位于宾夕法尼亚州费城的Cipher Prime凭借《Fractal》和获得多项成就的《Auditorium》在业界倍受赞誉，玩家可免费在线探索《Auditorium》的乐趣，或通过iOS、PSP或PlayStation Network系统来购买。此刻，开发团队正开发《Fractal》的iPad版本，利用Unity引擎在PC和MAC上发布此款游戏。

在Cipher的新音乐游戏《Pulse》上，团队不畏艰险加快利用游戏的平台舒适区，在屏幕宽大的iPad上实现《Pulse》的多点触摸玩法。《Pulse》也是此团队首款使用Unity引擎制作的游戏，Kerry Gilbert参与游戏的设计，担任关卡设计师和游戏中半数音乐的作曲。尽管有这些初次的尝试，但开发团队表示这个近乎完美的产品将给人带来视觉、听觉和触觉的三重体验。

《Pulse》的核心玩法是触碰显示为白点的音符，逐渐向外扩散的脉冲将这些白点连接起来。一个脉冲代表音乐中一个小节，每首歌曲的拍子记号决定了画面中环状物的数量。调子不会永远停留在环状物上，Cipher Prime声称游戏中会包含八分音符和十六分音符等。此作中还需要玩家同时点击多个小点。根据玩家对时机的掌控会出现如下三种画面效果：独特的符号（游戏邦注：如图片中的蝴蝶）表示良好，爆炸符号表示优秀，X表示差劲。如果玩家的节奏不合拍，游戏的颜色也会褪去。

Pulse 蝴蝶

即便没有写满文字的教程，玩家也会迅速学会所有这些内容。Cipher Prime并不笃信典型的教程，公司认为这也是游戏赢得玩家青睐的原因。《Pulse》中第一首称为“教程”的音乐中并未出现指导性文字。游戏开始时，只有一个脉冲和一个音符，直到玩家知道如何点击音符后音乐才会开始。

Cipher Prime不喜欢失败，因而玩家在关卡中也不会有挫败感。玩过“教程”关卡后，就可以体验到《Pulse》中另外的7个曲目。所有的音乐都能够马上选择，游戏中不存在关卡锁定系统。团队计划由当地的独立艺术家来开发新曲目，每周在免费游戏更新中发布一首新曲。团队将在Cipher的网站上展示每个提供音乐的艺术家以及对他们的采访内容。团队正在尝试将游戏中曲目的发布和独立音乐集同步。

Cipher Prime也正在寻访其他艺术家，说服其在游戏中加入他们的音乐风格。团队希望有一天所有风格的音乐都会出现在游戏中，包括nerdcore说唱、重金属华尔兹和歌剧，因为音乐本身就很难将各种类型的歌曲完全区分开来。团队已经在《Pulse》上展示了两首自己的音乐。

Cipher Prime从细节上展示了音乐的未来。Cinder会逐渐从chiptune转变为交响乐，随后分解进入节奏快速的音噪篇章，这里的一切不再规律运转。在这个篇章中只有音符，玩家必须在音噪消逝前合拍。团队还在游戏中设计了某些拍子记号变换的音乐，此时Cinder在4/4和2/4拍子间跳转，因而关卡布局有6个环状物。为配合这些较难的关卡，团队在游戏中添加了动作追踪和隆隆声的效果。（游戏邦注：如果在一段时间内不合拍，就会响起隆隆声。基于音乐快慢的动作效果也会通过补偿周边视觉来帮助玩家了解他们手边正在发生的事情。）

就《Pulse》合拍型游戏机制而言，在脉冲之后点击音符已经过时。这款游戏为玩家在点击音符前后设计了时延，休闲玩家可以轻松理解如何点击音符，但想要获得高分的硬核玩家就需要与音乐完美合拍。除了合拍玩法外，团队曾讨论过称为滑动动态效果的先进技术，玩家可以用手指在屏幕任意位置滑动和画圈。画圈可以改变音调，游戏节奏就会因此变慢，这样只要玩家保持手指触屏就可以点击其他事物。

Pulse

团队成员玩《Pulse》体验这些机制后，讲述了更多设计想法，内容如下：

你能谈谈触屏设备上音乐游戏未来的发展方向吗？

Cipher Prime：我们正在关注Smule上人群的创新之举，音乐制作肯定会变得更加有趣，Garage Band的出现可见一斑。对游戏来说，如果能在多点触摸上有更多创新当然很好，甚至可能会在韵律系列游戏中产生多种韵律。

改用Unity对玩家和开发有什么影响？

Cipher Prime：到目前为止，改用Unity可能是我们在开发过程中做出的最佳决策之一。我们从Flash制作中学到很多内容，这使得我们可以轻而易举地使用更高端的引擎。在3D环境中制作游戏确实带来了某些问题，但我们几乎已经完全克服这些困扰。

对玩家而言，这意味着有更多的选择和更快的转型。转向新平台根本不值得考虑，如果我们决定这么做，可能需要花上3个月时间谈判和签订发布协议，甚至还要更多的端口，得出的结果只是对原游戏不完美的复制。现在我们掌控着所有的事物，可以做更好的决定，希望也能制作出更好的产品。

你们的目标是在2011年至少发布3款游戏，能说说这个吗？

Cipher Prime：其中一款不是音乐游戏，而是社交游戏。还有一款是街机游戏，可能会完全免费，也是音乐游戏。第三款游戏你此前见过了，我们会将其发布于其他平台和世界各地。

《Fractal》和《Auditorium》的设计经验对开发《Pulse》有何帮助？

Cipher Prime：“编者经验”可能是最宝贵的经验，即从游戏设计第一天起就应该有个编者。为理解游戏的可玩性所在，必须要有人关注XML文件且随时重新初始化变量。尽量从游戏设计第一天开始试玩也是很重要的。制作游戏其实只要做好两件事：弄清楚游戏的娱乐点所在，将其精制直到散发耀眼光芒。

公司首次设计iPad游戏，在游戏开发过程中碰到何种挑战，你们又是如何克服的呢？

Cipher Prime：我们已经使用Flash多年，所以很熟悉2D矢量动画，但3D场景和iPad与之不同。改用3D给我们带来许多问题，如编写custom shader和喜欢复制某些我们已经使用过的方法。在iPad上，我们还需要找到方法巧妙地将游戏项目打包，让我们的产品引起他人注意，而且还要保证有绝佳的可玩性。

你们如何处理非iPad用户对游戏的关注问题？

Cipher Prime：《Pulse》需要触屏界面，这一点毫无疑问，游戏完全围绕触碰的想法来设计。我们同样正在关注Android系统平板电脑，因而这款游戏并非只能用于苹果的设备。iPad市场对像我们这样的小型工作室而言发展空间很大，如果《Pulse》的表现足够好，我们就可以做出更多更好的游戏。因为我们使用Unity引擎来开发游戏，所以平台兼容性不成问题。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Interview: Cipher Prime on ‘Pulse’, iPad, Unity development and a Call for Indie Musicians

Philadelphia, PA based Cipher Prime has built a solid reputations for itself with Fractal and the multi-award winning Auditorium. Gamers can explore Auditorium online free or purchase it for the iOS, PSP, or PlayStation Network. The team is building an iPad version of Fractal and re-releasing it on PC and MAC with a new Unity engine.

For Cipher’s new music game, Pulse, the team fearlessly stepped out of its platform comfort zone to actualize Pulse’s multi-touch gameplay concepts on the large iPad. Pulse is also the team’s first game built on the Unity engine. The duo has teamed up with Kerry Gilbert, who’s become the level designer and composer of about half the music of Pulse. Despite all these firsts, the team demos and describes a near-polished product that is destined to stimulate the senses of sight, sound, and touch.

Pulse’s core gameplay involves touching notes, represented by white dots, when an expanding pulse lines up with them. Each pulse represents a measure in the music. Each song’s time signature determines the amount of rings in the stage. The notes will not always rest on the rings, as Cipher Prime stated they will include eighth and sixteenth notes and more. There will also be multiple dots to tap simultaneously. Three particle effects occur depending on player timing: a song specific icon (butterflies in picture) for good, icon with bursts for perfect, or x’s for bad. The game’s color also washes away when players miss the timing.

Gamers will quickly learn all of this, even without a text-filled tutorial. Cipher Prime doesn’t believe in typical tutorials and feels that is still a huge win with fans. Pulse’s first song called “Tutorial” has no instructional text. When first starting the game, there’s just a pulse and a note. The music doesn’t begin until players realize they have to hit the note.

Cipher Prime doesn’t believe in failure, so players can’t fail the level. Once they play the anti-tutorial level, Pulse will contain around 7 additional tracks. All songs will be available immediately; there will be no unlocking system. The team plans for mostly local indie artists to be featured on new tracks, releasing one per week in free game updates. The team will have each artist featured along with an interview on Cipher’s website. The team is trying to coordinate releases of tracks on the game with the street dates/releases of the indies’ albums.

Cipher Prime is also currently looking for other artists to tie into the game and add to their collection of genres. The team hopes all genres will be represented at some time, including nerdcore rap, heavy metal waltz, and opera. The music itself will dictate the song’s pattern difficulty. The team has released two of its own song previews for Pulse.

Cipher Prime went on to discuss a future song in detail. “Cinder” will go from chiptune to symphonic and will break down into a rapid glitch section, where things aren’t moving around anymore. There will just be notes, and players have to time with the glitch as it’s breaking down. The team also has some songs with alternating time signatures, wherein Cinder goes between 4/4 and 2/4 time resulting in a 6-ring level layout. To help with these harder levels, the team is adding motion trails and a booming effect. With a combo streak, the boom goes up. Motion effects based on how fast the music is will also help players see what’s going on around their hands by aiding their peripheral vision.

As for Pulse’s timing mechanic, the note pops after the pulse has gone by. This provides a time lapse before and after to hit it. Casual players get a window to hit the note, but hardcore players can only get perfect scores with perfect timing. In addition to timing, the team talked about an advanced technique called the slide dynamic where players hold a finger anywhere on the screen and slide and spin. As players spin, it time warps the pitch. The game literally slows down and players can hit other things as long as they hold a finger down.

After playing Pulse, experiencing these mechanics first-hand, the team agreed to discuss more about their design choices in this follow-up below:

Could you talk about the future of music gaming on touch devices?

Cipher Prime: We’re seeing some great innovative from the guys over at Smule. Music creation is definitely going to be a lot more interesting. The new Garage Band is already making a splash. As for games, it would be great to see more innovation in the form of multi-touch, maybe even break out into multiple rhythms for the rhythm series of games.

What does the move to Unity mean for fans and your ease of development?

So far, moving to Unity has been one of the best decisions we have made in our development process. A lot of the lessons we have learnt from Flash carry over, and it’s allowed us to jump into the deep-end without a whole lot of hassle. Working in a 3D environment has caused some concern, but we’ve remedied almost all of those.

For our fans, this means more options and quicker turn-around. Before, if they requested a new platform, it was most likely out of the question. If we did decide to do it, we probably had to do a publishing deal, waste 3 months negotiating and signing, even more porting, and still end up with an imperfect copy of the original game. Now we control everything and are able to make much better decisions and hopefully, make much better end products.

You have a goal of releasing at least 3 games in 2011. What can you tell me about them?

One of them is not a music game. It’s a social game. Go figure, huh? One of them is an arcade game. It may be totally free. Music? Oh, yeah. (There’s) another title you’ve seen before, but we’re beefing it up to go multiplatform and take over the world.

What lessons from ‘Fractal’ and ‘Auditorium’ helped in making ‘Pulse’?

Probably the biggest thing is what we call the “Editor Lesson”: You should have an editor for your game from day one. Futzing around with XML files and re-initializing variables every 2 minutes stands in the way of figuring out what’s fun about your game. You also have to have people playing from as close to day one as possible… There’re really only two things to do when you make a game: figure why it’s fun and polish it ‘til it shines!

As your first iPad game, what development challenges did it present and how did you overcome them?

We’ve used Flash for years, so we’re quite comfortable working with 2D vector animations. (That’s) not quite the case in 3D and especially not on the iPad. Making the transition to 3D brought us a bit of hassle with writing custom shaders and the like to replicate some of the features we’d gotten use to. On the iPad, this also meant figuring out ways to cleverly batch our game objects together to keep our draw calls down and keep gameplay snappy!

How are you addressing the concern that your core fans were built on devices other than the iPad?

Pulse needs the touch interface; there’s really no way around that. The game was designed entirely around the idea of touch. We are looking at Android tablets as well, so we’re not iDevice-centric over here. The iPad market is a huge boon for little studios like us. If Pulse does well enough, that enables us to make more, better games. Since we’re developing in Unity, we can be on any platform we damn well please. (Source: Game Set Watch)