作者：Lee Bradley

“我真的希望看到一些具有人文精神、不折不扣的成功游戏。”

今年初，独立开发者Adam Saltsman（代表作《屋顶狂奔》）和Greg Wohlwend（代表作《线条滑雪》）的合作成果——《Hundreds》登陆iOS平台。

这款益智游戏在外观上将极简抽象艺术与街机风格相融合，操作上看似非常简单，实际上对精度要求极高。但对于Saltsman，《Hundreds》的意义显然不仅仅是一款成功的游戏。

他表示：“想要在苹果应用商店中获得收益上的成功，你必须谦虚，这是一个普遍的态度”。

“我认为，用纯艺术的想象力制作出来的游戏应该享有足够的商业成功，才可能激励更多人制作这类游戏。这一点意义重大。”

在本文中，Saltsman和Wohlwend回顾《Hundreds》从最初的原型到成功游戏的演变过程。

原型

最初的《Hundreds》是Greg Wohlwend设计和编写的一款Flash游戏，于2010年6月上传到Newgrounds网站。

Wohlwend表示：“这款游戏体现了我对坚硬、严整和高雅游戏设计的偏好，这弥补了我作为程序员在技术上的不足。”

“我在Flash上编写过许多小东西，但从来没有做出游戏，甚至没有做出游戏原型，所以我开始构思一些我力所能及的东西。我希望靠自己的力量制作出一款游戏。于是有了《Hundreds》。”

在游戏中，为了使圆圈变大变多，玩家必须触摸在一个限定区域内弹跳的圆圈。当这些数字达到100时，玩家就可以进入下一关。

这款游戏的难点在于，当圆圈膨胀时，它不可以触碰到其他圆圈。

当然，实际的玩法比上面描述得更讲究。Flash版本的《Hundreds》很受欢迎，广受好评。但仅此而已。

一年多以后，Semi Secret Software的Eric Johnson获得源代码，花了一个周末的时间将它移植到iPad上，并发邮件告诉Wohlwend。

Wohlwend觉得倍受鼓舞、激动兴奋，于是他开始和Johnson与Adam Saltsman合作，进一步细化《Hundreds》的概念，以便制作完整的iOS版本。

谜题

Wohlwend专注于这款游戏的外观，Johnson编写代码，而Saltsman负责设计《Hundreds》的绝大多数谜题。

为了探索Wohlwend的最初想法和“尊循他的创意”，Saltsman从Jonathan Blow广受关注的益智平台游戏《Braid》中汲取灵感。

他解释道：“我认为，《Braid》的谜题设计方法和体现方法仍然是同类之最。它引放新想法的方式，使你不得不靠这些小小的灵光一现才能通过关卡。”

“我可能从Jonathan Blow那里挪用了一个创意，这是一个相当棒的谜题，单靠反复试验是无法解决的——如果你不知道你在做什么，那就不可能。但是，如果你理解这个谜题之后深意，那么解决过程就非常简单了。”

正是带着这个想法，Saltsman开始设计《Hundreds》的谜题；用他的平板画草图、将个人偏好晾在一边，客观而严格地剔除不适合游戏的东西。

他表示：“有时候只是觉得某个想法不够新颖、不够有趣，于是只能放弃它了。”

难题

Wohlwend解释道：“Adam实验了许多机制。我认为像洞吞没圆圈、工厂制造圆圈和炸弹炸掉圆圈，都是很有趣的想法，但是实际上行不通。”

Saltsman感叹：“洞的想法行不通最让我失望。因为看起来确实很有希望，它可以与许多其他圆圈类型产生交互作用……但是，洞的概念就是无法产生我们想要的那种风格的谜题。”

作为创意过程的重要部分，Saltsman对品质的严格把关使他经常失眠。

Saltsman回忆道：“有那么一段时间，我就是无法充实游戏的核心机制，我们才设计完20个关卡，好几个月就已经过去了。这让我非常焦虑。”

“我克服困境的唯一办法就是跟我妻子一起头脑风暴，过滤和减少想法，直到我们想到可以帮助我们完成游戏创意探索的东西。”

Saltsman最终解决了难题，他对《Hundreds》方向的暂时性焦虑意义重大。然而，该团队面临的最大问题却是，找到营销游戏的办法。

营销

因为陌生的外观设计和在输出中转译得不太好的机制，《Hundreds》可能很难营销。

“我认为游戏的网站很有用，是营销工作的一个焦点。我们希望向人们介绍《Hundreds》——它是全新而奇特的游戏，虽然有一点儿难，但非常有趣。我们确实花了很多时间考虑网站、预告片、图标和截图等工作。我们知道让人们知道这款游戏非常难，所以我们把它当作一个严肃的设计问题，就像我们在游戏设计时遇到的难题一样。我觉得这种办法通常是有效的。”

另外，他们还讨论了更有创意的营销构想。在开发过程的某个时候，Wohlwend建议克隆他自己的游戏，也就是将卡通风格的膨胀河豚放到《Hundreds》的圆圈中。

他不太愿意详述这个想法，可能是因为他觉得本不应该完全排除这个创意。

“我不想多说了。我想把这个想法添加到游戏中，是因为我认为这很酷啊。我知道这可能作为一个策略吸引大量休闲玩家玩《Hundreds》，但结果没有被采纳。”

发布

游戏开发到2012年底完工，这支团队面临的唯一问题就是决定价格和发布日期。

一开始，Wohlwend和Saltsman开玩笑产要发布这款游戏的免费版本，对剩下的关卡付费解锁。

Wohlwend笑道：“我们发现所有人，上至老祖母下至小毛孩玩这款游戏都不需要我们的帮助；所以我们认为我们可以有一些免费的东西，比如给玩家一个带十个关卡的演示样本。”

然而，他们最终将这款游戏的第一周出售价格定为2.99美元，之后升至4.99美元。发布日期为2月3日。

“12月是一个相当诱人的时段，很容易开展假日促销活动，因为所有人都在争先恐后地做同样的事情。”

“但是，我们觉得还是再等几周，高峰期之后的淡季更有利于玩家发现我们的游戏。”

“从过去的经验看，12月的最后两周是一年当中的最佳发布时期，但在2月发布，我们就有了最好的5周。”

反响

他们的决策是明智的。

游戏的销售强劲，好评如潮。《Hundreds》在苹果应用商店的销量超过10万，自发布当天就冲入应用排行榜。

确实，因为《Hundreds》的成功，该团队正在计划将它移植到Android平台，并推出新功能和内容的更新。

“在这个项目里，我们始终体现它的价值。我很想说，正是因为如此，《Hundreds》吸引的玩家人数简直不是我们敢想象的。”

“这绝对是我做过的最好的游戏。”

Wohlwend补充道：“我做过不下一打游戏，但《Hundreds》是我觉得最满意的一款。这么多人在玩它，真是太疯狂了。”（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）

Gaming by numbers: The making of Hundreds

by Lee Bradley

“I really wanted to see something succeed that was humanist and uncompromised.”

Early this year, Hundreds – a collaboration between indie developers Adam Saltsman (Canabalt) and Greg Wohlwend (Solipskier) – hit iOS.

A visually minimalist arcade puzzler with seemingly simple controls, Hundreds demands excruciating precision. But for Saltsman, the game also represents something more.

“There’s this really widespread, prevalent attitude that you have to condescend in order to have financial success on the App Store,” he says.

“I think it’s really important for games with a really pure artistic vision to enjoy enough financial success that maybe they can inspire more people to take chances.”

In our latest making of, Saltsman and Wohlwend reflect on that mission, talking us through Hundreds’ evolution from a flash prototype to an App Store success.

Prototype

Uploaded to Newgrounds in June 2010, Hundreds began life as Flash game designed and coded by Greg Wohlwend.

“It sort of bubbled up out of a predilection for hard, strict and elegant game design, born out of restriction and my lack of skill as a programmer,” he says.

“I’d coded dozens of tiny little things in Flash but never a game, even in prototype form, so I set out to think on what I could dream up that would be clear and achievable for me. I wanted to make a game all by myself. Hundreds was the result.”

Greg Wohlwend

In the game players must touch circles bouncing within a confined area, in order to increase both their size and the number at their centre. When those numbers reach a total of 100, players progress to the next level.

The challenge comes with the fact that no circle can touch another while it’s expanding.

Hundreds

More elegant to play than describe, the Flash version of Hundreds proved to be popular, racking up the plays and the positive comments. And that, it seemed, was that.

Then, over a year later, Semi Secret Software’s Eric Johnson picked up the source code, spent the weekend porting it to iPad, and emailed the results to Wohlwend.

Inspired and excited (he emailed back “oh shit!!!”), Wohlwend began working with Johnson and Adam Saltsman, to elaborate on Hundreds’ concept for a full iOS release.

Puzzles

While Wohlwend focused on the visual aspect of the game and Johnson did the coding, it was Saltsman that designed the majority of Hundreds’ puzzles.

The goal was to explore Wohlwend’s initial idea and “follow it all the way down.” In doing so Saltsman took inspiration from Jonathan Blow’s highly regarded puzzle platformer, Braid.

Adam Saltsman

“Braid’s approach to puzzle design and presentation I think is still basically best in class, ” he says. “The way it introduces new ideas and you have to have these little epiphanies to solve the level.

“An idea I probably cribbed from Jonathan Blow is that a really good puzzle can never be solved by trial and error. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s impossible. But, if you understand the idea behind it, then the process of inputting the solution should be very simple.”

It was with this in mind that Saltsman went about creating Hundred’s puzzles; sketching in his pad, prototyping, setting ideas aside to achieve “editorial distance” and brutally culling anything that didn’t fit the bill.

Early Hundreds sketches by Saltsman

“Sometimes its just not new enough, or interesting enough, and you just have to kill it,” he says.

Problems

“Adam experimented with a ton of mechanics,” says Wohlwend, elaborating on the process.

“I think things like holes that ate circles, factories that created circles, and bombs that blew circles away were interesting ideas in our head, but didn’t work in practice.”

“Holes not working out was the biggest disappointment for me,” adds Saltsman. “They seemed really promising, they interacted with a wide range of other circle types… but they just weren’t creating interesting puzzles in the style we wanted.”

Although an important part of the creative process, Saltsman’s exacting quality control would lead to lost sleep.

“There was a phase where I hadn’t fleshed out our core game mechanics,” says Saltsman, “and we only had like 20 levels designed, and we’d been working on the game for months and months already. That still makes me uneasy.

“I think the only way I got through that was going on these long runs with my wife, brainstorming and sifting and reducing ideas until we came up with something solid that we could rely on to finish exploring the game idea.”

Ultimately overcome, Saltsman’s temporary angst over Hundreds’ direction was an issue. The biggest problem the team faced, however, was finding a way to market the game.

Marketing

Visually unfamiliar, with mechanics that don’t translate particularly well in print, Hundreds could potentially have been a hard sell.

“I think it was useful,” says Wohlwend of the game’s website, a focal point of the marketing push. “We wanted to introduce Hundreds to people – it’s a new, weird kind of game that’s intriguing and a bit hard to explain.

“We definitely spent a lot of time thinking about the website, the teaser, the trailer, the icon and the screenshots. We knew it’d be a challenge to tell people about the game and we took that on as a serious design issue, just as we had with any of the game design. I think in general that approach paid off.”

Other, more creative marketing ideas were also discussed. At one point during development, Wohlwend suggested cloning his own game, using cartoony, inflating blowfish in place of Hundreds’ circles.

He’s reluctant to elaborate on the idea, hinting that it may have not been completely abandoned.

“I sort of don’t want to [say any more],” he says. “I want to make a game with this idea because I think it’s really cool. I know it might come off as a ploy to rope a larger more casual audience into Hundreds, but it’s really not, there’s a lot more to it.”

Release

With work on the game completed towards the end of 2012, all that remained was for the team to decide upon a price point and a release date.

Initially, Wohlwend and Saltsman toyed with the idea of releasing a free version of the game, with an IAP to unlock the rest.

“We saw everyone from little kids to grandmothers play the game without any help from us and we thought we might have something that could work with free, giving people a sort of demo version. Tens!,” laughs Wohlwend.

Ultimately, however, it was decided that the game would be sold for $2.99 during its first week on sale, rising to $4.99 thereafter, with a release date of January 3rd.

“December is a really sticky month,” says Wohlwend. “It has all these Holiday sales and everything which are great, but everyone is crowding in to do the same thing.

“We felt like waiting a few weeks until that passed would give us the best chance at gaining more attention.”

“And historically, for Semi Secret,” adds Saltsman, “while the last two weeks of December is the best two week period of the year, January is actually our best five-week period.”

Reception

It proved to be a wise decision.

With prominent promotion from Apple and a slew of positive reviews from critics, Hundreds has sold over 100,000 copies, enjoying high App Store chart placings since release.

Indeed, such has been Hundreds’ success that the team is now planning an Android port and updates with new features and content.

“Every value we had going into this project we carried all the way through to the end, and in spite of that, or, I am tempted to think, because of that, Hundreds is resonating with more people than we ever allowed ourselves to imagine,” says Saltsman.

“It’s definitely the best game I ever got to work on.”

“I’ve made over a dozen games and Hundreds is the one I feel closest to, still,” adds Wohlwend. “It’s even crazier that so many people are digging it.”(source:pocketgamer)