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Tony Ventrice解析手机游戏开发的四个层次

发布时间:2011-05-23 23:52:07 Tags:,,,,

游戏邦注:本文原作者是资深手机游戏设计师Tony Ventrice(《吉他英雄》手机版是其代表作),目前与iPhone应用开发商Smule(主要作品包括Ocarina/Leaf Trombone)一道开发音乐游戏。Ventrice在本文将探讨游戏开发的四个层次。

营销人员可能明白强势品牌的重要性,但却对游戏机制一无所知;程序员可能深谙强大游戏机制的意义所在,但对游戏机制的传达方式一窍不通。这样的营销人员和程序员都无法各自打造出成功的游戏。因为一款成功的游戏离不开跨领域的协调性,然而,我们经常见到情况就如上所述,游戏制作团队的成员往往只熟悉游戏设计中面向己方的专业知识,对其他学科的知识所知甚少。

此时游戏设计师的职责显得尤为关键——把不同专业的观点融合为全面的设计构想。如果设计师做不到,结果就是,团队里的成员各忙各的,把时间和精力浪费在毫不相干的工作上。

游戏设计包含了几个层次的工作,且各个层次彼此不同,就如游戏的市场营销和用户界面,把这些毫不相干的层次组合起来,这看似一项艰难的任务。完成这项任务需要明白游戏设计交叉性的理论框架、形象化游戏设计方案的下滴(上滴)效应。

手机平台的两个支点

手机游戏带给玩家的融入感可能不如掌机游戏或电脑游戏那么强烈,但如果要深入研究游戏设计结构,简易的手机游戏却是个理想的探索起点。手机游戏开发之所以独特基于两点:能简则简,以量取胜。

能简则简。你可能已经听说过这么句话:一旦所有可删除的对象都被删除了,一个游戏就趋于完美了。手机平台检验了这个论断。即使是在今天这个iPhone的黎明时代,手机游戏开发者仍然不得不应对手机游戏需局限于128K空间的难题,而这128K包括了美工、代码、游戏数据、声音和其他所有游戏要素。

这种容量限制几乎足以令任何一种游戏设置寸步难行,但游戏还是顽强地活下来了——虽然硕果仅存的是些再简单不过的游戏。这些残存下来的游戏拥有高度精炼和清晰可辩的设计构架。

以量取胜。在时间相对紧凑的开发周期中,手机游戏设计师要同时开工好几个游戏,这几乎囊括所有你能想得到的游戏类型。

同时设计三四款不同的游戏,你有两个选择:要么是通过一个共同的工作期掌握所有游戏的设计进程,要么顶着令人抓狂的压力分别跟进所有游戏设计进度。以下是一些手机游戏设计的经验总结。

tetris

tetris

层次

所有游戏设计都可以划分为四个基本的层次,即:

·概念

·范式

·机制

·界面

我们以手机游戏长青树《俄罗期方块》为例,该类戏设计的四个层次如下图所示:

俄罗斯方块的四个层次

俄罗斯方块的四个层次

概念

组合下落方块,尽可能把方块组合成完整的一行或多行,使之被消除,以延长游戏时间。

范式

范式是玩家与游戏时需要的“思维框架”。范式中所列的“几何空间关系”模式只是简单地指代玩家可能遇到的各种益智类游戏,例如拼图游戏、魔方、《无限回廊》、《音乐方块》和《跳跳球》等等。范式中的“组合构建”在游戏上就是所谓的“匹配消除”类游戏,例如《宝石方块》、《毛毛球》和《宝石迷阵》等等。

机制

机制由游戏内容构成的;内容对于支撑范式是必不可少的。

机制是第三层次的实质,内容也是建立在机制的基础之上。在《俄罗期方块》中,可阐述的机制非常多,没有办法列出全部,省略的要点如:“方块阻塞,游戏结束”和“下落”及“接触”这两个动词的解释。

界面

如图可见,并非所有的机制都需要直接的用户输入。在设计良好的游戏里,界面的利用限度是最低的,但能引起机制之间的连锁反应。例如,玩家通过影响方块的下落位置,从而决定底部的方块残排能否补全。

每一款游戏都可以描述为这四个层次。以下是对四个层次的详解。

概念

对许多人来说,游戏设计的起始都伴随着一个概念——即从提出初步设想到形成完整的理念。

概念本身并不能阐明游戏的乐趣所在。提出设想的人通常是在头脑中想象着其他概念相似的游戏,并且假设所有游戏辅助细节都隐含其中。

如果你是一个设计师,你就会知道概念不是重点,但并不是说一个设计师应该抛弃设想。毕竟,概念是游戏设计的最高层次;如果概念本身不能讲述引人入胜的剧情,这样的游戏也不会有市场。

曾经存在着这么些卓越的游戏,因为其概念不能与用户产生共鸣,所以盈利表现不佳。游戏续作和电影授权游戏的成功很大程度上可以归结为,其游戏概念已深入人心。

在手机游戏里,没有所谓的游戏盒子或者视频演示——游戏概念只能通过游戏名称体现出来。当我参与制作一个24 TV show授权游戏时,我们团队面临的最大障碍是游戏命名的问题。

我们那时已在开发游戏续作了,我们知道第一款游戏反响不佳可能得归咎于名称,所以“24 Part 2”这个名称就被淘汰了。而“24: Jack Bauer’s Back”等此类名称显然也不是我们的选择,最后只好将游戏命名为“24: Agent Down”。

在本作中,游戏的理念已经体现出来了;任何看过24的人都知道它是关于间谍和阴谋、黑客和枪战的电视节目,但通过简短的描述把这个概念完整地传达给用户几乎是不可能的事情。

《ER Rush》这个名称就不错。这是一款原创、以医院为主题的“转盘”游戏,与成功的《美女餐厅》类似。这两款游戏虽然在许多机制颇有偏差,但基本概念却是一致的——用户各取所需(游戏邦注:玩家在该游戏中的任务就是在医院里四处奔走为病人提供服务),这款游戏的市场行情也非常走俏。

要产生一个理想的概念,最重要的是鼓励大胆创新;提取出最引人注目的内容对其进行扩充;体现游戏剧情。虽然这未必可以描述游戏的最终走向,但却是定义下一步—–范式的前提。

范式

范式大概是四个游戏设计基本层次中最难称呼且最容易被忽略的一个层次了。范式听起来有些虚饰和抽象,但其意义却非常具体、明确:范式是玩家作用于游戏时的展望。

每一个挑中某款游戏的玩家都会带着先入为主的观念来玩游戏,这种观念是玩家本身、玩家所处的社会和人性所固有的特点。游戏反映生活,所以大多游戏带给玩家的普遍体验都不外乎打猎、收集和建造等等,这是自然而然的事。正是这些游戏体验定义了范式。

范式包含了一系列的玩家意料之中的规则。因此无需提醒,玩家凭直觉就知道范式固有的目标和风险,例如管理资源。如果一款游戏融合了各式体验,且每种体验都有各自的小目标,那么这个游戏可以说是融合了形形色色的范式。

范式与类型相似,但类型主要根据以往的游戏来创建原型,而范式则直接涉及人类体验的基本构建模块。

从类型方面举例,第一人称射击类游戏,展现了游戏的视觉范围和目标,但没有定义明确的范式。而FPS类游戏的特色在于:缓慢的节奏(系统的/计划前瞻性)、频繁地使用掩护(躲藏和搜索),战略武器升级(资源管理)和武器在不同情景的切换(工具管理)。这些游戏过程事实上都各有其小范式(即括号内的词组),并且每一个都是玩家熟悉的经历。玩家无需得到躲藏和搜索的前提解释,因为那就是人的本能。

范式和概念经常被混淆;许多概念能立即反映一个明显的范式(如猎鹿游戏需要躲藏和搜索的游戏内容),但这并不意味着其他范式不能与之共存。

范式和游戏机制同样不易区分。第一款游戏为了展开成功的范式,通常会构建一个机制先例,而这个机制先例总是被后来的游戏效仿。例如,技巧类桌面游戏总是围绕四个键的输入组合来做文章。这就是这类游戏多年以来形成的惯例。

机制与内容

范式隐暗游戏规则,而机制决定游戏规则。在一定程度上可以说机制充当了游戏中的可操作部分。组合三个方块来消除一排或几排方块、重新装载枪支、用木材和铁搭建兵营或者其他在游戏中能做的事,这些都是一种机制。如果玩家可以改变或者影响游戏中的什么元素,那种元素就是机制。

机制具有详细性、技术性,且其细节包含的信息太多(游戏邦注:对一般人而言是如此,但游戏程序员和设计师除外)。一般人看到是本身只作为机制的集合体内容,而看不到其掩盖下的细节。

富有经验的设计师从游戏概念成形的那一刻起就在考虑游戏机制。如果有人建议做一款以玩家为上帝的游戏,且所有人都认同这是个了不起的概念,那么设计师肯定在所有人都开工前就确定好可控制的机制。

一个普遍而不言自明的手机游戏开发理念是:游戏功能和机制越多越好。这是因为游戏可玩的地方越多,游戏的价值就越大。

如果制作游戏过程不受时间、金钱和玩家注意力的限制,以上言论可能完全正确。但游戏设计师的当务之急是决定什么功能可以为整个游戏锦上添花,什么功能应该排除在外。

总体来说,设计师就像主管。想法是廉价的,但艺术构想却是无价的。程序员可以只将设计视为纯粹的机制,制作人员可以只当设计是纯粹的内容,但设计师却要把自己的视野放宽一些。

除了确定游戏的功能和特色,设计师还要凭借自己的经验和想象,将预定设想转化为赏心悦目、意义深远、一目了然的界面,且这个界面能激发玩家的凝聚力,平衡玩家的紧张感和松弛感。

界面

游戏设计层次的底层是界面。界面是有形的视听提示,是沟通玩家与游戏机制的桥梁。

界面通常是由按钮组成的,但也可能包含虚拟摇杆、鼠标、麦克风、加速计或者移动传感手套等。

界面设计至少应把输入方式与机制相对应,但还要进一步考虑界面的平衡性——不可用过多输入操作吓走玩家、避免难度较大的输入组合以及过分精确的定时设置,要让游戏的基调始终如一,简单易记。

Guitar Hero World Tour

Guitar Hero World Tour

因为手机有别于其他游戏设备,所以界面就成了运行手机游戏的一大挑战。设计手机版《吉他英雄之世界巡演》时,我很快就断定增加一击鼓键与玩家习惯了的三键相比,游戏难度将大大提升。玩家经常不得不彻底改变拿手机的方式以适应击鼓输入。

为了简化这种设置,我们把下排数字键(7、8、9)设定为有效的击鼓输入,同时进一步过滤音符数据,这样鼓的轨道上就不会产生多音符弦。

事实证明,这种额外简化设置确实有助于创造吉他和鼓模式之间的独特玩法,吉他的挑战难点在于控制复杂度渐进的和弦过渡,而鼓的挑战难点则在于通过更多输入实现单音符的快速衔接。

界面会对上游层次的机制产生影响——只有玩家本能地知道如何与机制互动的时候,这种设计才能生效,所以我们必须针对界面调整游戏机制。所有关于界面设计的文献得出的最终结论都是:界面设计的目标是尽可能展现一目了然的用户界面。

结论

此时你可能觉得现在已产生的问题比解决掉的问题还多。例如,如何平衡全新的概念和熟悉的概念?范式的定义应如何进一步精细化?如何组织游戏内容,才能使上层的范式和下层的机制对其产生定义作用?如何优先考虑界面的要求?

用四层次法界定游戏的好处在于它可以展示设计的结构,同时指出了一些更深层次而有待解决的问题。

事实上每一层次还各有深度:

·理念借助市场营销的威力

·范式需要心理学上的分析

·机制是纯游戏设计的结构单元

·用户界面是实用性专家的关注焦点

在一个小型手机游戏项目中,以上所述的任务很可能是设计师一个人的职责,但这也算是一种优势。当所有游戏设计的层次都为一人所掌握,那么这个人就应做出最明智、最有效的决策。如果整个团队都能理解游戏的整体状况,那么整个团队都能做出明智的决定。

本文的目的不在于解释如何设计游戏,而只是提供游戏设计的思路。解决了这四个层次的问题也还只是设计游戏的开端,但至少可以指引你朝着正确的方向前进,而不至于迷失方向。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

The Four Perspectives of Game Design: Insight from the Mobile Fringe

by Tony Ventrice

[What can you learn about game design from working on mobile titles? Cellphone game design veteran Ventrice (Guitar Hero Mobile), now working with iPhone developer Smule (Ocarina/Leaf Trombone) on music games, discusses the key conceptual layers of game building that are common to all titles.]

A salesperson might understand the importance of a compelling brand but have no concept of game mechanics. An engineer might understand a compelling game mechanic but not understand the methods of teaching it to the user.

Creating a successful game requires critical cross-discipline coordination, yet all too often team members only understand the facets of the design that face their own specializations.

It is the responsibility of the game designer to bring these specialized perspectives together in a comprehensive design. If the designer fails, different groups in the team will waste time and effort working towards unrelated goals.

But bringing together aspects as disparate as the marketing face of a game and its user interface may seem to be an undertaking in the abstract. What is needed is a framework for understanding the interconnectedness of a design; a way to visualize the trickle-down (or up) impact of design decisions made at any level.

Mobile Insight

Mobile phone games may not be as immersive or as intense as their console and PC counterparts, but their simplicity provides an ideal starting point to an inquiry into the structure of game design. The mobile platform is unique for two reasons: reduced depth and increased breadth.

Reduced Depth. You’ve probably heard that a design is perfect once everything that can be removed has been. The mobile platform puts this adage to the test. Even today, in the dawning age of the iPhone, mobile developers still have to deal with phones that allow as little as 128k of space; that’s 128k for art, code, game data, sound and anything else.

These limitations nearly prevent any kind of gameplay from existing at all, but games do survive; very simple games. In these stripped down games, the underlying design structure is highly refined and clearly visible.

Increased Breadth. Over the course of a relatively compacted span of time, a mobile designer works on dozens of titles, spanning nearly every conceivable genre.

Designing three or four different games at a time, you have two options: learn to understand all games by a common set of terms, or go crazy trying to keep track of everything individually.

What follows is a summary of lessons learned in the field of mobile design.

The Layers

Every game design can be understood through four distinct perspectives. These perspectives stack nicely, so it is convenient to label them as the four layers of a design:

Concept

Paradigm

Mechanics

Interface

As an example, let’s take a quick look at the perennial mobile favorite, Tetris, in Figure 1:

Paradigms may seem abstract at first, but they are an essential perspective to understand.

Concept:

The concept is almost too simple; Match sets of blocks to clear away a growing pile-up of debris.

Paradigms:

The paradigms are the “frames of mind” the player is asked to use while playing. The “geometric spatial relations” paradigm listed here is simply describing the variety of visual puzzle the user will be engaged in; other example games in this paradigm are jigsaw puzzles, Rubik’s cube, Echochrome, Lumines, Peggle, etc. The “set-building” paradigm listed here is often known as “match-3″ in games such as Bejeweled, Lumines, Chuzzle, Hexic, etc.

Mechanics:

This section is organized by Features. Features are the game requirements needed to support the paradigms.

Mechanics are the substance of this layer; the parts that the features are built from. There are too many mechanics in this example to illustrate all of them and some omissions include: “Game ends when pieces are blocked from entering the play area”, as well as explanations of the verbs: “settle” and “contact”.

Interface:

As you can see, not every mechanic needs direct user input. In a well-designed game, the interface is minimal but causes chain reactions across mechanics. For example,here the user’s ability to affect the dropping of blocks causes blocks to contact in different places, resulting in rows either being completed or not.

Every game can be defined by these four layers. Let’s take a more detailed look at each individually.

For many people, game design begins and ends with a concept. “Hey, I have a great idea for a game,” it usually begins; what follows is a concept.

The concept on its own offers very little real insight into how or why the game will be fun. Often, the person pitching the concept is imagining a few other games with similar concepts and assuming all of the ancillary details of the gameplay are implied.

If you’re a designer, you know this is not the case, but that’s not to say a designer should be dismissive of concepts. After all, the concept is the highest level of the game design; a game won’t sell without a concept that tells a compelling story all by itself.

Some of the greatest games ever designed were commercial failures because the concept didn’t resonate with the consumer. Sequels and movie-licenses are successful largely because the concept is already defined in the consumer’s consciousness.

In a mobile game, there is no box art or demo video: the concept has to come across in the game’s name. When I was working on a game using the 24 TV show license, the greatest obstacle the team faced was naming the game.

We were already on the sequel and we knew the first game had underperformed, probably because of the name, so “24 Part 2″ just wasn’t going to work. Something like “24: Jack Bauer’s Back” was contractually not an option. Ultimately, the game was named 24: Agent Down and very likely suffered because of it.

In our case, the concept was already set; anyone who had seen the show knew 24 was about espionage and intrigue, hacking computers and after-hours shootouts, but communicating it to the consumer in one short line of characters was almost impossible, making the concept as good as lost.

A game that worked was ER Rush. ER Rush was an original IP, hospital-themed “plate-spinning” game, similar to the successful Diner Dash. We diverged with many of the mechanics, but the basic concept was the same. The users got what they expected (a game where you rush around servicing patients in a hospital environment) and the game sold well.

The best thing to do with a new concept is to encourage it; pick out the aspects that seem most compelling and expand on them. Tell a story. Let others tell a story.

This won’t necessarily describe the final game, but it helps define the next step: paradigm.

Paradigm

Paradigm is perhaps the most difficult to name of the four basic layers of a game design and the most easy to overlook. It sounds pretentious and abstract, but the meaning is actually very specific and necessary; the paradigm is the perspective with which the user interacts with the game.

Every user that picks up your game will be approaching it with a certain set of preconceptions; assumptions that are inherent to the user himself, his society and humanity in general. Games are reflections of human life so it is only natural that most games tend to fall into the same range of popular experiences such as, hunting, hiding, collecting, building, etc. It is these experiences that define paradigms.

A paradigm encompasses a set of expected rules. The user intuitively knows the objectives and hazards inherent to a paradigm, such as managing resources, without needing to be told. If a game incorporates many different experiences, each with its own micro-goals, then it can be said to incorporate many different paradigms.

Paradigm is similar to genre, but where genre relies on past games to build archetypes, paradigm refers directly to the fundamental building blocks of human experience.

An example genre; first-person shooter, describes the visual perspective and objective, but fails to define the specific paradigms. A FPS might feature slow-pacing (methodical/planning ahead), heavy use of cover (hide and seek), strategic weapon-upgrading (resource management) and situational toggling of weapons (tool management).

Each of these aspects of gameplay is actually its own little paradigm (marked in parenthesis) and each carries with it a familiar experience that the user can be assumed to understand immediately. A user doesn’t need to be explained the premise of hide and seek; it is inherent to the human psyche.

It can often be difficult to differentiate paradigms from concepts; many concepts will immediately suggest an obvious paradigm (for example, a deer-hunting game begs for hide-and-seek gameplay), but that doesn’t mean other paradigms can’t be used.

It is also easy to confuse paradigm with game mechanics. Often, the first game to succeed in a paradigm sets a precedent for mechanics that is rigidly copied by generations of successors. For example; does a trick-based boarding game have to be built around a four-button combinational input scheme? For many years, it did.

Paradigms imply the rules of a game but the mechanics define them. In a way, mechanics are the toy within the game. Momentum is a mechanic, so is matching three blocks to remove a set, reloading a gun, building a barracks out of wood and iron, or anything else you can do in a game. If the user can change or affect something, it is a mechanic.

Mechanics are specific and technical and the details generally constitute ‘too much information’ for anyone other than programmers and designers. For everyone else there are features which are just lumped-together groups of mechanics that gloss over the specifics.

An experienced designer is thinking about mechanics from the moment the game concept comes crashing onto the scene. If someone says, “Hey, let’s make a game where you’re God!” and everyone agrees that’s a great concept, the designers had sure better be working to define manageable mechanics before everyone shakes hands and starts work.

A common, unspoken, belief in mobile game development goes like this: The more features and mechanics in your game, the better it will be; this is because, the more things there are for the player to do, the greater the value of the game.

The above statement would be completely true if making games was not a process limited by time, money and user attention. The most important thing a designer can do is decide which features add up to a compelling whole and which features are expendable.

Being a designer is like being a director because, at the end of the day; ideas are cheap, artistic vision is not. Programmers can view the design as pure mechanics, producers as pure features, but the designer must see more.

Beyond the functionality and the features, it is the designer’s job to use experience and vision to pare down the proposed design into something which is aesthetically pleasing, poses meaningful user decisions, adheres to an intuitive interface, and creates a cohesive, balanced experience of tension and release.

Interface

The final layer of game design is interface. Interface is the physical means, and audio-visual cues, through which the player interacts with the game mechanics.

Traditionally, interface is about buttons, but it might also include an analog stick or two, mouse, microphone, accelerometer, plastic guitar, or futuristic motion-sensing glove.

At its simplest, interface design is just matching inputs to the mechanics, but the task quickly becomes a balancing act: don’t overwhelm the user with too many new inputs, avoid difficult input combinations or prohibitively precise timing, and stick to a consistent, easy-to-remember theme.

With mobile phones, interface is a significant challenge; phones aren’t built as gaming devices. While designing Guitar Hero World Tour for mobile, I quickly confirmed that adding just one more button for a kick-drum created gameplay significantly more difficult than the three buttons the player experienced on guitar. Players often had to change their entire method of holding the phone to accommodate the added input.

To simplify the addition, we allowed the entire bottom row of number buttons (7,8,9) to be valid kick-drum inputs and then went further and filtered the note-data so that no multi-note chords would occur on drum tracks.

In the end, this additional simplification actually helped create unique gameplay between the guitar and drums modes: the challenge of guitar was in managing increasingly complex chord transitions and the challenge of drums was in the fast succession of single notes over a wider range of inputs.

As much as we may wish it wasn’t true, interface exerts an upward influence on the mechanics; a design only works if the user intuitively understands how to interact with it, so accommodations must be made for the sake of the interface. Entire books have been written on interface design and usually the conclusion is the same: the goal of the interface is to make the interface as transparent as possible.

Conclusion

At this point you may feel that many more questions have arisen than have been laid to rest. How should you balance the benefits of fresh concepts and familiar concepts?

How granular should the definition of paradigms be? What is the best way to organize features so that they are defined by both by upward-facing behavior and underlying mechanics? How should interface requirements be prioritized?

The benefit of defining a game by the four layers is that it opens up understanding of the design and allows visibility to the deeper questions that need to be asked.

Each of the four layers is surprisingly deep in its own way:

Concept requires marketing prowess

Paradigm calls on psychological deconstruction

Mechanics are the building-blocks of pure game design

User Interface is the focus of a whole field of usability specialists

On a small mobile project, all of the above are most likely the responsibility of one person -the designer- but this can be an advantage.

When all of the layers of a game design are understood by a single person, that person is in the position to make the most informed and effective decisions. If an entire team can be brought to understand the game as a whole, the entire team can make informed decisions.

The purpose of this article wasn’t to explain how to design a game as much as how to approach designing a game. Once the four layers have been addressed, the design is only just begun, but at least you’re pointed in the right direction and you understand where you’re going.(source:gamasutra


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