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ZeptoLab谈C.A.T.S.:Crash Arena Turbo Stars的开发过程

发布时间:2017-09-28 10:56:52 Tags:

原文作者:Matt Suckley 译者:Megan Shieh

战车组装战斗手游《C.A.T.S.》的设计独具匠心,有创意但不至于烧脑的对抗玩法使得它在应用程序商店中一枝独秀。

游戏中的小猫们需要利用搜集到的不同部件来打造自己的专属战车,然后在超快的自动战斗中进行1V1互怼,一决高下。

为了找到最有效的组装方案来赢得对手,玩家需要使用从战斗中获得的强大武器和升级来装备他们的战车。

C.A.T.S.:Crash Arena Turbo Stars(from pocket gamer.biz)

C.A.T.S.:Crash Arena Turbo Stars(from pocket gamer.biz)

此作刚刚发布不久,就获得了惊人的成就。为了了解开发过程,pocketgamer.com.biz访问了Zeptolab工作室的首席产品官Max Petrov。

《C.A.T.S.》感觉像是《King of Thieves(神偷)》中核 PvP风格的自然延伸。你们是想要用《C.A.T.S.》来延续《King of Thieves》的成功吗?

Max Petrov:《King of Thieves》的表现很棒,在开发和管理它的过程中我们也学到了很多东西。当然,我们试图把这些东西带入到《C.A.T.S.》的制作中,同时也会避免之前出现过的错误,然后创建出全新的内容。

不过《C.A.T.S.》的目标受众更大,它的下载量是《King of Thieves》的5倍,利润也大很多。

本作延续了用户生成内容(UGC)的主题,让玩家自己打造战车并使用它们来战斗,这个想法是什么时候出现的?

从一开始我们就决定要在《C.A.T.S.》中加入UGC功能。如果要玩家自己控制打斗的话,通常有很高的技能要求;但是如果玩家可以创造出他们自己的战斗机器,用脑力来获胜而不是手指,那岂不更好?这样的游戏设计中不会有太多的按钮和操纵杆,也不会影响受众范围。

这次为什么会选小猫作为主角呢?

小猫的设定是在开发后期才出现的。其实在最初的时候,游戏里的车辆是设置为无人驾驶的。

后来我们觉得玩家可能不会与这些没有灵魂的金属块产生情感联系,所以决定画出一些不同的概念司机,然后用它们来做测试。小猫只是众多选项中的一个,我们画出的概念司机包括各类奇幻生物和一些其他的动物,比如猪和兔子。

截屏测试显示,有司机驾驶的车辆表现得更好;而比起其他角色,玩家比较中意小猫。

《C.A.T.S.》的开发团队有多大?总开发时间有多长?

初始版本的开发花费了8个月的时间,当时的开发团队只有游戏设计师,艺术家,程序员和产品经理。

接着我们将游戏进行了长达13个月的测试发行,最先在奥地利和瑞典,后来也在加拿大进行了测试发行。

在测试发行的过程中,有12个人在持续维护游戏;而此前有23位专家参与了《C.A.T.S.》的开发。

亚洲游戏文化是否对元游戏和实际战斗的自动化产生了影响?

在开发的过程中我们考虑了世界各地的趋势,不仅仅是亚洲。

简化核心玩法然后专注于元游戏,这种做法并不新鲜,但非常适合移动平台,而且也有很多成功的先例,所以这是一个较为安全的赌注。

偶尔会有玩家会提议手动战斗,但绝大部分的玩家都对自动战斗没有意见。而且我们不想把它做成hardcore游戏,因为这会缩小受众。

你从测试发行中学到了什么?作为学习结果,你做了什么改变?

我们学到最主要的一点是‘不要害怕尝试’。只要你能够评估结果的价值,就放手地去测试尽可能多的想法,包括那些听起来有些疯狂的想法。在决定当前的元数据之前,我们测试了很多盈利模式,也测试了《King of Thieves》里的一些东西。

另一个主要的变化是加入小猫做主角,这些都是在做完A/B测试之后添加的。

除此之外,我们还移除了一小部分的功能。例如,之前玩家可以毁掉对手车辆上的随机部分,以此来破坏他们的战车。虽然感觉好像很有用,但是玩家都不怎么用这个功能,于是我们决定把它拿掉。

游戏中的货币化机制是不是受到了《皇室战争》的启发?

就像玩法机制一样,我们总是在寻找最新的盈利趋势,并对它们进行大量的测试。

Supercell找到了一个很好的平衡,所以我们也从他们那里学到了一些东西;同时我们也会学习其他公司的做法;参考我们自己用过的盈利模式;到头来,我们都会对这些东西进行非常彻底的分析。

但正如前面所提到的,我们参考的盈利模式不只这一个,而且为了让它能够更好地适应游戏和受众,我们对它进行了很大程度的调整。

游戏中有个赛事外围的下注系统,《C.A.T.S.》的观看性如何?有没有成为电子竞技的可能?

有的,我们觉得《C.A.T.S.》在电子竞技和直播方面都存在潜力。请关注我们即将发布的更新。

研发过程中,团队遇到过的最大挑战是什么?

为了迎合截止日期,我们不得不去掉某些东西。有很多很酷的想法都还没来得及实施,不过在未来的功能更新中,我们肯定会尝试把它们加进去。

你如何看待这个游戏的发布?对目前的反响满意吗?

当然,高兴极了!这才刚刚发布三个月,就已经在全球范围内达到了超过5000万的下载量。

并且这还是应用商店历史上最大的一次发布(非系列游戏):发布后的第一个周末获得了800万的下载量,在全球20个国家的‘免费应用程序’中名列第一(包括美国在内)。

人们似乎真的很喜欢这个游戏,评分也非常高,而且这是工作室有史以来获利最高的游戏。

不过我们不会就此止步,因为游戏还存在非常大的进步空间。

对《C.A.T.S.》的未来有什么规划?

我们想要推出尽可能多的更新,最好是每个月都有。工作室已经为今年余年和2018年年初的新内容制定了计划。

制作一个好的游戏固然重要,但项目的进一步发展同样重要,未来还会有更好的内容出现在《C.A.T.S.》里面。

本文由游戏邦编译,转载请注明来源,或咨询微信zhengjintiao

ZeptoLab brings a very distinct flavour to its games that you’re unlikely to see anywhere else.

And it’s brought that quirky creativity and fun to its latest game, C.A.T.S.: Crash Arena Turbo Stars, which is quite unlike anything else available on the app stores.

The game pits cats against one another in suped up battle cars in lightning-quick automated battles. Players can fit their vehicles with an increasing number of powerful weapons and upgrades as they seek to find the most effective combination against their opponents.

To find out how ZeptoLab went about developing the game, PocketGamer.biz caught up with the studio’s Chief Product Officer Max Petrov on creating one of the most interesting and unique mobile titles of the year.

PocketGamer.biz: C.A.T.S. feels like a natural extension of the midcore PvP style you introduced with King of Thieves. Was the intention to build on that game’s success?

Max Petrov: King of Thieves was a big success for us, we learned a lot while creating and managing it. So, naturally, with C.A.T.S. we tried to implement all this knowledge, while avoiding previous mistakes and bringing in something completely new.

This time we were aiming at a much larger audience. As a result,C.A.T.S. is five times bigger in terms of downloads and significantly bigger in profit.

The game also continues the theme of user-generated content. When did the idea emerge to have players building their own machines and battling with them?

We wanted C.A.T.S. to feature UGC right from the very beginning. As stated before, we were aiming at a much larger audience this time, and that’s when the idea of uncontrollable battles came to us.

What if instead of fighting themselves, which usually requires some serious skills, players create their own fighting machines and use their head more rather than their fingers?

This sounded quite fresh and was an ideal solution for mobile, where you don’t have a lot of buttons and sticks to control the action.

Ever since Om Nom, ZeptoLab has seemingly placed a lot of value in its characters. How did you go about designing the cats themselves?

Cats didn’t appear in the game until late in the development. At first, the machines were unmanned.

However, we had doubts that players would be able to develop any emotional connection with these soulless chunks of metal. So we decided to test it and drew concept arts featuring different drivers.

Cats were only one of many options: we had concepts with fantasy creatures and other animals like pigs and bunnies. Screenshot tests showed that manned vehicles indeed performed better, and that players prefered cats to the other characters.

That’s how the game’s final appearance started to form.

How big was the team on C.A.T.S. and how long was the total development time?

The initial version took eight months to develop and the team consisted of only the game designer, the artist, the programmer and the product manager.

After that we released the game to a 13-months long soft launch in Austria, Sweden, and later in Canada.

The team grew accordingly: there were more than 12 people constantly working on the project during the soft launch, and prior to the release we had 23 specialists working on C.A.T.S.

Was there an Asian influence in the focus on metagame and the automation of actual battles?

We’re looking for trends everywhere, not precisely in Asia. Easing core gameplay and focusing on the meta game instead isn’t new, but that’s a good fit for mobile platforms and there are a lot of successful examples, so it was a pretty safe bet.

Some players asked us for manual battles, but the majority were fine with automatic fights. Plus we didn’t want to narrow the audience and make the game hardcore.

What did you learn from the soft launch period and what were the biggest changes you enacted as a result?

The major thing we learned from the soft launch is that you shouldn’t be afraid to experiment. Test as many things as possible, including the radical ones, as long as you can measure the results. We tested a lot of monetisation models, including some things from King of Thieves, before deciding on the current meta.

Another major change was implementation of cats. Both of these things were added after A/B tests.

We also had to take out a few features: for example, at some point players were able to sabotage the car of their rival by destroying a random part on their vehicle. Despite being seemingly useful, players didn’t use this feature much, so we decided to get rid of it.

What was your approach to monetisation design? Was Clash Royale’s chest system an inspiration?

As with gameplay mechanics, we’re always looking for newest trends in monetisation and perform a lot of tests to find what’s working.

Supercell managed to find a good balance there, so we learned a few things from them, as well as from many other companies and our own projects, which we always thoroughly analyse.

But, as mentioned earlier, it wasn’t the only model we tried, and we adapted it quite a lot to fit our game and the audience.

With the ability to bet on other players’ bouts, to what extent did you design C.A.T.S. to be spectated? Is there eSports potential?

Yes, we do see eSports and streaming potential. Please follow our upcoming updates.

What was the biggest challenge you faced during the game’s development?

Perhaps the biggest challenge for us was the necessity to cut certain things out to fit the deadlines. We have a lot of cool ideas that we were unable to implement yet, but that we’ll definitely try to make in future updates.

How do you reflect on the game’s launch? Are you happy with the reception thus far?

We are extremely happy with C.A.T.S.: three months after the release we already have more than 50 million downloads worldwide.

We also managed to make one of the biggest launches in the app stores history, at least for non-franchise games: C.A.T.S. got eight million downloads on the first weekend and was number one in the “free apps” category in 20 countries, including the US.

People seem to love the game, the ratings are very high and it’s our biggest title in terms of profit. Yet we don’t want to stop here – there’s still room for many improvements.

What’s next for C.A.T.S.?

We want to roll out as many updates as possible, preferably every month. We already have plans for new content for the rest of the year and even for the beginning of 2018.

Making a good launch is amazing, but further development of the project is just as important. We’re pretty sure that the best is yet to come for C.A.T.S.(Source:pocketgamer.biz  


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