作者：David Ferriz

在之前的博文中我曾解释过一些前人的理念是如何诞生的，但是我却未曾跟你们说过它们是如何变成今天的样子。所以我打算在本文提供给你们更多有关这种游戏设计过程的细节。

影响

我和同事的整个童年都是伴随着8位体游戏度过的。就像Enrique便使用286电脑玩过《Goody》，《Fury of the Furries》和《波斯王子》。而我第一次和这些游戏接触则是通过Master System II，并且我最喜欢的游戏便是平台游戏。我记得自己曾花许多时间在玩《Alex Kidd in Miracle World》，《幻影城堡》，《Asterix》，《The New Zealand Story》，《异形3》以及《Sonic》，并且这些游戏带给了我和玩《兽之影》或《圣铠传说》等其它类型的游戏以及在像NES等其它主机上玩的《超级玛丽世界3》一样的优秀体验，

前人的理念

Enrique和我都想要创造出像“那些来自早前时代”的平台游戏。这便意味着我们想要为用户创造一些直接且简单的内容，即并不需要10分钟教程便能开始游戏且游戏中所需要的按键不会多于Master System II或NES控制器的按键。

那些能够带给我们灵感的经典作品通常都只提供了较短暂的游戏体验（通常是2至3个小时），而虽然我们希望传达这种8位体体验，但是我们却不希望将自己局限于对这些游戏的复制并忽视掉现今技术的各种可能性，于是我们便决定创造较长的游戏体验去满足今天玩家们的期待，因为毕竟发行一款大获成功的3小时游戏是像《地狱边境》这样的游戏才拥有的特权。为了实现这一目标我们设计了一个提供了6至12个游戏的单人玩家模式以及能够延伸产品的在线多人玩家模式。

变化的城堡

Castle of Illusion(from cngr)

在《魔法城堡》，《幻影城堡》或《波斯王子》中，玩家的目标便是去拯救某些人，即通常都是公主。于是我们决定保留这样的模式，并加上非线性游戏故事，即让玩家可以选择许多不同路线。

有些roguelike或metroidvania式游戏会完全基于程序去生成关卡和迷宫，但是我们却不希望将关卡设计寄托于算式中。我们希望每个砖块，每次跳跃，每条秘密路道以及每个危险都是带有策略性的，所以我们便手动设计了无数不同的房间并将其结合在一起为每个任务和每个玩家创造了一座与众不同的城堡。

游戏设计文件

在阅读本文的你可能已经清楚，设计文件就如设计师的圣经一般，这里将包含整支开发团队在开发过程中能够参考的所有有关游戏开发的细节内容。你需要投入时间去创造这份文件，但一旦你拥有了它便能为之后的游戏开发节省许多时间。

为了创造一款带有经典机制并以每个游戏环节都会发生变化的大型城堡为背景的平台游戏，我们从2013年初便开始编写游戏设计文件，虽然那时候我们还不确定游戏将面向具体哪个平台发行。我们拥有开发Flash和手机游戏的经验，所以我们很早便以免费游戏为模型面向手机设备，网页浏览器和Facebook创建了游戏原型，但当我们将其带到一些活动上并看到用户的反应时我们意识到应该赋予这款游戏一个控制器或键盘。

我从来都不是免费游戏的倡导者，因为我始终认为如果你不能有效优化模式你最终便会搞砸一款游戏并获得较低的利润。当我在编写设计文件时我也会担心自己将太多时间花在纠结盈利而不是如何带给用户乐趣上面。虽然放弃到目前为止所完成的工作是个非常艰难的决定，但最终我们还是决定面向PC，Mac和Steam上的Linux发行《king Lucas》。

你可能会想，放弃之前已经开发了一半的内容并不是明智的决定，这会拖延游戏的发行，虽然这并没错，但现在当游戏几乎快完成时，如果我们因为不能将游戏变成我们真正想要的内容，我们便会被这样的因子牢牢束缚住而不能继续前进。

游戏玩法

在一些节日中公开了游戏的预告片和测试版本后，我们收到了许多有价值的反馈并帮助我们更好地完善游戏，但我们同时也会担心有些玩家可能不能在游戏中找到这些完善内容。一开始便有很多玩家将《King Lucas》与《Rogue Legacy》以及其它行动游戏进行比较，当然了这是对我们的赞美，但这并非我们的真正的目标。在《King Lucas》中你可以与许多敌人以及最终boss进行战斗并可以使用各种武器与盾牌，但是战斗却不是游戏的主要元素，说实话，这里并没有疯狂的动作，源源不绝的敌人以及激烈的射击。

实际上《King Lucas》是一款平台游戏，所以我们必须想办法将玩家引向大型城堡，为此我们创造了两种重要的道具：指南针（指向目标）和水晶球（告诉玩家会有多少房间）。这些道具以及用于开门的钥匙是避免玩家在城堡中漫无目的前行并帮助他们完成任务的关键优势，并且这是与玩家所选择的武器的能力和持久力无关的。

为了完成库存我们还添加了经典的生命值和无敌药水。

结果

经历了4年的游戏开发，我们在几周前进行了第一轮beta测试并获得了一些反馈能够帮助我们去平衡游戏难度以及武器等道具的价格。当我自己玩了30个小时的beta版本后我突然觉得我们有必要重新体验一些经典内容并从中获得灵感，毕竟我已经20多年没玩过这些游戏了。所以在我那古老的Master System上玩了一些游戏后我突然理解了这些游戏所具有的分量，其实我们几乎是无意识地在《King Lucas》表达了对于这些经典的致敬。

（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）

Designing a game like those from the good old times

by David Ferriz

In the previous post of King Lucas devblog I explained how the former idea was born but I didn’t tell you how it became what it is today. In this new post I’m going to try to give you some details about the game design process.

The influences

Me and my associate spent our childhood playing 8 bit games. Enrique had a 286 where he used to play Goody, Fury of the Furries and Prince of Persia (the real one, that still hadn’t got “bullet time” and those kind of things). In my case, my first contact with games was the Master System II and my favourite ones were platformers. I remember wasting hours and hours playing Alex Kidd in Miracle World, Castle of Illusion, Asterix, The New Zealand Story, Alien 3 or Sonic as well as I had really good times playing games of some other genres such as Shadow of the Beast or Gaunlet and in other consoles like Super Mario World 3 in NES.

The former idea

Enrique and me agreed we wanted to make a platformer like “those from the good old times”. This means we wanted something direct and simple for the user, something that wouldn’t need a 10 minutes tutorial to start playing and no more buttons than the Master System II or NES controllers had.

The classics that inspired us offered a short game experience (from 2 up to 3 hours) and, although we wanted to deliver that 8 bit experience, we didn’t want to limit ourselves to carbon copy those games and miss the possibilities of the actual technology, so we decided to create an experience long enough to fulfill the expectations of nowadays players, because launching a 3 hours game and succeed is something that only some privileged get, like Limbo. In order to reach this goal we designed a single player mode that offers between 6 and 12 playing game as well as a online multi-player mode that extends the product life.

A changing castle

In Alex Kidd, Castle of Illusion or Prince of Persia the goal was to rescue somebody, usually a princess. We decided to keep that schema, but with a non-linear game narrative in which the player can choose hundreds of different routes to get to the end (that’s why the playing time of King Lucas has such a wide range).

Some roguelike or metroidvania games generate levels and mazes in a completely procedural way, but we didn’t want to leave the level design in the hands of an algorithm. We’ve always thought that each tile, each jump, each secret passage and each danger must be strategically located so we chose to hand design hundreds of different rooms to then combine them so together they build a different massive castle for each quest and for each player.

The game design document

If your reading this devlog you may probably already know that a design document is the bible where all the details of the game to be developed are compiled in order to be a reference for the whole team through the process. To make this document is usually a laborious job but it really save a lot of time in the development.

Starting from the point of creating a platformer with classical mechanics set in a large castle that changes in each play, in early 2013 we began to write the game design document without having very clear which platform the game was going to be oriented for. We had a lot of experience developing Flash and mobile games so initially started to make prototypes for mobile devices, web browsers and Facebook with a free 2 play model in mind, like Candy Crush, but as soon as we showed the game in some events and see the reaction of the users we realized that we hadn’t a mobile game; it deserved to be played with a controller or a keyboard!

Moreover, I’ve never been a free 2 play advocate because I think that if you fail in tuning the model you may end up screwing a good game and even getting very low profitability. While writing the design document I was worried about using too much time thinking of monetization instead of dedicating these efforts to think about how to make the users have fun so, even though discarding the work done up to that date was a hard decision, finally we forgot the tactile control, the free 2 play model and we focused on working to launch King Lucas for PC, Mac and Linux in Steam (and maybe consoles later).

As you probably guess, dismiss the design with half development advanced is not the ideal way of working and it delayed our launch but it’s also true that, now when the game is almost finished, I think it was the best of the choices because if we had been limited by these factors we wouldn’t have been able to make the game that we really wanted to.

The gameplay

After showing the trailer and the beta version of the game in several festivals we received a very valuable feedback and that helped us much to improve the game but we are also aware that, even with those improvements, maybe some players won’t find in it what they look for in a game. From the very beginning a lot of users have compared King Lucas to Rogue Legacy and other action games; of course that’s a compliment for us but that has never been our goal. In King Lucas you can fight a good bunch of enemies, final bosses and use a lot of weapons and shields, but fights are not the main part of the game and, being honest, there’s no frenetic action here nor hundreds of enemies and heavy shooting on screen.

In fact King Lucas is a platformer where the important thing is to get yourself oriented in its massive castles and for it we created two significant items: the compass (that points to your goal) and the crystal ball (that tells you how many rooms there are between you and it). These items, together with the keys to open doors, are the key advantages in order to not wander aimlessly through the castle and overcome the quests, independently of the power and endurance of your chosen weapons (that also help, but not so much).

To complete the inventory we included the classical health and invincibility potions that no classical platformer should lack.

The outcome

After almost 4 years of development, some weeks ago we could make the first formal round of beta testing which gave us useful insights in order to balance the difficult of the game as well as the prices of weapons and other items. Right after playing for 30 hours that beta on myself I suddenly felt a huge need of revisiting the classics that inspired us and that, in some cases, I hadn’t played for more than 20 years. It was after some plays with my old Master System when I understood how much weight those games had carried and how, almost in an unconscious way, we had recreated so many references and homages to them inside King Lucas.

Some days ago my father -who’s always concerned about my company but know nothing about games- asked whether King Lucas was “the kind of game that sells today“. Honestly, this question puzzled me and I did my best not to reply because the answer wouldn’t have probably reassured him. On one hand, the honest answer would have been no, King Lucas is not the game somebody would create actually in order to make money but, on the other hand, I’m sure that if we reach the players who grew up playing Alex Kidd, Wonder Boy or Castle of Illusion and we achieve to transport them to their childhood for a few hours at least we will have a chance to cover the investment made in these 4 years of development.（source：gamasutra）