作者：Keith Andrew

Boss Alien工作室旗下游戏《CSR Racing》下载量已突破5000万次，在全球170地区榜单登顶，该工作室代表Jason Avent在最近的GDC 2013发言中介绍了这款游戏核心机制的吸引力来源。

他指出“我同一帮朋友创建了Boss Alien，虽然整个团队都来自主机游戏领域，但我们比其他工作室更能包容免费增值模式。”

“我们相信移动设备是下一个重要平台。但我们还是这一领域的新手，还有很多需要学习，所以我们不可过于自大，自认为无所不知。”

Avent称针对免费增值模式究竟是否可行的争论毫无意义，因为这已经是一个在Facebook等社交平台“确立地位”的成功商业模式。Boss Alien需要做的就是对之加以调整，使之适用于《CSR Racing》的外观和风格。

“我们如果忽视这个已经站稳脚跟的模式，那就真是疯了。”

“我们是提取这些已经成型的特点，为它们改头换面之使适合我们的游戏。例如，游戏中的汽车交货时间，就是你在许多城建类游戏中可以看到的同种机制，只是传达的方式不同而已。”

Jason Avent(from pocketgamer)

迭代的重要性

Avent称《CSR Racing》是在高端游戏都采用付费模式的时期开发出来的——那些游戏画面的精细程度堪比主机游戏，它们极少采用免费增值模式。

“例如，我们光是迭代竞赛结果画面就花了数个月之久，但用户每隔30秒都会看到这个画面，所以必须确保这个画面尽量趋于完美。”Avent如是说，并指出分析和心理学因素也具有相当重要的作用。

“这是让你耗财的地方，但你还是得腾出资源进行迭代。如果你重做一些事情，就可以得到更好的结果。”

若想推出高质量的产品，迭代就是“必不可少”的选择，但这很难安排计划，也难以让开发者为遵从这一过程而完全抛弃个人观点。

Avent以这款游戏的UI举例称，“有时候你已经在这些东西上投入了许多心血，所以很难彻底放弃并重新制作。”

“你得狠心一点——抛弃那些你已经深深为之着迷的设计。重要的是你得根据调查和经验，而非个人选择做出调整（例如‘开始’按钮）”。

直到满意为止

Avent针对游戏中的诸多按钮和UI植入方式进行了一系列调整，从游戏玩法屏幕到竞赛地图均不例外。

“那些表面看似微不足道的调整，实际上花了我们60-70%的预算。但你得清楚何时停止迭代，此时就要靠个人选择。”

Boss Alien必须关注的另一个主要元素就是游戏的选择格式。Avent称移动游戏甚少获得玩家的完整注意力，这从根本上改变了一款成功游戏的设计。

“我们的用户有可能刚喝了酒，或者正在看电视，所以你得让游戏更易于使用，没有无预期的障碍。”

“简单性是必要元素。例如，游戏的核心——从赛车到获胜，约历时30秒。获胜会让你感觉良好，这会吸引玩家重返游戏。你赢了比赛，获得金鱼，购买升级装备，遇到下一个boss，获得新车然后进入下一关，这让游戏具有重玩性和重复性，因为你获得了奖励。”

强强合作的产物

Torsten Reil(from pocketgamer)

当然，Boss Alien制作《CSR Racing》的过程中也少不了发行商NaturalMotion的帮助，据其首席执行官Torsten Reil所称，这款游戏令公司实现了发展。

Reil在发言中调侃道，“Matchbox一年出售了5000万部汽车，我认为这真了不起。”

“预计2013年全球汽车产量将达6000万部。而在《CSR Racing》中我们一年出售了1.2亿部汽车，我认为我们实际上是世界最大的汽车制造商——当然不得不承认，这些只是虚拟汽车。”

Reil称他们此前从未想过公司能够在移动平台创造如此庞大的收益——NaturalMotion团队拿游戏首周的收益吃掉了许多蛋糕，喝掉了大量香槟。

发展战略

Reil指出，“针对《CSR Racing》，我们先是从观察我们认为能够改进的游戏题材入手。例如，我们喜欢《Real Racing 2》，但它并没有通过我们的星巴克排队测试。”他解释道，这里所谓的星巴克线是指，游戏能让人们在星巴克排队时获得有意义的体验。

他称通过这一测试的游戏之一是Creative Mobile的《Drag Racing》。但NaturalMotion和Boss Alien希望在此基础上更进一步。

“人们对CSR汽车的情感联系极为重要，所以很有必要通过大型公司获得授权汽车。”

“这得以让我们制作出具有视觉保真度的游戏——我们可以优化所有汽车的真实细节。许多大众用户市场中的游戏都不太理想，你得让玩家一开始就获得良好体验，这正是我们在《CSR Racing》中贯彻的理念。”

玩家觉得自己得到的奖励越多，他们就越可能投入体验。Reil透露玩家在《CSR Racing》的终极boss战役之前为购买nitros，单月投入的金额就高达250万美元。

为此，NaturalMotion和Boss Alien持续在游戏中大量投入，CSR现在有一个庞大的实时团队为这款游戏效力。

Reli总结道，“如果我想让游戏持续长存，就需要每个月都推出新鲜体验。我们并不推崇获取用户的营销策略，成功来自出色的游戏体验。”（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）

#GDC 2013: Why players are happy to be stuck in CSR Racing’s core loop

by Keith Andrew

“I’ve got a bit of a cold at the moment,” said Boss Alien’s Jason Avent half way through his CSR Racing talk to a healthy crowd at GDC 2013 in San Francisco.

“I apologise – it’s making my voice deeper than usual. I actually feel quite manly.”

It’s fair to say the vast majority of those sitting in the glow of the conference room’s huge screens as Avent cycled through his presentation weren’t bothered by his new found earthy tones.

With CSR Racing having hit 50 million downloads – topping app store charts in 170 regions in the process – any nuggets of wisdom Avent could deliver, gruff voice or not, were going to be lapped up.

And he didn’t skimp on that score.

Start line

“I started Boss Alien with a group of my friends, and even though the team all came from a console background, we were open to freemium a lot more than other studios,” Avent said.

“We believed mobile was the next big platform. But we were the new kids on the block and we had a lot to learn, so it was important not to be arrogant and think we knew everything.”

Avent said the debate of whether freemium could work or not was null and void. A successful model “had already been established” on social platforms like Facebook. What Boss Alien needed to do was shift it so that it fit in with CSR Racing’s look and feel.

“We would have been mad to ignore the model that had already been established,” continued Avent.

“We took these established traits and dressed them up differently to fit within our game. The delivery time for cars, for instance, is the same mechanic you see in lots of city builders and so forth, but just delivered in a different way.”

Iteration, iteration, iteration

Avent said that CSR Racing was developed at a time when high end games all went the premium route – games with high attention to detail or the “console rigour” Boss Alien had on board from day one very rarely tended to be free to play.

“Iteration on the race results screen took months and months of effort, for instance, but people see it every 30 seconds, so it was important to make sure it looks as good as it could,” said Avent, noting that analytics and psychology have a part to play.

“This is where you spend your money, but you’ve got to allow for iteration. If you do things again, they’ll end up better.

Iteration is “essential” if you want to deliver quality products, but it’s both difficult to schedule for, and also hard to take your personal opinions out of the equation.

“It’s sometimes difficult to drop things and do them again when you’ve invested in them,” said Avent of CSR’s UI.

“You’ve got to be brave – you’ve got throw away designs you’ve fallen in love with. It’s important that changes you make – such as to Start buttons – are based on research and experience rather than personal choice.”

Green means go

Indeed, Avent cycled through a series of changes to various buttons and UI implements deployed within the game – from the actual gameplay screens to the race maps.

“Changes that seem quite subtle on the outside, we actually spent 60-70 percent of our budget,” added Avent. “But you’ve got to know when to stop – very easy just to iterate for the sake of it, for personal choice.”

The other major element Boss Alien had to focus on was the game’s chosen format. Mobile games, Avent said, rarely garner a player’s full attention, and this fundamentally changes the design of successful games.

“Our audience may be drunk, or watching the TV, so you need to make the game easy to use, no snags and no unintended friction,” he continued.

“Simplicity is a necessity. For instance, the game’s core – from racing to winning – takes about 30 seconds, and winning gives you a good feeling, which then brings players back. You win a race, you get money, you buy upgrades, you get to the next boss, you get the next car and get to the next tier – it makes it seem worth playing and repeating, because you get rewarded.”

It takes two

Of course, Boss Alien hasn’t been alone during its CSR journey. Publisher NaturalMotion has also been there along the way, and according to CEO Torsten Reil, the game’s success is helping to evolve the company as a whole.

“Matchbox sells 50 million cars a year, which I think is pretty amazing,” opened Reil in his follow up talk.

“Global car production is predicted to hit 60 million in 2013. For CSR Racing, however, we’re selling 120 million cars a year, which we think means we’re actually the biggest car manufacturer in the world,” he added, to a flurry of laughs.

“Admittedly they’re virual cars, but still.”

Indeed, such was CSR Racing’s early success – generating revenue rates Reil said the company previously didn’t think we possible on mobile – that the NaturalMotion team spent the game’s first week eating a lot of cake and drinking a lot of champagne.

The success, however, had been well earned.

Line them up

“With CSR, we started by looking at genres we thought we could disrupt and bring something new to,” said Reil.

“We loved Real Racing 2, for instance, but it didn’t actually pass our Starbucks line test.” The Starbucks line text, Reil explained, is the ability to have a meaningful experience in play while waiting in the line at Starbucks.

One game that managed that, Reil suggested, was Creative Mobile’s Drag Racing. But NaturalMotion and Boss Alien wanted to go further.

“The emotional attachment that people have to CSR’s cars is incredibly important, so it was crucial that licensed cars from the big companies,” he said.

“It allowed us to create games with a visual fidelity – we could go into real detail across all our cars. Also, most of the mass market are rubbish at games – that’s something we learned with Backbreaker. You need to make the player feel good about the experience from the start, so that’s what we took across with CSR Racing.”

The more rewarded a player feels, the more likely they are to invest in the experience. Reil revealed that players parting with cash for nitros ahead of final boss battles in CSR Racing has generated $2.5 million in one month alone in the past.

As a result, NaturalMotion and Boss Alien continued to invest heavily in the game – CSR now boasts a large live team than the original development team that worked on the game.

“If you want the game to last, you need to deliver a fresh experience every month,” he concluded.

“We’re not playing the user acquisition game. Success is all about building big experiences.”（source：pocketgamer）