作者：Patrick Miller

在GDC Online上关于《CastleVille》的总结发言中，Zynga Dallas工作室的设计总监Bruce Shelley和首席设计师William Lemons便提到，他们在设计过程中对于有趣的核心循环的重视是推动他们在Zynga的第一款游戏取得成功的关键，但是反复的迭代工作以及较薄弱的核心视角也让他们在开发过程中吃尽了苦头。

castleville(from ultrahackz)

积极面

在前期制作时专注于设计过程

Shelley说道：“当你进入一个已经充满各种作品的领域时，你便不能再制作与现有作品相同的游戏，因为将没有人愿意反复购买相同的内容。你必须确保你的作品的与众不同，你可以在游戏关卡上进行创新。一开始我们便发现Facebook上不存在任何以中世纪为背景的游戏，所以我们便决定以此创造出一种全新的游戏体验。”

Lemons还认为，他们工作室所缺乏的社交游戏经验应该说是一种优点而非缺陷。他说道：“我想我们的设计过程中最棒之处便在于我们是一只全新的团队，还处于挖掘游戏理念的发展过程中，并且我们现今的目标仍只是努力创造出最优秀的游戏而未多加考虑其它商业元素。”

“所以我们便开始研究现有的一些社交游戏，如《FrontierVille》，并想着‘这便是我们所喜欢的游戏，但是我们该如何做才能创造出比之更出色的游戏？’我想正是因为我们在早期能够拥有如此自由的设计空间才让我们可以无需考虑其它游戏中的系统遭遇过何种结果。”

例如，《CastleVille》的锻造系统便是Zynga Dallas一直坚持的一大元素，尽管Zynga的执行人员并不是很看好它。Shelley说道：“尽管某些公司领导并不希望我们使用这一系统，但是我们团队中的一名首席设计师始终坚持如果没有了锻造系统，这款游戏便不再具有任何价值。而当游戏发行后，公司的一名董事也对自己最初的想法表示歉意，也就是我们最终证明了自己的坚持是正确的。”

强大的设计工具

推动《CastleVille》取得成功的另一大关键元素便是Zynga Dallas所拥有的工具，基于这些工具设计师便能够从一个更高的层面去控制他们所创造的任务。Lemons说道：“当我们开始接触Zynga的其它团队时，我们便发现自己在执行方面拥有更多控制权。”

“我们也能够与某些程序员一样控制任务分配，我们还吸纳了Zynga中的一些资深开发者，并且他们都对我们的工具以及这些工具在任务系统中所发挥的多种功效印象深刻。我们的游戏所带给用户的第一个乐趣点便是在恶棍击败圣诞老人时，圣诞老人将跌落下来并露出他的屁股，并且我们完全是在设计过程中去控制这些设置。”

MMORPG类玩家进程在社交游戏中的表现

使用MMORPG类关卡系统能让设计师更好地衡量玩家的学习经验并适当接触各种新内容。Lemons说道：“我们会使用玩家进程（关卡系统）去打开一些新内容，而为了让玩家能够接触到一些全新的内容，这一进程更是非常重要，其中包含了经济规划和锻造系统等。”

“基于关卡系统，我们便能够传输给玩家更多内容，并避免因为关卡每周所公开的新内容而带给新玩家过多压力。”

协同设计评审过程

Lemons和Shelley都强调了他们团队的协同设计评审过程总是能够帮助他们快速且有效地测试并修改设计。一开始他们总会先进行头脑风暴，随后他们将面向个体开发者分配特定的设计元素，这些开发者将创建设计规格，并使用电子邮件将其传达给团队进行审核。

随后他们仍将使用电子邮件去通知下一次团队讨论时间，并在此决定真正的设计规格。获得一致认可的设计规则将接受多次迭代测试。

Shelley还注意到有些特定的游戏元素总是未能在设计过程得到一致认可——最明显的便是城堡。Shelley说道：“我们一直在完善城堡这一元素。城堡到底有多重要？它是否是游戏的核心元素，或者只是徒有其名？一开始我们便想着去创建一座巨大且华丽的城堡，但是这一理念却总是未能获得一致的认可。”

消极面

执行人员搞乱了整个创造性过程

关于社交游戏，你必须确保任何新玩家能在游戏的前10分钟内感受到最顺畅且最有趣的游戏体验，这是游戏吸引新玩家并留住玩家的关键。Zynga将其称为“首次用户体验”，而Zynga Dallas在进行《CastleVille》的多次迭代时更是遇到了不少困难。

Lemons说道：“我们进行了许多次的用户测试，我们也会带给玩家许多不同的演示版本，并且我们总是会将首次用户体验呈献给公司。我们很满意自己所创造的首次用户体验，这是我们最初的几次迭代所得到的结果，但是当我们接收到用户测试结果时，Zynga的执行人员希望我们可以尝试一些不同的内容，所以我们又尝试了一些不同的版本，而当我们又一次完成迭代时，我们似乎又回到了最初的迭代中。对于我来说这是一次让人沮丧的经历，因为我亲身经历了整个执行过程。”

Shelley详细解释了他们在开发过程中所遇到的最严重的迭代问题：“我们之上还有一个难以逾越的领导力量，他们能够随时提出‘我想这点需要做出改变’之类的建议，但是他们却从未经历我们的协同设计过程也从未出现在我们的讨论会上，所以有人突然走出来并干涉我们的行动这一点总是会让我们非常泄气。”

设计工具带有较复杂的学习曲线

尽管设计师拥有非常强大的工具，但是Lemons同时也指出，要想使用并精通这些工具并不是那么容易。“要想使用我们的设计工具可不是件易事。幸运的是我们的团队成员大多都拥有CS或编程经验，并且团队中的每个人都具有不同的技能组，所以不同的成员将会投入不同的时间去掌握这些工具。我们的工具的创造也绝非偶然，这是团队中的一名程序员利用业余时间所完成的巨作，而如果他未能创造出这些工具，我们也不会取得今天的成绩了。”

MMO进程系统让游戏很难为新玩家呈现出新内容

尽管角色关卡进程系统能够帮助设计师逐步引进新的游戏元素，但同时这也将导致他们难以向新玩家呈现出新内容。Lemons说道：“我们并未做好面对‘宽型漏斗’的准备，即这种漏斗的目标是面向更多的玩家推出新内容。”

“我们始终依附于MMO进程，它也带给我们许多帮助，但与此同时许多内容都被固定在更高的关卡中，也就是很多玩家将不可能接触到这些内容。例如游戏中有一半的庄稼都锁定在第15个关卡。当玩家开始执行任务时，他们总是会因为种种关卡锁定而沮丧不已，他们希望我们新推出的内容能够更容易接近。如此我们便不得不将某些游戏内容引向较低关卡中，并想办法让任务变得更加简单——而这点也让我们感到非常沮丧。”

从问题中寻找出路

尽管遭遇了种种问题，Lemons和Shelley都很高兴自己能够将传统的游戏开发技能带到社交游戏领域。Shelley说道：“乐趣是一种具有意义和目标的有趣的决定，这也是我们早前在接触社交游戏时未能看到的元素。以前的Facebook游戏总是有办法让我昏昏欲睡。”

（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）

CastleVille: A GDC Online postmortem

By Patrick Miller

In a CastleVille postmortem talk at GDC Online, Zynga Dallas’ director of design Bruce Shelley and senior designer William Lemons spoke about how focusing their design process on a fun core loop was key in making their first Zynga title a success — but over-iterating and a weak central vision made development harder than it should have been.

What went right

Strong design focus during pre-production

“When you’re competing in a space with so many productions, you can’t do the same game again because nobody is going to buy it again,” Shelley said. “You have to be different, you have to innovate at the gameplay level. So first, we didn’t see any other games on Facebook set in the Middle Ages, and then we had to do things to make the game itself a new experience.”

Lemons felt that the studio’s inexperience with social games actually proved to be an asset, rather than a liability. “I think one of the things that was great about our design process is that we were a brand-new team, still in the process of presenting the game idea, and just focused on making the best game we could, not the business aspects,” Lemons said.

“So we looked at the social games out there, like FrontierVille, and thought, ‘This is something we like, but how do we make it better?’ I think the fact that we were so free to design in those early stages meant that we didn’t worry so much about whether systems in other games had failed in the past.”

CastleVille’s crafting system, for example, was something that Zynga Dallas fought to include despite the fact that Zynga execs weren’t enthusiastic about it. “Some of the company leadership was uncomfortable with it, but one of the lead designers insisted that the game wasn’t worth doing without the crafting system,” said Shelley. “After we shipped, one of the board of directors said that he was ‘humbled’ by how he had missed it completely and we were so right.”

Powerful design tools

Also key to CastleVille’s success was Zynga Dallas’s in-house toolset, which enabled designers to exercise a high degree of control over the missions they built. “Once we started interacting with other Zynga teams, we found that we had a great deal of control over implementation than other teams had,” Lemons said.

“We had almost as much control over the quests as some of the coders did, and when we brought other Zynga veterans in, they were really impressed by our tools and how much versatility they had in quest systems. One of our best moments of user delight was when we had Santa Claus get shot down by a villain, and he crash-landed in the scene and his butt is sticking out, and we had total control of that on the design side.”

MMORPG-style player progression works in social games

Using an MMORPG-style leveling system let designers pace the player’s learning experience and exposure to new content. “We used player progression — a leveling system — to unlock new things, which was really important for me to teach players new things, like economic planning and the crafting system,” Lemons said.

“With the leveling system, we were able to teach them things in chunks, which helped us to keep from overwhelming brand-new players with the weekly content that was locked by levels.”

Collaborative design review process

Both Lemons and Shelley stressed that their team’s collaborative design review process allowed them to quickly and effectively test and revise designs. The design process started with a brainstorming session, after which they’d assign specific design elements to individual developers, who would build the design spec and pass them back to the group for a review over email.

The email review then informed the next group discussion, during which the team would reach a consensus on an accepted design spec. That accepted design spec would then be play-tested, which led to further rounds of iteration.

Shelley did note that certain game elements never quite made it through the whole design process — chief of which was the castle itself. “We struggled with the castle,” Shelley said, “How important is the castle? Is it the focus of the game, or just in the name? Originally, we thought that you’d be driving to build a big, beautiful castle, but we never reached consensus on that.”

What went wrong

Execs gummed up the creative process

For social games, ensuring that first-time players have a smooth and enjoyable experience for the first ten minutes or so is critical to attracting new players and keeping them around. Zynga calls this the “first-time user experience”, and Zynga Dallas had a bit of difficulty over-iterating CastleVille’s.

“We had a lot of user testing, we had several different demo versions that we showed people, and the FTUE was generally how we’d show the game to the company,” Lemons said. “We had a FTUE planned out that we were really happy with, one of our first few iterations, but after we got our user testing results back [Zynga execs] wanted us to try several different things, and a dozen versions later, once we finalized it, we sorted of ended up back where we started with the first iteration. It was frustrating for me in particular because I was the one implementing this stuff.”

Shelley elaborated on how iterating from the top caused problems with their development process: “We had leadership above us who would come in and say ‘I think this needs to be changed,’ and they hadn’t been through our collaborative process, in our meetings, and we found it discouraging when someone just came in and told us what to do.”

Design tools had high learning curve

While the designers’ tools were powerful, Lemons pointed out that they weren’t really easy to pick up and use. “The implementation of our design tools was fairly difficult. Fortunately, there were a number of us with a CS or programming background, and everyone on the team had a different skillset, so people with more of a narrative background had a different time with that stuff. Our tools weren’t created in scope, they were created by a programmer in his own time, if he hadn’t made those tools we wouldn’t have had anything.”

MMO progression system made it hard to expose new players to new content

While the character level progression system helped designers introduce new game elements gradually, it also made it harder for them to expose their new content to brand-new players. “One of the things we weren’t prepared for was the concept of the ‘wide funnel,’ which is that the goal is to release new content to as many players as possible,” Lemons said.

“We were really attached to the MMO progression, and it helped us in some ways, but we had a lot of things that were locked behind higher levels, which meant that there were a lot of things we couldn’t let the players do. Half of our crops were locked behind level 15. When we were implementing our quests, we got frustrated because so much of it was level-locked, and they wanted our new releases to go to as many people as possible. Eventually we had to go back and bring some of those things to a lower level, make some of those quests a little bit easier, which was frustrating.”

Royal pains

Despite CastleVille’s misses, Lemons and Shelley were enthusiastic about how they brought a bit of their traditional game development skills and craftsmanship to the world of social games. “Fun is interesting decisions that have meaning and goals, that was what I think was missing from social games when we started playing them,” Shelley said. “Early Facebook games used to put me to sleep.” (source:GAMASUTRA)