开发者分享手游创新案例及实现创新的方法建议

原作者：Nikita Tolokonnikov 译者：Vivian Xue

什么是创新？

当我们思考一个新游戏时，总会谈到创新。我希望观察市面上一些优秀的手游，看看它们是如何进行创新的，并分享我在这个领域的个人经验：我从中学到了什么以及它如何帮助我创造出了一个更好的游戏。

我对创新的理解很简单：做一些人们从未见过的东西，或是人们在什么地方见到过、但大概已经没印象的东西。事实上，很多创意都已经以某种方式存在，只不过平常的玩家接触到的游戏还不到总数的1%。当前我们的市场上有马模拟器、鸽子约会游戏，还有很多其它的创意。

创新可以是创造一个全新的游戏概念，也可以是让某样熟悉事物以崭新的视觉效果呈现在人们面前。同样是节点地图，《糖果苏打传奇》把它做得既简单又美丽，成为了游戏成功的关键之一。而这年头三消游戏还能怎么创新呢？把地图去掉！《梦幻家园》、《梦幻花园》和《卡通爆炸》（Toon Blast）就属于这种。当人们看到这种没有Saga地图的三消游戏时，他们感到耳目一新。

开头

我敢打赌你一定听很多公司说过（大概你的公司也一样），他们的重点是创新。然而，创新最大的问题在于沟通。在你创造人们从未见过的事物之前，你得想办法向人们解释你的想法。我见过许多伟大的想法因缺乏理解而夭折。

试想一下，屋子里一群高管准备倾听你的绝妙主意，你开始描述它，充满了激情和说服力，但得到的却是众人空洞的眼神以及“你能举个成功的例子吗”的回复。

这就是危险所在。你的想法尚未被成功地应用在任何游戏上。但若真被应用过，你这也算不上创新了。当你的目标是所谓的蓝海（亟待开发的市场空间或产业，游戏邦注）时，你总会面临这样一个进退两难的情形：“从来没有人在这方面取得过成功，究竟是因为不存在适合该市场的产品，还只是因为人们做的不够好？”那你又能把它做好吗？

要追逐这些想法，你需要有远见，有时还需要足够的信任。如果没有人能理解你的想法，也许你需要回过头来对它进行修改。很多时候那些你征求反馈的人比玩家本身更熟悉游戏。然而，如果人们理解了你的想法，并且你得到的唯一的反馈是从没有人这么做过——那么也许它是一个值得追寻的目标。

你为什么想要创新？

那么创新真正的意义到底是什么？在经过了我以上提到的压力和讨论过后，你可能很容易这么想——那么，让我们参考《皇室战争》，增加一些功能，把它们5%的玩家吸引过来。这将是一笔巨额收入！

但是为什么呢？为什么那些玩《皇室战争》的人，那些SuperCell努力维系起来的忠诚的玩家要转玩你的游戏呢？仅仅因为你的游戏里有一些新功能？玩家们不会这样想的。

PC单人游戏市场当前陷入了一场玩家注意力的争夺战。但玩家们总有一天会通关《荒野大镖客 2》和《蜘蛛侠》，并接着寻找新游戏。那时也许你的游戏足够有趣到能吸引他们。

然而这种事很难发生在手游领域。拿《英雄联盟》或者像《皇室战争》《糖果苏打创奇》和《漫威英雄冠军赛》(Marvel Contest of Champions)这样的游戏来说，他们的玩家都已经玩了好几年了，并且对于寻找新游戏也不是很积极。当然了，他们会尝试你的游戏，并且如果足够好他们会考虑继续玩。但是添加几个新功能并不会让你的游戏有什么质的提升。你应该为他们提供一种新的体验，思考如何替代他们手头的游戏。

当前市场中每一种游戏类型都呈现极度饱和的状态，其中要么是《皇室战争》、《炉石传说》和《精灵宝可梦GO》这种“一家独大”的游戏，要么是充斥着大量成功作品的类型游戏，比如解谜类：里面全是《糖果苏打传奇》、或者是跟Playrix、Peak Games产品类似的游戏。

要想真正从他们手中分得一杯羹，或者建立一个全新的玩家群体。你需要一点新东西。一些玩家期待已久但不为人知的东西。游戏行业存在的一个永恒的问题是，新游戏根本不会去解决问题。我们自以为只要把游戏做的足够有趣，人们就会喜欢它。但如果他们在常玩的那几个游戏上花费了很多时间，你必须让你的游戏超过它们才能吸引玩家。如今几乎所有的手游都在提供服务，大家都希望能在市场上存活三年、五年、十年，没有人会松懈。

有价值的例子

大概很多人会觉得我所谈论的创新很枯燥，甚至根本称不上创新，但是我认为无论创新以什么方式被实现，它本质上都是为玩家带来全新的、令人兴奋和享受的感觉。我认为创新的程度还得取决于市场。比如在独立游戏市场，创新可能是非常疯狂、漫无边际的，然而在F2P市场里，它可能就是几个元素的出人意料的组合。

什么样的创新才能为你的玩家所接受？以一个50岁的女性玩家为例。当她开始玩一个新游戏时，她希望接触多少功能和体验？究竟是一种全新而强烈的体验，还是一些似曾相识但稍作改变的东西才能让她产生新鲜感？

让我们从一个简单的例子开始——《皇室战争》。让我们从两个方面思考它：第一，它最初的概念是什么样子的；第二，它为市场真正带来了什么。

《皇室战争》的原始概念并不算多么有创意：同样的地图、两个玩家一人3座塔和8个一组的战斗单位，通过消耗圣水召唤单位。似乎和其他战略游戏没什么不同。但它的绝妙之处在于它简化了战略游戏，使之完美契合手游体验，这一点无人能做到。

我们知道，在简单的背后，《皇室战争》能够成为一个经久耐玩的游戏还有很多原因：部署位置、寻路系统、进攻combo、圣水的管理和使用以及一些其它的小细节。

我们再来看一下手游市场，是否存在成功的多人同步战略游戏？没有。你看，这就是创新。尽管你可能会说从游戏的角度来看《皇室战争》只不过是一个多人战略游戏、或者一个简化版的MOBA游戏，但它在手游市场上是独一无二的，并且自打它出现至今都一直稳居王座。

我们再来看看更休闲向的游戏，比如《梦幻花园》：除了支持多条支线任务外它几乎没什么创新性，它是《糖果苏打传奇》和《梦话水族箱》糅合的产物。然而它凭借着重建花园的简单设定和轻量化的剧情一举攻占了市场。

与前辈们相比，《梦幻花园》的创新性体现在玩法上——增强道具系统和《糖果苏打传奇》颇为相似但没那么鲜艳、还进行了一些调整。随着游戏进行，剧情一点点展开，让玩家在进行每一个关卡时都获得新鲜感。

看看三消游戏市场上的一个较新的竞品——《家居改造》（Home Design Makeover）——他们的创新可以说是很全面了，虽然大获成功，但他们也本可能彻底失败。他们采取了与《农场英雄传奇》（Farm Hero Saga）或他们自己的游戏《糖果风暴》（Sugar swap Mania）相似的玩法，但增加了一个很大的特色——直接把增强道具捆绑在消除元素（瓷砖）上，游戏meta混合了《梦幻家园》和家居设计，他们由此获得了一个非常可靠的产品，让玩家一边玩新颖有趣的三消游戏一边装修房子，这种体验是前所未有的。

这样的例子还有很多，它们都在原本游戏的基础上做了简单的修改，然而却从没有人想到过。让我们快速浏览下面的两个例子：《决战高尔夫》（Golf Clash）和《连成字》（Wordscapes）。

《决战高尔夫》的玩法基于高尔夫运动，这为它带来了先天的粉丝基础，不过它是通过加入类似《皇室战争》中的升级系统和meta（包括1v1匹配玩法）打入市场。虽然只是我的猜测，但我敢说正是由于他们把这种超出游戏玩法之外的升级系统带入了游戏里，他们才得以把玩家基础扩展到高尔夫球迷之外，并把成功的盈利模型融入到了竞技游戏中，在此之前，还没有人知道如何通过竞技游戏有效盈利。

《连成字》是一款已经存在已久的纵横字谜游戏，它拥有独特的用户体验，让玩家在简短的关卡中感到乐趣和成就感，这为它带来了巨大的下载量，并通过销售游戏提示和视频广告获得巨大的商业效益。

综上所述你可以看到，在手游市场中，有些团队能够创造一些全新的、独特、从未存在的东西，而有一些团队只是通过某种方式对现有的游戏模型进行混合或再次迭代，从而为目标玩家创造全新体验并不断扩展这种体验。

寻求创新

关于如何寻求创新，没有真正完美的答案。我可以告诉你一些使我们Social Point工作室获益良多的建议，它可能会引导你朝着正确的方向进发，也有可能毫无用处。

按照传统的方法，我们通过团队头脑风暴来获得新点子。然而，在互联网上你能找到无数实现头脑风暴的方式，我将重点阐述那些对我们更有帮助的东西。

第一，建立一个多元化的团队，由来自不同国家、不同文化、不同背景的人组成。邀请美术设计、开发人员、分析师一起参与头脑风暴，而不要仅把它当作设计师的职责。让拥有不同想法的个体一同思考是产生惊人灵感的关键。开发人员的一些你永远想不到的想法将产生更多的讨论和更多的想法。

另一种增强差异化的方式是让一些经验不太丰富的人加入讨论，一些充满激情的有时甚至很天真的年轻人。太过有经验的人往往倾向于在表达观点前扼杀他们脑海中一些想法，这往往无助于头脑风暴。而一个尚未被行业“腐化”的人往往能提供新鲜且极其有用的建议。

推动头脑风暴的另一种方式是自我启发。然而我们总倾向于观察我们直接竞争者的游戏，但这会让我们形成思维定式，一旦陷进去很难走出来。当你思考如何做某件事时，你的脑海中总是马上得到了一个答案，因为Top50的游戏早已解决了它。但是也许还有别的方法呢？

观察与我们的平行行业：电影、电视节目、书籍——人们享受的是什么，又为什么会感到享受？你能在一款游戏中再现烹饪节目的体验吗？你能再现密室逃脱的体验吗？寻找意想不到的领域，你将能够挖掘一些真正有趣而具有创新性的东西。

另一个角度是观察老游戏。市面上存在有数千种不同的游戏，几乎所有的玩法已经以某种形式被创造出来了。从来自80年代，90年代，00年代的游戏、3A游戏、独立游戏和其他游戏中获得灵感。从这些游戏中你能找到很棒的东西，但它们尚未被应用到手游里。究竟是因为没有市场，还是因为以前没有人尝试过？

最后，让我们再次回到当今游戏存在的问题上——无法解决玩家的问题。然而，你可以从玩家们玩的游戏中发现他们的需求。你可以弄清楚他们喜欢什么、为什么喜欢，更重要的是他们觉得这游戏还缺了些什么。

不要害怕与玩家交谈，建立焦点小组，进行访谈。接触你的终端用户才能获得最具价值的信息。很多时候，你可以通过这样发现一些你从未思考过的东西。

证明创新的设想

最后我想谈的是如何将你的创新设想付诸实践。虽然不是每个人都会同意，但我提倡的方法是制作最小可行产品(MVP)。如果您想出了一种市面上没有的产品，基线性能不取决于执行的质量，而是想法本身。

快速让你的MVP产品进入试发行状态将使你获得真正的受众反馈。在此之前的所有研究只能为你提供信息，无法可靠地证明你成功的机会。执行质量管理能够帮助你提升游戏的指标，但前提是你的MVP产品本身的基线性能是优秀的。

尽可能地简化过程，以便调整你的产品，这一点很关键。想象一下您花了一年时间开发，然后决定更改几个关键系统，那么你很可能需要重建整个产品。然而，如果你在游戏模型做出来3个月后就进行试发行并看到一些需要改变的地方，那么你需要花费的时间会大大缩短。

迭代永远是创造优秀游戏的关键。唯有当你足够了解受众的期待（如果你要创新这一点几乎不可能）、或者足够幸运时，你才有可能一次性做出一款好产品。

很多人不赞同这种开发方式，一些非常成功的公司即便在试发行阶段也不会将一个未经打磨的游戏直接搬上台面。许多游戏在经过了大量打磨后还会不断迭代，并取得我想象不到的成功。成功的方式有很多种，我提出的不过是其中一种罢了。

尽管如此，我还是建议开发者们在创造一个新游戏时，想一下对你的玩家们来说它的MVP产品是什么？什么才能引起他们的关注？什么才能让他们第二天回来接着玩游戏？迭代构建你的游戏，逐个优化你的指标。你的玩家第二天回来了吗？也许现在是时候想办法让他们留下来一周了。

我希望看到越来越多的创新性的项目出现在手游市场上，并证明成功是由新颖的想法和新鲜的体验推动的，我们作为专业人士应该不断为玩家寻求和提供这种体验。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源或咨询微信zhengjintiao

What is innovation?

Everyone is talking about innovation when they start thinking about a new game. I would like to take a look at some outstanding mobile games, look at how they innovate and share my personal experience in this field: what have I learned and how does it help me to make a better game today.

I understand innovation simply: something that you haven’t seen before or you have but in a different place, probably already forgotten. Truly, there are not many ideas that haven’t existed already in some form, but typical player hasn’t seen even 1% of all games that are out there. We live in the world that has a horse simulator game and pigeons dating game among many other ideas.

Innovation could be the whole concept for the game or just a new visual representation of familiar information. A simple and brilliant thing such as the node map is one of they key differentiators that made Candy Crush successful. And what is considered an innovation these days in Match3 genre? Lack of the saga map! Take a look at Homescapes, Gardenscapes and Toon Blast. When they were released without saga map, it looked new, fresh, unfamiliar.

The beginning

I bet you’ve heard every company (probably yours as well) saying that their focus is innovation. However, the biggest issue of innovation is communication. To bring something new to life, that people haven’t seen before, you have to find a way to explain it. I’ve seen many situations where great ideas fall victims to lack of understanding.

Imagine – you’re in the room with this brilliant idea. You have executives listen to you, you start explaining, passionate, convincing but you get blank stares in return and the question “Can you give me an example in a successful game?”

And this is where the danger lies. There are no examples in successful games. Otherwise, you’re only following someone and not innovating. When you aim at the so called blue ocean, you always face the same dilemma: “Have nobody succeeded there because there’s no real product to market fit or just because nobody made it right yet?”. Can you make it right?

You need to have strong vision and sometimes just enough trust to pursue those ideas. Probably if nobody really understands what are you saying – you should come back and revise it. Chances are people you are asking for feedback are more familiar with games than gamers themselves. However, if people know what you are saying and the only feedback you’re getting is that it just has never been done before – maybe that’s the whole point to go for it.

Why would you want to innovate?

So what is the actual point of innovating? After all the stress and discussions that I’ve mentioned above it’s so easy and compelling to say – ah, let’s take Clash Royale, add a couple of features and that is going to bring us 5% of their audience. Huge money!

But why? Why people who play Clash Royale, who Supercell have been building trust with, will go and play your game? Because there are a couple of new features? Players don’t really think that way.

Take PC, single player experiences, you’re competing for player’s attention at the CURRENT moment. But eventually he or she will complete Red Dead Redemption 2, Spider Man and will be on a lookout for new games. Maybe yours is interesting enough.

However, take League of Legends or mobile examples such as Clash Royale, Candy Crush or Marvel Contest of Champions. People play those games for years. They don’t actively look for a new one. Sure, they might try out your game and they MIGHT consider staying if yours is better. But a couple of new features will not make your game actually better. You should provide a new experience to consider your game as an alternative.

Market is so saturated in every genre that there is either a single player takes it all – Clash Royale, Hearthstone, Pokemon GO or there is a multitude of successful games in a genre such as puzzle: all Candy Crush games, all games from Playrix and Peak Games and so on.

To be really able to take part of their audience OR actually create a new slice of audience you need to offer something new. Something players have been waiting but didn’t know. The everlasting issue of gaming is that new games usually don’t solve problems. We assume that if we make it really fun – people will like it, but if they have so many minutes in their day to play games they need to like it MORE than other games. Almost all mobile games are built as services right now, everyone wants to be there for 3, 5, 10 years. None of the games will give yours any slack.

Worthy examples

Probably many would deem the innovation that I’m talking about dull and not that innovative after all, however I think it just needs to deliver fresh exciting feeling for players to enjoy no matter how has it been achieved. I think the innovation scale depends on the industry itself. When in the indie games, the innovation might be really wild, in the F2P mobile it can be unexpected mix of several elements.

What kind of innovation is acceptable by your audience? Take a woman 50 years old. How many new features and experience does she want to handle when starting a new game? Something completely new and wild or rather something familiar with a twist that makes it fresh for her?

Let’s start with an easy example – Clash Royale. Let’s take a look at it from two sides. First – how does the initial concept sound like and, second – what does it really brings to the market?

The brilliance of clash royale, and it’s easy to say in hindsight, is that its initial concept wouldn’t even sound that innovative. Always same map, two players, three towers for each and a deck of 8 units with mana economy. That sounds like any other strategy game out there, but nobody could simplify a strategy game that it actually FITS the mobile experience.

As we all know, behind the simplicity there are numerous parameters that make the gameplay of Clash Royale so long-lasting: location of spawn, pathfinding, unit combos and counters, mana management and many other small details.

Now take a look at the actual market, were there any successful games that featured strategy gameplay with synchronous multiplayer? Nope. That’s how you want to innovate. Even though you might say, from the gaming perspective overall – Clash Royale is just a strategy multiplayer game or simplified MOBA or whatever you would like to call it, this game had nothing to compete with on the market and it easily took the place and holds the crown ever since.

Switching to more casual games, consider Gardenscapes: no innovation in the gameplay except multiple goals, it’s quite usual mix from Candy Crush and Fishdom. However, taking something simple as rebuilding a garden with light narrative along the way and it totally crashes the market.

Compare Homescapes to its predecessor, it went for innovation in the gameplay – booster system that is rather similar to Candy Crush, but colorless and with some other adjustments. Keep evolving the narrative bit and the audience is happy to play another match3 game that feels fresh when you play the levels.

Looking at a newer competitor on the match3 market – Home Design Makeover, they went all across the board with innovating and it could have pan out like it did or it could have been a total failure. They took a gameplay similar to Farm Heroes Saga or to their own Sugar Swap Mania, added a big difference – boosters that stick to the tile, added on top of all of that meta that is somehow mix between Homescapes and Design Home and they’ve got a really solid product that offered an experience of decorating while playing fun and fresh puzzle game that nobody came up with before.

There are more examples out there, that did something simple if you think about it, however nobody really did that before them. Take a quick glance at these two examples: Golf Clash and Wordscapes.

Golf Clash took the golf gameplay that has its audience, combined it with the progression and the meta (including competitive 1 vs 1 play) from Clash Royale and it exploded the market. I can only guess, but I would bet that because of bringing this kind of progression outside of the gameplay itself, they have expanded audience outside of typical golf players and brought the successful monetization model to the previously skill based game that nobody knew how to monetize well.

Wordscapes just took a crossword game that has been out there forever and packed it with unique user experience that made it fun and rewarding to play short entertaining levels that brought a ton of downloads and allowed to make a successful business through selling hints and showing video ads.

Summarizing, you can see that some teams were able to create something completely new and unique that didn’t exist on mobile market before when others just mix or re-iterate in a way that create fresh experience for target audience and expands it even further.

Seeking for innovation

There’s no really good answer how to seek for innovation. I could tell you some tips that helped us in Social Point, however it might lead you in the right direction or nowhere at all.

Classic way to come up with new ideas is brainstorming with the team. However, you might find numerous ways to perform a brainstorm on the internet, I would rather focus on things that might help to get better results.

Number one, build a diversified team. People from different countries, different cultures, different backgrounds. Invite artists, developers, analysts, don’t do brainstorms only with designers. Having profiles that think differently is a crucial part in coming up with really unexpected ideas. Some thoughts of a developer that you would never have yourself will generate more discussions and more ideas.

Another angle of variety is bringing people who are not constrained by years of experience, bring passionate and sometimes naive juniors into the room. Experts tend to kill all ideas in their head even before voicing them and that doesn’t help collaborative brainstorming. Having a point of view of someone who is not yet “corrupted” by the weight of the industry is indeed fresh and extremely helpful.

To fuel the brainstorming, inspiring yourself is the way to go. However, we tend to look at games that are going to be our direct competitors and that creates a framework in our head that is very hard to escape. When you think how to do X – you always get an answer because that game in top 50 grossing already solved it. But maybe there are other ways?

Look at industries that are parallel to ours: movies, tv shows, books – what people enjoy there and why do they enjoy it? Can you re-create an experience of a cooking TV show in the game? Can you re-create an experience of escape room activity? Look for unexpected places and you can find something really interesting and innovative.

Another angle is old games. There are thousands of different games and probably almost every gameplay already has been created in some way. Get inspired by games from 80s, 90s, 00s, by AAA, indie games and many others. A variety of things that you can find in those games still haven’t found a good application on mobile. Is it because there’s no market or just because nobody has tried before?

And last but not least, we come back to the issue of gaming that it doesn’t solve any problems that players have. However, they play other games and you can identify what are their key needs in those games. You can figure out what they like, why they like it and more importantly what are they missing in those games.

Don’t be afraid to talk to your audience, conduct focus groups, make interviews. This is the most valuable information – reaching out to your end customer. A lot of the times you will discover something that you had never even considered.

Proving an innovation

And the last thing that I want to talk about is how to execute on the innovation that you came up with. Not everyone will agree, but I’m an advocate of an minimum viable product (MVP) approach. If you come up with something that never has been on the market, quality of the execution will not determine the baseline performance. It will depend on the idea itself.

Moving fast towards soft launch with an MVP product will allow you to gather the real initial reception of the real audience. All research prior to that can only give you information but it will never reliably prove your chances for success. Quality of execution might help you improve the metrics of your game if your baseline performance is promising with MVP version by itself.

It’s crucial to move forward as lean as possible to be able to pivot easily. Imagine you develop something for a year and then decide to change a couple of key systems. Chances are that you will need to rebuild the whole product. However if you went into soft launch after 3 months of prototyping and see that something needs change, it will take much less time to find the direction that is right for your product.

Iteration will always be the crucial process to create good games. You can only nail it from the first try if you know exactly your audience expectations (which is not the case if you innovate) or if you’re lucky.

Many will disagree with this point of view and you will never see an unpolished game from some very successful companies even in the soft launch. Many will iterate even on the huge polished product and will reach success that I have never dreamt of. There are many ways to get there, and I’m listing just one of them.

Nonetheless, I would advise, next time you build a game, consider what is the minimum viable product is for your audience. What is going to catch their attention? What will make them come back on the next day? Build iteratively, address your metrics one by one. Did you get your players back on 2nd day? Maybe now it’s time to retain them for a week.

I hope to see more and more innovative projects appear on the mobile market and prove that success is driven by original ideas and fresh experiences and we as a professionals should keep seeking for delivering these experiences to our players.（source：Gamasutra  ）