣差不多的东西。

所以,对于传统的游戏,商业模式就是,玩家购买一个60美元的盒装产品,然后到Metacritic网站上给它评分,对吧?玩家打出的Metacritic评分很高,那意味着游戏确实有趣,或者你收买了评论者,对吧?决定游戏生死的就是评分。所以游戏最好还是得有趣。

然后,一旦玩家们购买了产品,一切都不重要了,对吧?因为他们已经给你钱了。

EL:他们可能讨厌它。他们可能玩上半个小时就要求GameStop(游戏邦注:是目前全球规模最大的电视游戏和娱乐软件零售业公司)退款35美元。

DC:是的。但如果游戏品质过硬,够有趣,那么它会传播得很快,评论得分便会很高。

社交游戏就有一点儿不同了。因为大部分玩家是免费的,只有一些玩家是付费的。社交游戏中有很多元素,你很难说哪个是致瘾的或有趣的,但我觉得MMO也是一样的。有些东西可能并不有趣,但就是让人上瘾。

这些东西是游戏赢利的关键。我认为现在的游戏设计比以前的更强调融入商业思想。这让我想到设计《New Legends》的经历。

EL:是的。

DC:否则游戏只能彻底失败(而游戏的工作室如果不能谈下另一个发行合同,就要关门大吉了)。我发誓在也不会允许那种情况出现。所以我必须综合考虑各个方面,但对我而言,游戏设计说到底是系统层面上的设计。

EL:说到指标,最近也出现在一款免费游戏中,我想你在GDC上应该发现很多人不看好它,说这是卑鄙的。你肯定认为指标“是现在的游戏设计的世界”。认为售价60美元的游戏是卑鄙行为这点总是让我备受打击。其他人为你设计了这种商业模式:以60美元的价格出售,花数百万美元在市场营销上。而你习惯于接受营销部门或那些控制大预算的人的要求,然后“破坏”你的“艺术想象力”。

现在,你需要面对玩家。你需要从人们对你的游戏的评价中找废话并明确他们到底想要什么,以及他们的行为是什么。

DC:其实卑鄙这一说法在某种程度上是对的。总有些致瘾和操纵玩家的成分。但我认为所有游戏都是一样的。没有人会全盘否定《魔兽争霸》,但它确实有一些相同的机制。

显然,致瘾性机制中也有一些确实是非常有趣的。比如社交游戏中的某些机制。一方面我们努力把某些东西做得有趣,另一方面,我们确实也有一些迫使玩家每天上线的机制。

EL:听起来你好像从非常实用主义的角度着手设计,因为你意识到你的目标玩家、你所在团队以及预算的约束条件。你在设计时确实考虑了这些限制。
能不能举个例子说明你如何在意识到团队或公司的限制条件的情况下,改进设计的品质?

Kingdom Age(from app111)

Kingdom Age(from app111)

DC:《Kingdom Age》就是一个好例子。它现在已经在Google上发行了,Facebook版也即将面世。我认为我们面临的限制条件是,我们使用的是《Crime City》的引擎。所以我们无法摆脱《Crime City》的设计的影响。

我们放进《Kingdom Age》的许多特征只是基于《Crime City》基础上的小改进,但对程序员来说都很容易执行:至少不必做重复的工作了。

不过我认为《Kingdom Age》中有一点非常有意思,那就是现在玩家可以训练单位了。但是在以前,在《Modern War》/《Crime City》中,你是直接购买和立即获得单位。所以,现在的《Kingdom Age》更像RTS了,我们还添加了训练时间。

所以,虽然玩家觉得不一样,但其实我只是简化了某些内容,程序方面并没有太大变化。“好吧,我们要这种道具。我必须经这个道具添加时限。”我们还添加了很多其他东西,当然数量也是有限的,而不只是游戏范围有限。

我知道我们得快一点。

EL:当你在制作游戏时,过去的程序员经验对你现在的设计师工作有何影响?有什么帮助吗?例如与程序员的交流方面?或者在系统设计上做出让步?

DC:有帮助的。比如,我设计的系统比较容易执行。所以现在当我思考某个特征的数据库模式,我会想怎么操作更简单。

通常只是添加一些我认为可以改变游戏的组件。但程序员并不会觉得很难执行。

许多RPG就是这样做出来的。先做一张很大的电子表格,然后不断地添加另一行列。并不是什么东西都能这样做出来的。但我会从执行功能所需的时间和人力方面来估计成本。也会考虑一下回报是多少。

EL:对于从来没有开发过游戏的人,也就是外行人,应该想不到执行这些功能有多困难。外行人只是想得到好的结果。根据你的经验,当提议一个特征时,为什么考虑执行成本如此重要?

DC:对我而言,这是一个商业决策,关系到投入的回报。如果你开发的东西不能保证收回本,那么就不值得开发,或者你必须想出更好的执行办法或另一种赢利的办法。

估计做某事需要多少时间,并不是人人都有的能力。基本上你得和程序员及美工谈谈。但你必须理解项目的每一个方面。不只是程序上的成本,还有美术成本。为了让这个功能运作起来且赢利,你需要动用多少美术材料?

我认为评估成本比以前更重要了。对于社交游戏,你可以对一款已经发布的游戏推出一个新功能,然后看看它能给你挣回多少钱。

EL:是的。因为我便曾经参与过一两次这种功能的创造工作,即所有程序员和美工投入了一个月于该项目中,但在发行后玩家只玩了一星期就放弃了。你可以计算自己花了多少成本在这个功能上,而玩家又花了多少时间玩它。这真是惨痛的教训,你可能会想“我再也不做费时超过一周的东西了”。

DC:是的,特别是社交游戏,显然服务器端的功能是最好的。它们不需要安装客户端,你可以对数字做一些修改。

EL:你认为在游戏设计中,最让你沮丧的是什么?

DC:我认为是,不得不做的决定。可能是决定游戏是否应该有更丰富的剧情,但这意味玩家的选择变少了。可能是决定游戏是否突出游戏的赢利策略,但这意味着弱化了游戏真正的乐趣。

我认为选择是必须做的。我不知道是否必然让我觉得沮丧,但绝对是最困难的部分。

EL:能不能举个例子说明你很艰难地做了某个决定,但事后却发现“我做了正确的决定,使游戏变得更好了。”

DC:(笑)

EL:还是说,只有事后发现自己后悔了的例子?

DC:(笑)当然有很多让我后悔的事。我可以举出相反的例子。(笑)我想面对社交游戏中更困难的部分,如病毒传播力和赢利策略,游戏设计师很难做出看似有利的决定。比如为了建造一个建筑,你必须问你的朋友要更多材料。显然,这是一个痛苦的过程,因为你要求玩家发表在公告墙上,或发送请求。这样就需要更长的时间才能得到材料。

但最终,可能会导致更强的病毒传播力。还有,现在越来越多游戏要求提前加载尽量多的东西出来,以便玩家能看到所有好东西。就像《Dragon Age 2》对吧?在开头教程中你就看到所有这些好东西了。

EL:是的,你说的太对了。

DC:但在正式游戏中,这些东西你都不能用。休闲游戏也是这样的。一切都取决于这一个小时的试玩,所以你要尽量把东西塞进去一小时的教程中。

但之后意味着你的棋盘完全乱了,你不知道接下去要怎么做。社交游戏也是这样的。“好吧,那些都在教程中。他们可以当它们是很棒的废物。”

接着你便可以利用这个小把戏。或许你给他们一件强大的武器。但你知道游戏之后要怎么进行下去吗?如何让东西变得更酷?这真的会让人郁闷死的。我是从商业的角度来看,这绝对不是90年代或80年代的游戏状况。

但我也不认为我们现在处于极其保守的年代。

EL:你是否认同《PC Gamer》杂志将《New Legends》(即Jedi Knight还在的时候)誉为当时“最佳PC游戏”?

DC:是的。

EL:那Justin Chin呢?

DC:我想他也值得获得那一荣耀。

EL:他被《PC Gamer》评为世界上最顶尖的设计师。我读了所有《PC Gamer》杂志,简直当它们是圣经。这么优秀的团队花了这么长的时间开发《New Legends》,之后却得不到其它活。

这就是不重视商业方面的结果。这是否使你更容易做出病毒传播或赢利策略方面的选择?因为你知道会发生什么事?

DC:是的(笑)。我的意思是,我供职过许多工作室,有的做了一款游戏后就关门了,有的做了一个又一个项目,但在游戏机行业真的得不到多少版权费。然后你只能四处争夺合同和开发商。

谁也不想处于那么尴尬的局面,谁也不想发不出工资。我确实考虑过那些事。也许我已经走了完全相反的方向,使我不得不“向钱看”。

但是,我认为这种想法并没有其他人想得那么糟糕?但这也只是我的个人看法罢了。

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

On Game Design with Dan Chao

by famousaspect

The following are excerpts from a conversation with Dan Chao, Lead Designer at Funzio.  Dan’s work runs the full gamut of design, including releases in the Core, Casual, Social and Mobile segments of the industry.  Dan has worked as gameplay engineer on Xbox launch title New Legends, lead designer on the casual game Wandering Willows, and most recently lead designer on social/mobile games Crime City, and Kingdom Age.

EL: To start with, what is game design?

DC: There are so many different parts of it. I feel like it goes down to the talents of certain types of game designers. There are obviously people that are good at writing story and coming up with characters. There are people that are just great with the numbers, tuning, the economy.

Then, there’s the system level design; how the game actually works. I guess calling it “defining the core loops” has become the fancy term that people throw around.

But to me, that’s really at the heart of everything is designing how all those systems work together, to make a cohesive, clean and consistent design.

EL: And it sounds like you trend towards system design, is kind of your passion at the heart.

DC: That’s definitely what I’m passionate about. I like to tailor the design to all the limitations of the company, whether that be the resource limitations of being engineering heavy or light, or art heavy or light. And just the talents and kind of the DNA of the company, as they say.

Nowadays, in Social, what I like is that it’s not just about making the game fun. You have to optimize the game around these other metrics, which some people might say is soulless. But there are just the realities of making the game monetize well, making the game viral. And then retention, which I feel is the same thing as fun.

So, with traditional games, the business model was you buy a $60 box product and then it basically comes to your Metacritic score, right? Your Metacritic score is high, that means the game is really fun or you paid awesome reviewers, right? And that’s what the game lives or dies by, is just that review score. So that game better be fun.

And then once they’ve bought the product, it doesn’t matter, right? They’ve already given you their money.

EL: They might hate it. They might play for half an hour and then return it to GameStop for $35.

DC: Yeah. But if it’s good enough and it’s fun enough, then word of mouth will travel and review scores will be high.

With social games, it’s a bit different. Because you have all these free players. You have some people paying. You have a lot of elements that, it’s hard to say whether it’s more addicting than fun, but I kind of feel MMOs are the same way. There are these things that may not be fun but may just be addictive.

And those things are important to have the game make money. I think more than ever, it’s important for game design to incorporate a lot of business thought behind things. Which comes back to like my original experience in the industry [on New Legends].

EL: Right.

DC: Which, that game just totally flopped [and the studio folded after not being able to land another publishing deal]. I just vowed that would never happen again. So, I think you have to consider everything, but game design to me, at the heart, is that system-level design.

EL: With regards to metrics, having done a free-to-play game recently too, I feel like you go to GDC and there are a lot of people who crap on it and say it’s soulless. You are clearly embracing metrics as “this is the world of game design now.” It always strikes me that selling games for $60 is just as soulless. Only, someone else designed the business model for you: sell at $60 and spend millions and millions on marketing. Whereas you used to have to take on reasonable requests from a marketing department or someone who controls a giant budget, and “ruins” your “artistic vision.”

Well, now it’s players. Now you’re taking your crap from the people playing your game and what they actually want, and what their behaviors actually are.

DC: There is some truth to the soulless part. I think, just with anything, there’s a sense of addiction and manipulation. But I feel like you see that in all sorts of games. No one craps all over World of Warcraft. But it does have the same certain set of mechanics.

Obviously there are other mechanics that are very fun. I feel like social games are getting there, too. There are certain things where we try to make it really fun. While, on the other side, we do also have  the appointment mechanic which forces people to come back every day.

EL: It sounds like you approach design from a very pragmatic sense in recognizing the limitations and constraints of the people you’re working with and the team you’re on and the budget. And actually taking that to inspire the design.

Do you have an example of when you recognized a constraint or a limitation within your team or within your company, and how you used to improve the quality of the design?

DC: Kingdom Age is a good example, which is out on Google+ right now, and is coming to Facebook. I think the limitation was that we were starting with the Crime City engine. And we really couldn’t stray too far from the Crime City design.

A lot of the features that went into it were small evolutions over Crime City. But all of them simple to implement for an engineer: not necessarily simple but not reinventing the wheel.

So, something with Kingdom Age which I thought was pretty good was that you trained units now. Whereas before, in Modern War/Crime City, you buy them outright and get them instantly. So this ended up being more of an RTS mechanic and we added the training time on top of that.

So, while it feels different to the player, in the end I’m definitely simplifying things, but the engineering side isn’t that crazy. “Okay, we have this item. We need to add a time to that item.” And there’s a ton of other things that we added, too. But it was definitely limited, more than limited in scope.

And I knew we had to get it out quickly.

EL: When you’re working on a game, how important is your past as an engineer to helping you be a designer? What about being a former engineer helps? Is it the communication with engineers? The ability to compromise on systems?

DC: Yeah. I design the systems to be relatively easy to implement. So I actually think, nowadays, about the database schema of a given feature. And I figure out easy ways to manipulate things.

So often it’s just adding a multiplier and some additive component that I feel will change the game for players. But not be that bad for the engineer to implement.

Which is how a lot of RPGs work. There’s just some large spreadsheet and I feel like if you’re going to add another column to that spreadsheet, it can’t be that bad. Not everything works out like that. But I try to measure the cost of the feature in terms of how long it’s going to take to implement and how many people it’s going to take. And think about what the return is going to be.

EL: For people who have never developed a game before, from the outside, you would never think about the difficulty to implement the thing. You just want the cool stuff. From your experience, why is it so important to consider the cost of developing a feature when proposing it?

DC: For me it comes down to a business decision. It’s ultimately your return on investment. If whatever you’re developing isn’t going to make its money back, then it’s not worth it and you need to figure out a better way to do it, or a different way to make money.

Being able to figure out how long something’s going to take, not everyone can do it off the top of their head. Ultimately you need to talk to the engineers and the artists. But it is important to understand every single aspect of the project. And not just the engineering costs, but even the asset costs. How many art assets are you going to have to generate in order for this feature to come to life and monetize?

I think that’s more important now than ever, with social games, where you can literally just launch one feature on your already-launched game, and see how much money it makes you.

EL: Yeah. I can say from experience having done one or two of those features where it’s every engineer on the project, every artist, a whole month, you release it and people play it for a week and they’re done. And you can calculate how much money you’ve spent and how much time people spent playing it. And you go “Oh my God.” It was a hard lesson to learn; you do one or two of those and you say “I’m never doing anything that takes over a week again.”

DC: Yeah. With those sorts of things, especially social games, obviously the server-side features are the best. They need no client implementation and you can add a few tweaks of the numbers.

EL: What do you find most frustrating about game design?

DC: I think there are decisions you have to make, one way or the other, you know? Sometimes it can be about whether you want a more story-rich game, but then that means sometimes you have to introduce less choices to the player. Sometimes it means you have to emphasize monetization here and you can’t emphasize the actual fun or choice of the game.

I think those choices have to be made. I don’t know if it’s necessarily frustrating or not. But it’s definitely the hardest part.

EL: Can you give a good example of a choice you’ve had to make that you found especially difficult at the time and now, in hindsight, you think “I did the right thing and the game’s better for it.”

DC: [laughs]

EL: Or is only a world of regret when you look back?

DC: [laughs] there are a lot of regrets, sure. I could definitely give the opposite example. [laughs] I guess the harder things in social games like virality and monetization, which feels unnatural to the game designer to make a decision in favor of. Like adding more materials to build a building you have to ask your friends for. Obviously, it’s going to be way more of a pain in the ass and you’re making them post it on their wall or do a request. And it’s going to take them longer to get.

But ultimately, it may lead to like better virality. I think something that’s also true with, especially more modern games, the tendency to front load a game with as much cool stuff as possible so the user gets to see all that stuff. So, Dragon Age 2, right? The opening tutorial, you had all this awesome stuff.

EL: Right. You were Super Hawke.

DC: Yeah. And then you get stripped of a lot of that stuff. And the same thing is true with the casual downloadable industry. It’s ruled by the one-hour trial, so you pack as much cool crap into that one hour as possible.

But then it means your ramp is totally fucked up at that point. It’s like, “Okay, now how do I ramp from here?” And that’s true in social games, too. “Okay, they’re in the tutorial. They can see all this cool crap.” You make a dragon come by or a tank shoot.

And then you’re running around with this little pig sticker. Or maybe you give them an awesome sword. But then how do you know how to ramp up the game from there? How do you make something cooler? And that’s definitely frustrating. I get it from a business standpoint. It’s definitely not how games were in the 90s or 80s.

But, I don’t think we’re in as puritanical an age anymore.

EL: Well, do you think that the experience of being on New Legends, where Jedi Knight was at the time, was it PC gamers’ number one PC game of all time…

DC: Something like that, yeah.

EL …and was it Justin Chin?

DC: Yeah, Justin Chin.

EL: Was one of PC Gamer’s top designers in the world. I read every one of those magazines; they were like a Bible to me. To have such talented team who had previously worked on such an incredible game, to spend so long in development on New Legends and then not be able to get another deal after that.

Seeing what happens when you don’t pay attention to the business side of the business, does that make it easier for you to make those viral or monetization choices? Because you know what happens?

DC: Yeah. [Laughs] I mean, I’ve definitely been part of many studios that were either crumbled right after a game or, from project to project, like a project finishes, you don’t really see royalties off that in the console industry. And then you’re just scrambling for the next deal and cold-calling all the publishers.

So no one wants to be in that position and no one wants to miss payroll. I definitely think about that and it makes things easier. Maybe I’ve gone in totally the opposite direction where it’s like I’ve totally joined the dark side.

But, I guess I don’t see as much wrong with it as I feel like other people do, you know? But that’s just me.(source:famousaspect)


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