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关于创造MOBA触屏游戏的5大经验

发布时间:2015-08-24 16:17:43 Tags:,,,,

作者:Kristian Segerstrale

自从Super Evil Megacorp成立以来,我们的首要关注点便是创造一款能够获得硬核玩家尊重的触屏游戏。与过去许多触屏游戏不同的是,我们并不想简化一种类型。相反地,我们想要创造一款彻底的硬核多人联机在线竞技游戏(MOBA),并且这款游戏也会非常适合触屏设备。对于《Vainglory》这款游戏,我们的任务便是将真正具有深度的体验带到触屏上—-即在这里策略,战术和机制技能都很重要。这是我们从小玩到大的一种游戏类型,也是我们在PC时代中非常喜欢的类型—-特别是在局域网设置中,并且我们也想将它呈献给全新一代的玩家,并且他们不需要在再依赖于PC平台便能够体验这样的游戏。

当我们最初决定创造《Vainglory》时,我们并不知道自己是否能够将一个完整的MOBA体验从PC带到触屏上。我们知道,在主机级的E.V.I.L.游戏引擎中,我们拥有技术能够传达具有视觉震撼力的体验所需要的图像,模块和帧速率。但我们并不确定是否能够创造出玩家完全沉浸于游戏行动并专注于打败对手(而不是思考控制如何运行)的游戏“感”。在这里不管玩家是观看别人游戏还是自己游戏都能感受到乐趣。

我们进行了许多次迭代才将控制,地图设计和整体的高级设计选择整合在一起,但早前的开发过程也给予了我们很大的鼓励。因我们从发行于北美和欧洲的早前游戏版本身上学到了许多。我们也备受优秀社区的发展的鼓舞。

单单在5月份,我们在iOS平台上便获得了超过150万的月活跃用户,并且玩家平均每天会花费超过80分钟在玩游戏,同时有将近20%的玩家既会在Twitch上观看游戏也会亲自在自己的设备上玩游戏。自从Android版本发行以来,我们的发展速度更快了,我们也非常乐于与我们的社区一起发展游戏。

持续创造并发展《Vainglory》及其社区是一个不断学习的过程,而我想在此分享我们从游戏开发以及将一个超级硬核且传统的PC游戏类型带到触屏中学到的5个经验。

经验1:引擎很重要

对于主机或PC开发者来说,引擎技术很重要这一点并不是什么新鲜事—-很少有排行榜前列的游戏是基于第三方引擎进行创造。然而对于触屏游戏来说,这却是一个全新的概念。当我们清楚自己想要将硬核游戏体验带到触屏设备上时,我们便决定创建E.V.I.L.引擎,即专属于我们的且带有主机性质的引擎,它能够帮助我们不受限制地发挥创造性去创造自己想要创造的游戏。

E.V.I.L.引擎不仅具有非常出色的表现和精确度(60帧/秒),同时它也能够帮助我们快速适应全新硬件以及全新的API和芯片组。

通过创造属于自己的引擎,我们也能够摆脱任何关于创造性的局限性。这也帮助我们吸引了更多顶尖人才的加入—-如带有出色技能且渴望艺术自由以及受技术驱动的文化的设计师们,这对于我们公司来说真的非常重要,因为这能够帮助我们站稳脚跟并不断成长。也许有一天我们能够大声地告诉世界E.V.I.L.代表的是什么。

Screen Shot (from gamasutra)

Screen Shot (from gamasutra)

经验2:面向玩家而不是手机设计游戏

也许我们的方法与其它方法最根本的不同在于我们并未尝试着为当前的“手机玩家”设计游戏—-即人们所熟悉的设计2至3分钟的游戏过程,并带有超级简化的游戏控制,通常包含计时器,能量和社交机制。相反地,我们想要将触屏作为一流的硬核游戏平台。它们的技术能力已经赶上了PC和主机。它们只是需要与之相配的软件而已。

我们从未考虑将《Vainglory》制作成一款手机游戏,尽管它能够运行于触屏设备上。我们一直以硬核体验为基础去设计并创造这款游戏—-而不是将其作为移植到手机平台上的PC游戏类型。在设计这款游戏的时候我们是从零开始,并为了让它更完美的适应这样的新平台而精益求精。

例如关于游戏控制,我们便不再使用像加速计或虚拟手擎等控制方式。相反地,我们想要找到最简单且最精确的控制方法去呈现出色的每分钟行动控制输入内容。当大多数PC玩家在发现自己习惯了这种新的控制方式,轻敲比传统的鼠标和键盘输入让他们能够更精确地执行复杂的行动(游戏邦注:因为使用双手手指轻敲能够让你同时控制2至4个点)时,我们受到了很大的鼓舞。

将我们的游戏与其它手机游戏区分开来的另外一点便是我们的回合长度。比起迎合大家所熟悉的2至3分钟的游戏过程,我们想要设计一个能够最大程度压缩MOBA体验并且拥有完整MOBA竞技的回合长度,即能够包含从耕作到团队竞争等所有阶段,并且玩家能够在这里真正思考如何有效地击败对手。在此,团队比较,搭建,摧毁与地图控制都很重要。最终我们为《Vainglory》创造了一个20分钟长的比赛,尽管休闲手机游戏一般只有2至3分钟的游戏回合。实际上,我们的玩家每天平均会花超过80分钟去玩我们的游戏。

经验3:与社区共同发展

我们可以从手机游戏与PC或主机游戏的发行商间看到的另外一大区别便是对于社区的关注度。我们花了很长时间去创造《Vainglory》—-而不是为了快速出现在畅销游戏排行榜单上一周后就小时。尽管许多公司依赖于付费用户获取策略去支持这一目标,但是到目前为止我们的用户获取率都很低。我们的大部分玩家都是有机的。在我们看来,培养一个具有较高用户粘性和忠诚度的社区是创造一款玩家喜欢的高质量游戏的最重要元素。从一开始我们便与玩家以及在MOBA领域具有影响力的人维持着紧密的关系。这不仅影响着我们的雇佣选择,同时也影响着我们在市场营销资源上的分配。

我们聘请了《英雄联盟》的资深玩家George ‘Zekent’ Liu作为我们的视频社区经理,他每周都会在Twitch上为《Vainglory》的社区成员发布有关游戏的视频流。我们也会为世界各地的玩家举办社区活动。我们始终都将玩家放在优先位置,并会听取他们的看法,这是创建一个喜欢我们游戏的长期玩家社区的关键。

我们总是以我们的社区为傲—-我们的玩家具有很高的用户粘性,并且在某种程度上《Vainglory》拥有比我们自身跟多的粉丝。甚至我们有一些很棒的理念是来自我们的社区—-我们之所以很早便添加了一个旁观者视图便是因为我们的Twitch观众的提醒。我们之所以添加了Taka这个最受欢迎的英雄之一便是因为我们的玩家希望看到一个忍者角色。我们总是尽可能地听取玩家的要求。我们的所有团队成员都会与玩家进行直接的交流,而这也是我们最大的福利之一!

Koshka_attacking_a_jungle_monster(from gamasutra)

Koshka_attacking_a_jungle_monster(from gamasutra)

经验4:衡量进展

在一个传统的休闲平台上发行一款硬核游戏需要重新评估“成功”这对于我们的意义。这一代的手机游戏的成功经常是以它们能否在发行几周内进入畅销游戏或最佳下载游戏排行榜单为依据。

但是我们觉得下一代硬核游戏的评判标准将不再是这样的。这并不是帮助你一夜获得具有用户粘性的社区的一种方法。我们认为下一代的游戏将更平缓地发展,就像过去的PC游戏那样我很幸运能够成为面向全新平台而创造领先游戏的公司中的一份子,而产业总是会基于之前游戏所创造的各种参数去衡量你。

比起专注于今天的表格,我们应该更注重社区参与度。而像Twitch或YouTube上的评价,策略网站上的评价,花费在应用内部中的时间等在过去被当成第二参考元素的内容应该成为我们评估自己工作的主要发展参数。例如我们的《Vainglory》在Twitch上的流量从2月份的50万发展到5月份的150万便是我们所重视的内容。

到目前为止我们一直深受我们的社区参与的影响。我们同样也很高兴看到我们的游戏在6月的几天里出现在了前100名畅销游戏榜单中,这表示我们较小但不断发展的玩家基础不只在时间方面支持着我们,同时也给予了我们金钱上的支持。

虽然我们仍处于早前的发展阶段,但我们却得到了来自社区满满的支持与爱。

经验5:耐心

不管怎样,创造一些能够改变人们对于触屏游戏的观念的内容需要你具有耐心与毅力。社区,特别是硬核游戏社区更需要花费更多时间不断发展。如果你想要创造一些全新的内容,那么手机游戏产业所创造的“即时满足”心理并非你应该遵循的标准。

对于我们来说,我们一直专注于创造我们认为触屏时代应该拥有的硬核MOBA体验。作为该目标的一部分,我们开始进一步扩展我们在社区上的努力,即设立了世界各地的社区管理者并与eSports上一些最有名的人一起为社区创造比赛。例如今年年初的ESL,以及最近的韩国OGN。我们已经发行了第一版本拥有全新8台摄像机,具有4K分辨率/超高清画质的台式机客户端,即能够呈现出全新视角的eSprots。在游戏中添加8台摄像机意味着玩家能够像观看电影或观看像曲棍球等传统体育运动那样观看《Vainglory》—-拥有多个视角并且不会漏掉关键部分。

将硬核游戏从PC或主机中解放出来的潜在机遇让人难以置信。有些人一天便能够成功创造出比最大的PC和主机游戏大出3至5倍的触屏游戏。我们深受早前发展的鼓励,但对于我们来说现在仍然是早期阶段。我们每天都努力去管理那个决定一直支持我们的社区,并希望能够呈现出比他们想象中还棒的内容。

我们具有无限的耐心去执行这一方法,并希望终有一天能够创造第一个真正面向大众市场的eSprot,就像足球那样,任何人可以在任何地方玩这项运动。并且我们也努力创建一家能够让世界各地最优秀的硬核游戏专家去传达自己的想法并实践自己的技艺的公司。现在的我们仍然处于这段旅程的开始,并且非常兴奋地期待着未来的到来。

本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转发,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Five Lessons I’ve Learned Building a MOBA for Touch Screens

by Kristian Segerstrale

Since the start of Super Evil Megacorp, our number one priority has been to create a game for touch screens that can earn the respect of core gamers. Unlike many touch screen games from the past, we didn’t want to simplify a genre. Instead, we set out to create an unapologetically core MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena game) from the ground up and perfect the game for touch devices. Our mission with Vainglory is to bring the visceral, deep experience to touch screens – where strategy, tactics and mechanical skill all matter. This is the type of gaming we all grew up with and loved in the PC era – especially in a LAN party setting – and we wanted to bring it to an entirely new generation of gamers with the added bonus of not having to carry their PC rigs around.

When we first set out to build Vainglory, we didn’t know if it was possible to transition the full MOBA experience from PCs to touch screens. We knew that, in the console-grade E.V.I.L. game engine, we had the technology to deliver the graphics, polygons and frames-per-second required for a visually stunning experience. But we weren’t sure if we could deliver the “feel” of the game where you would be fully immersed in the action and entirely focused on beating your opponent, instead of figuring out how the controls worked. And where it would be as much fun to watch people play as it was to play the game in the first place.

It took a lot of iteration to get the controls, the map design and the overall high level design choices to all work together, but we’ve been very encouraged by our early progress. Since an early version of the game launched on the App Store in North America and Europe, we’ve learned a lot. We’re very encouraged by the growth and support by our awesome community.

In the month of May alone, we had over 1.5M monthly active players on iOS only, with players spending on average over 80min per day playing the game, and with nearly 20% of players watching it on Twitch as well as playing it on their device. Now following on from the Android launch, we’re growing faster still, and we are very excited about working with our community to continue to evolve the game.

While continuing to build and grow Vainglory and its community is an ongoing learning process, I wanted to share five lessons we’ve learned while developing the game and bringing a super core, traditionally PC-only genre to touch screens.

Lesson 1: Engine Matters

For console or PC developers, it’s not any news that your engine tech matters – very few top charting titles are built on 3rd party engines. However, for touch games this is a largely new concept. Knowing that we wanted to bring core game experiences to touch devices, Super Evil decided to build the E.V.I.L. engine, our proprietary, console-quality engine that allows us to creatively work on our game without the boundaries or restrictions of having to follow someone else’s guidelines.

Not only does the E.V.I.L. engine allow for wonderful performance and precision (60FPS, <30ms controls, 1.3M polygons), but it also allows us to quickly adapt to new hardware, with the fastest time to new APIs and chipsets.

By building our own engine, we’ve also been able to get rid of any technological limits for our creative. This has helped attract top talent to the company – designers with incredible skills who crave artistic freedom and a technology-driven culture have been able to find a long-term home here, which is really important for us as a company as we find our footing and grow. And maybe one day we’ll let people know what E.V.I.L. stands for ;)

Lesson 2: Design for Gamers, not Mobile

Perhaps one of the more fundamental differences between our approach and many others, has been to very specifically not try and design for the current “mobile gamer” – where established wisdom is to design for 2-3 minute play sessions on the go with super simplified controls and typically include timers, energy and social mechanics. Instead, we wanted to respect touch screens as a first rate core gaming platform. Their technical capabilities have largely caught up with PCs and consoles. They just need the software to go with it.

We don’t consider Vainglory a mobile game, despite it being playable on touch devices. We designed and built the game as a truly core experience – not just a port of a PC genre to mobile. We started from scratch when designing the game – and re-thought literally everything in order to make it perfect for the platform on which we were building it.

For example, our controls – we stayed away from using gimmicky controls like the accelerometer or even virtual joypads. Instead, we wanted to find the simplest, most precise and accurate form of control that offers a very high action-per-minute control input. We were very encouraged that even the most skeptical PC players found that after some getting used to, taps allowed them to execute complicated maneuvers with even more precision than their traditional mouse and keys input allowed them to, since tapping with fingers on both hands gives you 2-4 mouse pointers you can use simultaneously.

Another thing that sets us apart from other mobile games is our session length. Instead of pandering to the 2-3 minute established wisdom session length, we wanted to design for a session length that compresses the MOBA experience to shortest length in which we feel you can have a full blooded MOBA battle, including all its phases from farming to team fights, where you get a real opportunity to outthink the opponent as well as outplay them. And where team comps, builds, counter-builds and map control all matter. We arrived at a match length of 20 minutes for Vainglory, whereas casual mobile titles typically have 2-3 minute gameplay sessions. In fact, our players spend on average over 80 min per day playing. You can watch a best-of-3 game pan out from the Vainglory World Invitationals here to see how this has worked out in practice!

Lesson 3: Working with the Community

Another huge difference we see between publishers launching mobile games vs. PC or console games, is in the focus on community. We built Vainglory to last – not to surge to the top of the Top Grossing charts for a week and then disappear. While many companies rely on paid user acquisition strategies to support this goal, to date we have very little UA. The vast, vast majority of our players are organic. In our eyes, fostering an engaged, loyal and happy community is the most important aspect of building a high-quality game that players love. From the beginning we’ve been forming one-on-one relationships with our players and influential people in the MOBA space. This has both been reflected in how we hire, and how we spend our marketing resources.

We hired former pro League of Legends player George ‘Zekent’ Liu as our video community manager, and he runs weekly streams for the Vainglory community on Twitch. We’ve hosted community events for our players all over the world. We listen to our players and we put them first, and for us, that’s the key to building a long-term community of people who enjoy your game, rather than just a ‘flash in the pan’ hit.

We take pride in our community – our players are incredibly engaged and to an extent own Vainglory even more than we do. Some of our best ideas have come from the community – we added a 2-slot spectator view early on because our Twitch streamers kept telling us that we should. We added Taka, one of our most popular heroes, because our players kept asking for a ninja. We do our best to listen and hear what our players want. All of our team members interact directly with players and it’s one of our biggest perks!

Our community is at the center of everything we do. Check out this launch event video summary to give you a sense of what we’re building.

Lesson 4: Measuring Progress

Launching a core game on a traditionally casual platform called for the re-evaluation of what “success” means to us. The current generation of mobile titles are often measured by whether they hit the Top Grossing and Top Downloaded charts within weeks of launch.

We feel the next generation of core gaming hits will not be built this way. There simply is not a way to acquire your way to an engaged community overnight. We think the next generation of titles will have a far slower and more gradual rise to prominence, much more similar to PC titles in the past. I’ve been fortunate to be part of building multiple category-leading game companies on new platforms, and the industry invariably always measures you on the metrics of the previous generation of titles.

Rather than focus on on today’s charts, we’ve instead been obsessed with community engagement, and how our community has spent time with us. Things that would normally be seen as secondary metrics, like Twitch views or YouTube views, views on strategy sites, or time spent in-app have become our primary growth metrics to evaluate whether what we are doing works. The fact that our Twitch traffic for Vainglory tripled from 500,000 views in February to 1.5M views in May is something we pay a lot of attention to, as an example.

So far, we’ve been very encouraged by what we’ve seen in community engagement. And we were also pleased to have briefly been in the top-100 grossing charts for a few days in June, showing that even our small and growing player base is not just supporting us with their time, but increasingly also with their money.

So we are still in our very early days, but we are very encouraged by the support and love our community has shown us during our first few months of being live!

Lesson 5: Patience

Above all else, building something new that changes people’s perceptions of gaming on touch screens requires patience and persistence. Communities, especially for core games, take time to grow. The ‘instant gratification’ mentality that the mobile games industry has developed isn’t the formula that we believe makes sense if you want to build something truly new.

For us, we’re keeping our eye on the prize and are continuing to build the core MOBA experience we believe the touch screen generation deserves. As part of that, we’ve begun expanding our community efforts even further, with local community managers around the globe and by working with some of the biggest names in eSports to create tournaments for our communities. First with ESL earlier this year, and more recently with the world’s leading eSports broadcaster OnGameNet (OGN) of Korea. We’ve even released the first version of our all new eight-camera, 4K / UHD-ready desktop spectation client that brings something entirely new to the way eSports are viewed. Meaning, with eight pre-determined cameras built into the game, watching matches of Vainglory will be much more cinematic and look a lot like how traditional sports like hockey are viewed – from multiple perspectives and without missing a beat.

The potential opportunity to free up core gaming from the confines of a PC or console is mind boggling. Someone will one day go onto create a touch screen success 3-5x the size of the largest PC and console gaming franchises. We are encouraged by our early progress, but it is still the very early days. We work hard every day to do justice to the awesome community that has decided to support us along the way and appreciate them more than they can ever imagine.

We are infinitely patient in our approach and one day dream to build the first truly mass market eSport, which like soccer, can be played and watched by anyone, anywhere. And to build a company that provides the world’s best home for core gaming master craftsmen and craftswomen to express themselves and achieve mastery in their craft. We’re still at the very beginning of our journey and excited about what the future will bring.

Last but not least, find me in Vainglory! My name is EdTheShred.(source:Gamasutra

 


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