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Josh Knowles谈对主流手机游戏的看法

发布时间:2011-09-07 09:40:44 Tags:,,,

作者:Josh Knowles

很多人都知道,我正致力于创造一款手机社交游戏–《Casablance.》。我们花费了整个夏天时间,并得到了网络电视mtvU和Cisco System的资助,开发出了一些成功的游戏,可以说是成功上位了。但是今天,在这里我想谈谈一些手机游戏存在的弊端,并提出一些我认为有用的建议,帮助你们开发出一款优秀的独立手机游戏。

主流手机游戏现在已经不是很火热。确实,它有过辉煌的一幕,但是现在却已经不能够满足广大用户的需求了。举个例子来说,看看Gamespot网页上的“最受欢迎手机游戏”,都是一些无聊,劣质产品,可以说这些游戏要不就是著名掌机游戏(游戏邦注:如《Need for Speed》和《Final Fantasy》)的“微型版本”,要不就是早前经典电脑游戏针对不同平台调整后的再现版本,如《Snakes》和《Breakout》等。

tetris-mobile-phone(from coated.com)

tetris-mobile-phone(from coated.com)

EA和Digital Chocolate创始人Trip Hawkins曾表示:“很多公司把手机当成是一种二流的掌机,我认为这种看法有失偏颇。像《Madden》系列游戏通过采用一些高性能技术让玩家能够融入游戏,感受到犹如身临足球场的真实体验。但在手机的小屏幕上却不能再现这种体验。《俄罗斯方块》是20年前一款非常受欢迎的游戏,但是它却不再能够对当今甚至未来的手机游戏市场产生多大作用了。我不认为手机游戏的未来发展方向仅限于此。”

我将以自己的看法重述Trip的这些观点:

手机并不等于游戏机。一般来说,手机只有一些蹩脚的屏幕,蹩脚的音效和欠佳的游戏控制器。手机设计者经常会把用户界面腾出一些地方安置呼叫和发送信息等相对笨拙且非直观性的功能(就像我们向他人借了一部手机但是却不知道怎么使用它打电话)。游戏控制器对于设备的易用性和舒适度的要求很高。这就好比是强求一个只会组装自行车的人,组装一台高性能的赛车引擎。(在此我想对那些手机设计者说声抱歉,但是说真的,对我来说绝大多数手机的互动设计确实不尽人意)

很多游戏开发者好像忘记了手机是通讯工具这一事实(游戏邦注:或者是因为手机所具有的iPod和便携式电脑功能让他们便混淆了这一事实)。手机不只能够让用户在V Cast应用商店里下载“付费产品”,它同样也是用户间相互沟通的重要工具。所以,这种人与人之间的交流和社交联系可以说是推动手机游戏开发成功的基础。每个人都想要与他人进行交流,所以众多游戏开发公司应该重视用户们的这种心理。但是显然,只有少数一些公司能做到这一点。

我们生活在一个充满奇迹的世界,在这里,不论是独立开发者还是黑客都能够创造出一款大受欢迎的游戏或软件。显然,这种情形在网络上很普遍,但是在手机社交游戏领域也同样存在很多让独立游戏开发者着迷的工具。除去一些较出名的工具(如Java Mobile,BREW,Python等),我将列举出几个我正在使用并且觉得不错的手机社交游戏开发平台。它们中间绝大多数都是免费的。这些都是经过我亲自试用并且认可的工具:

短信服务(SMS)。无聊,没有图像,回复速度慢。这些都没错。但是,几乎所有手机都有SMS功能,而且用户能够轻易操作这个界面。获得一条短代码的代价很高,但是绝大多数新手机都选择直接发送电子邮件地址,所以如果你能够仔细研究邮件工具的使用脚本以获得一些外部电子邮件,并将其引入你的个人网页应用或者基于Perl搜索引擎的应用中,那么这些代价也是值得的。这一点都不难。一些流行的社交工具,如Twitter和Dodgeball就很好地利用了短信服务的这一优点。《Casablanca》也不例外。我们在游戏中添加了手机短信服务这一功能,让玩家能够用手机与好友进行交流,并通过手机获得任何更新信息。当然了,当玩家选择用电脑玩游戏时我们也为他们提供了一个更棒的游戏网站。这是个不错的尝试,不仅能让我们的游戏的寿命更加持久,同时也让我们的游戏显得更加休闲有趣:即当游戏中出现了一些新事物时,玩家的手机便会弹出一条相关信息。玩家可以自行选择回复时间,他们也不需要一整天开着Java应用。虽然短信服务并不特别,但是它却能够帮助你有效地针对不同手机平台制作出一款好游戏。

多用户发行环境(MUPE)。这是诺基亚为广大手机开发商提供的一种发行多用户游戏的快捷方法。虽然它需要你花费一点安装时间(包括安装MUPE服务器),同时也明确要求一些Java端口,但是一旦你具备了所有条件,你便可以利用它快速开发游戏了。这有点像web2.0社交网站的开发过程,但是在这里,所有活跃于手机上的用户都可以直接进入Java服务器,你也可以轻松访问手机相机和扩音器等功能。一旦你抓住了这一工具的要领,你将能够快速开发游戏或者进行原型设计。但是这一工具的一大缺陷便是,只有少部分手机支持这一功能。MUPE的开发资源让你有种随身携带的舒适感,我很喜欢这一工具。尽管如此,我却不得不重申一个事实,仅有一些最新诺基亚手机支持MUPE功能,这一点真的不妙。

语音功能。从贝尔发明电话开始,语音聊天功能便成为了所有电话(包括手机等)都支持的一种交流工具。通过使用Asterisk,你可以用各种有趣的方法在语音功能中创建交互性系统。当你给银行或者航空公司打电话时,可以使用自动化电话系统。“按键1代表分支时间和地点,按键2代表客户管理专员连线…”Asterisk能帮你做到这些。而且都是免费(但是你必须支付IP语音的费用-我用过Junction Networks,也想向你们推荐这一工具)。你可以将这一功能与Java或其它适合的平台绑定在一块。一旦你使用了语音功能,你将能够同时挖掘出游戏设置的妙处所在。

确实,对手机社交游戏我并未有太多想法。就像我说所的,Java手机应用工具(如J2ME)等多种平台都能帮助游戏开发。但是我上述谈到的一些工具能够为你的游戏添加更多更自然的游戏社交性。它们将帮助你更好地创造一款游戏原型或者发行一款简单的游戏。

游戏邦注:原文发表于2007年9月12日,所涉数据和事件均以当时为准。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Thoughts on Mobile Social Gaming

By Josh Knowles

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Many of you know I’m working on a mobile social networking game called “Casablanca.” We got a grant from mtvU and Cisco System to develop it over the summer — now we’re live and we’ve run a few successful games. Excellent. It’s been an interesting process and I’ll write up more details about it soon. Today, though, I thought I would take a quick look at the sorry state of popular gaming on mobile phones and point out a few tools for developing indie mobile social games which I have found cool and useful.

So mainstream mobile gaming sucks. It has its moments, but I’ve found it pretty dissatisfying so far. Take a look at Gamespot’s “most popular mobile games” page, for example. Boring. Ugh. Please. They’re all just micro versions of popular console games (“Need for Speed,” “Final Fantasy”) or rehashes of the same old classic computer games that get immediately ported onto any platform that’ll hold them: Snakes, Breakout, etc. Even the handful of porn games don’t save this lot from being just flat boring.

Trip Hawkins III, found of EA and Digital Chocolate observes: “Companies are treating the cell phone like it was a second-rate game console and I don’t think that’s really doing it justice. … A brand like “Madden” … is about immersion in a very high-performance technology to make you feel like you’re on the football field. That doesn’t work on a tiny cell phone screen. And ‘Tetris’ was a great game 20 years ago but it certainly can’t define the future of the mobile phone. It doesn’t make sense to me that that’s as good as mobile games are going to get.”

And yet almost all mobile phone games right now seem to fall into these exact traps.

Let me reiterate Trip’s points in my own way:

Mobile phones are not Playstations. They generally have crappy screens, crappier sound, and the crappiest gaming controls. Phone designers often botch up the most basic sorts of user interface elements, making placing calls or sending text messages excessively cumbersome and non-intuitive. (We’ve all had the experience of borrowing someone’s phone and having to ask them how to make it place a call, right?) Game controls require even more high-usability, high-comfort controls. It’s like asking someone who just knows how to put together a bike to build a high-performance racing engine. (Sorry to all of your mobile phone designers for the diss, but seriously: Interaction design on most phones I’ve used is a disaster.)

Many game developers seem to have forgotten that a mobile phone is a communications device (or maybe they never realized it in the first place with all of this emphasis on iPods and pocket computing: “Don’t call it a phone.”). And not just for communicating with V Cast to download “premium content.” A mobile phone is for communicating with people. Between people. Such communications and social connectivity should be the baseline of successful mobile game development, it would seem. People love to have excuses to communicate with one another. It would seem that more of these game companies would latch on to this urge. But apparently not yet (with a few exceptions).

We live in a miraculous world, though — one in which even individual developers and hacker-tinkerer sorts can create great games and software pieces that can become quite popular. It’s obviously happened (and is happening) left and right on the web, but the tools also exist for indie developers to go crazy in the mobile social game arena. I’m going to skip over some of the obvious ones (Java Mobile, BREW, Python, etc) and point you towards a few platforms for mobile social game development which I think are under-exploited and have some great features to offer. And which are free (mostly). I’ve used all of these for different projects and appreciated what each has to offer.

Here goes:

SMS text messaging. Boring. No graphics. Slow turn-around. True. But. Almost all phones are SMS-capable and you can very easily write SMS-to-web interfaces. Getting a short code can be expensive, but most new phones will send straight to e-mail addresses, so if you read up on using .procmail scripts to grab incoming e-mails and throw them into your PHP- or Perl-based web app, you’re golden. It’s not hard. Trendy social tools such as Twitter and Dodgeball totally take advantage of the power of the simple text message. So does Casablanca, the game I’m working on. We use text messaging so players can do simple communications and get updates with their phones. And then we have a more elegant gameplay website for when they’re at their computers. This works quite well for us. And it allows our game to be persistent over time, allowing our game to be more casual: When something occurs, the player’s phone beeps with a new text message. They can respond whenever they would like. And they don’t have to have a Java app open all of the time. Text messaging ain’t glamorous, but it can be exactly what you need to make a good game that works across a wide range of phones.

MUPE (“Multi-User Publishing Environment”). This is Nokia’s offering to the mobile developer that wants a quick and easy way to launch multi-player games. It requires a bit more set-up time (including a MUPE server) and definitely requires some Java chops, but once you’ve got it going it’s very quick to develop with. It’s like doing web 2.0 social site development, but all user activity on the phone latches directly into the Java server and you can easily access stuff like the phone camera and microphone. Sweet. Once you’re flying, it’s great for rapid development or prototyping. What it lacks, though, is any kind of broad support on phones. In fact, at the present I don’t believe it’s available on any non-Nokia phones — though I know Nokia would like for it to become more of a standard. MUPE’s open source, so if that’s your bag you can feel comfortable with it. I’ve enjoyed working with it. Let me reiterate again, though, that only new-ish Nokia phones support MUPE. Which sucks for now.

Voice phone calls! Calling someone voice is really the only communication mode supported 100% by all phones (mobile or otherwise) since Alexander Graham Bell first asked Thomas Watson to pick up. Everyone has voice. And with Asterisk, an open source PBX (phone answering system), you can build interactive systems that use voice phone calls in fun ways. You’re probably used to automated phone systems when you call your bank or an airline or something. “Press one for branch hours and locations. Press two for an account representative…” Asterisk does that. But it’s free (though you have to pay for VOIP (“voice over IP”) hosting — I use Junction Networks, which I recommend). And you can latch it right into Java or whatever for some really cool possibility. There are a ton of gameplay possibility that open when you go voice. I really recommend checking it out.

So, anyway. These are just a few thoughts of mine about mobile social gaming. As I said, Java Mobile (aka J2ME) is great for game development, as are many other platforms. But these that I’ve discussed above may be a bit more naturally social. And they might you some time developing a prototype or launching a simple game (if that’s what you’re up to).(source:auscillate)


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