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开发者谈易用性文本游戏开发工具的挑战性

发布时间:2012-08-07 15:46:45 Tags:,,,,

作者:Leigh Alexander

易用性平台时代的到来以及用户对于更具深度故事的渴望都为互动小说游戏的发展奠定了基础,而作为富有经验的IF写手和游戏行业资深人士,Jon Ingold认为创造故事型游戏的工具也必须具有易用性。

这也是为何他及其同游戏开发者成立的Inkle Studios工作室会推出Inklewriter的原因,这个制作互动故事的新工具是一种免费且任何人都可以使用的工具。

inklewrite(from greggmorris.com)

inklewrite(from greggmorris.com)

Ingold说道:“很长时间我都沉溺于分析程序这一兴趣爱好,并且尝试了各种实验去赋予各种内容更多‘易用性’。也就是整合更少的谜题和更多故事,并尝试着让分析程序更加灵活。”

互动文本游戏长期依赖于分析程序界面,而分析程序界面则主要是让玩家输入一些游戏能够理解的简单命令。但是如果游戏越复杂,玩家(特别是那些不熟悉文本冒险游戏的玩家)便很难做到让游戏理解自己的行动。这对于设计师来说也是一种挑战——他们将发现自己受困于巨大的挑战,很难创造出能够迎合玩家选择需求的功能。

Ingold认为这是分析程序界面所设定的一个进入壁垒,从而导致文本游戏只能局限于细分市场。一年半以前他将自己的一款游戏展示给一名同事(他认为这个人真心想要研究这类型游戏),但这名同事却始终不得要领。

他说道:“那时候我们开始思考‘这与内容无关,问题出在界面。’”

他认为在游戏产业中文本游戏的确是一个不断发展的领域,并能够以更多新的方式去影响平板电脑玩家,让他们可以只通过简单的输入便获得深入的游戏体验。

“对我来说最大的惊喜在于创造一些具有生命力的内容,”他说道,“谜题便是如此——最赞的谜题是能够带给玩家受困,逃脱并最终解决问题的过程,你知道它将发挥功效,并会因此不断进行尝试。”

Ingold表示在互动故事中让玩家掌控故事的发展将能够带给他们同样的奖励感。“但是一旦你打出了某些错误的内容或不知道如何分析,整个故事也将随之遭到破坏。”

撰写互动小说与撰写静态小说一样需要相同的技能和兴趣——“具有深度的意义,能够发人深思的潜台词(大多数游戏好像都没有潜台词),机制和共鸣,”Ingold说道。“而对于互动小说,我认为其中存在着较大的风险。这类型游戏延续了风险vs.奖励模式,并且所有的风险都是架构于故事背景上。”

如果操作得当的话,互动故事也能像其它游戏类型那样带给玩家同等的风险vs.奖励感,游戏将提供给玩家复杂且具有意义的决策,并让他们能够以一种合适的方式去评估并期待之后的结果。

这也是这个团队希望通过《科学怪人》(游戏邦注:Dave Morris所设计的一款新的手机应用)而达到的目标。并且这款游戏已经获得了像《柯克斯书评》(游戏邦注:美国著名书评杂志)以及《金融时报》等媒体的正面评价。

“基于《科学怪人》我们最后又将一些选择重新置于玩家面前,但是因为我们所提供的所有理念都是不能撤销且没有相关数值,所以玩家所面临的一切都将是冒险。”

互动故事所采取的这种方法与广受孩童喜欢的“选择你自己的冒险”书籍间存在的最大不同便在于,“这类书籍并不能让读者回想起各种内容也不能改变文本。而我们的游戏引擎则能够基于玩家所做的以及所看到的而改变段落中的文本内容,所以尽管它不能自动生成任何文章,但却能够定制各种单词表达。当这一引擎发挥作用时,玩家便能够感受到与应用作者类似的无缝的流动感,就好象真实地看到一些小妖精在构造故事一样。”

对于游戏设计师来说这具有非常大的吸引力,同时这也是创造出具有易用性的互动故事(特别是面向那些不清楚自己能从中获得多少乐趣的玩家来说)的一种好方法。所以他们便研发了Inklewriter这一工具。

“创造任何游戏首先需要的都是工具,能够帮我们有效解决问题且不会过于tinkerable(游戏邦注:可以动态改变代码段并立即看到结果)的工具;否则我们便只能花费大量时间去扩展代码而难以腾出足够的时间去制作实际内容。我们总是很难同时考虑系统和故事问题。”

为了鼓励更多人去尝试Inklewriter,该工作室举办了“Future Voices Competition”大赛,将把使用该工具创造的10个最佳故事编为选集并面向全球市场发行,一等奖还将获得250美元奖励。

Ingold说道:“我们希望通过Inklewriter获得一些优秀的故事,并且能够激发更多写手的灵感,让他们愿意前来尝试并创造出更棒的内容。如果人们开始谈论自己所写的内容,那么我想我们定能够看到一些真正优秀故事的诞生。”

他还补充道:“我希望有一天我能够重新回到分析程序中并更好地完善它。我想要创造也能够在平板电脑或手机上操作的游戏版本,不需要键盘,也无需提供任何动作功能表,但却能够给予玩家同等的自由——不过我也不确定这种版本是否能够获得玩家的喜欢,也许只会惹恼纯粹主义者并让更多休闲玩家感到疑惑吧!”

现在,他的梦想是通过Inklewriter创造出让玩家容易理解且能够感受到乐趣的互动故事——他已经见识了一些人以此为好友创造生日冒险礼物,“我们也同样在学校的创意写作课程中看到过相关实践。”

Inklewriter拥有能够帮助开发者轻松管理故事分支的设置,以便他们在开发游戏前更好地阐述故事情节。“这便是我希望Inklewriter具备的主要功能—-有点像‘互动小说记事本’,”Ingole说道,“既简单,又实用。”(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转载,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

New, free tools allow any novice to make an accessible text adventure

by Leigh Alexander

The age of accessible platforms coupled with a hunger for deeper stories have set the stage for interactive fiction games to flourish, but longtime IF writer and game industry veteran Jon Ingold believes the tools to create storytelling games have to be accessible, too.

That’s why he and his colleagues at Cambridge, UK’s Inkle Studios — a software company founded by game devs — have created Inklewriter, a new tool for making interactive stories: It’s free, and designed for anyone to use.

“I spent a long time in the full on parser-based hobbyist niche, and a lot of that was spent doing experiments trying to make things more ‘accessible,’” Ingold tells Gamasutra. “You know, less puzzle-y and more story-y, and then trying to do things to make the parser clever.”

Interactive text games have long depended on the parser interface, which relies on players typing simple commands that the game can understand. But the more complex games in the genre get, the more likely it is that players, especially those unaccustomed to text adventures, might be frustrated in their attempts to get the game to understand what they’re trying to do. It’s a challenge for designers, too, who might find themselves limited by the steep challenge of creating affordances for every option a player might want to execute.

Ingold believes it’s the steep barrier to entry posed by the parser interface that has kept text games confined to their niche status. A year and a half ago, he showed one of his games to a colleague he describes as “really keen” to explore the genre, and the colleague couldn’t get into it.

“That was when we started thinking, ‘okay, this isn’t about the content — it’s about the interface,’” he says.

In his view text games indeed can be a growth area for a game industry looking for new ways to leverage a tablet-generation audience interested in experiences that offer deep experiences with simple inputs.

“The thrill for me is making something that comes alive,” he says. “And puzzles can do that — the best puzzles are ones where you get stuck, walk away, solve it at the bus-stop or in the shop or whatever, and you know it’s going to work, and go home, and try it, and it does.”

Interactive stories where the player is in charge of keeping the narrative moving can offer that same rewarding feeling, says Ingold. “But the minute you type something wrong or can’t work out how to phrase it, it’s pretty quickly shattered.”

Writing for interactive fiction requires many of the same skills and interests as static fiction — “depth of meaning, a bit of subtext to chew over (most games don’t seem to do subtext at all), wit and resonance,” Ingold opines. “But then for the interactive side, I think a lot of it is about risk. Games run on risk versus reward, and in a story context that risk can be really interestingly-framed.”

When done correctly, an interactive story can offer players the same sense of risk versus reward as any other type of game, where players are offered complex, meaningful decisions the results of which they can anticipate later, hoping they calculated in a desirable way.

That’s what the team aimed for with Frankenstein, a new mobile app written by Dave Morris that offers an alternate take on Mary Shelley’s classic tale of a doctor creating nightmarish new life. It’s already gotten positive reception from the likes of Kirkus Reviews and the Financial Times.

“What we finally did with the Frankenstein app was go full-circle back to something that puts choices in front of you, but with the idea we give you no undo, no stats, so everything is risk.”

“It’s a pretty extreme take, though, and we’re looking at playing with that a little in the next thing we make,” Ingold adds. He says the team also hopes to develop stories that offer avenues for exploration beyond narrative advancement. Ultimately, though, the goal is simple: “We don’t really want the player thinking ‘how do I do…’ as opposed to, ‘what should I do?’”

The biggest difference between this approach to interactive story and the “choose your own adventure” books so many loved as children is that “CYOA books can’t remember much, and can’t re-flow the text. Our engine has a lot of power geared toward altering the text within paragraphs depending on what you’ve done and seen, so while it’s not auto-generating any prose, it’s certainly customizing right down to the level of the individual words. When that works, you get this seamless flow that’s a little bit like the writer is there inside the app, like some kind of goblin making the story up on the fly.”

That can be an extremely appealing feeling for game designers, and it’s also an approach that should allow interactive stories to be accessible to more players who might not even know how much they’d enjoy it. That’s where the Inklewriter tool comes in.

“The first thing when making any game is always tools… that get out of the way, and that aren’t too tinkerable, otherwise people spend a lot of time making code extensions and not much time making actual content. It’s hard to think about systems and story at the same time.”

In the hopes of encouraging loads of people to experiment with Inklewriter, the studio has just announced its Future Voices Competition, where the ten best stories made with the tool will be published worldwide as part of an anthology — with a $250 first prize at stake, too.

“We’re hoping we’ll get a few great stories out of Inklewriter, and that’ll get other writers inspired enough, or annoyed enough, to come along and try to one up them and do better. Then if people start talking about what they’re writing, then I think we could see some really good stuff,” Ingold says.

“One day I would like to come back to the parser thing and really fix it, somehow,” he adds. “I’d love to make a version that was playable on a tablet or a phone, without typing, and without presenting the user with huge menus of verbs, but that somehow captured that same freedom…but I’m not sure how popular it would be – might just annoy the purists and confuse the more casual players!”

For now, his dream is just to see people having fun making easy-to-read interactive stories through Inklewriter — already he’s seen someone make a birthday adventure as a present for a friend, and someone else developed a story about George Osborne’s appearance at the Levinson enquiry in the UK. “We’ve also been seeing it used by schools for doing creative writing with kids, and that’s really nice, too.”

Its facility for easily managing narrative branches may lend Inklewriter to good use by other kinds of game developers doing story plotting ahead of development. “That’s the kind of thing I want it to be — a sort of ‘WordPad for interactive fiction,” Ingold says. “Simple, but useful.” (source:gamasutra


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