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介绍电子游戏设计史之固定套路时代(4)

发布时间:2014-02-10 16:16:58 Tags:,,,,

关于电子游戏设计的第三个时代,固定套路时代是始于1998年或1999年。(请点击此处阅读本文第123篇)与之前的两个时代不一样的是,这里不存在突然传播开来的转折性理念,即能够从整体上改变产业。相反地,新设计趋势将慢慢发展,即日本游戏设计理念与西方软件制作方法开始进行接触。毕竟电子游戏就是一种软件类型,软件产品已经见证了商业世界中的许多开发。所以电子游戏市场的扩展以及产品团队的发展都是不可避免的,公司把现有的软件制作方法带进游戏制作过程中。这并不是说1998年以前的电子游戏的设计从不考虑业务或技术限制。开发的实践性从一开始便影响着电子游戏设计。障碍轴的出现便是因为一个技术缺陷,一次意外就会彻底改变电子游戏。在那之后几年,任天堂的设计师提倡了复合游戏的使用,但是为了做到这点他们必须先拥有一台足够强大且能够支持许多长关卡的主机。这些考虑因素便是源于技术。西方电子游戏制作的发展改变了团队成员的工作方式,特别是改变了领导者与下属设计师的角色。

我们必须清楚的是复合设计的实践从未像街机设计那样消失。今天还有许多小型与中型设计工作室仍然在努力创造着复合游戏。甚至连一些大型且具有明确业务的开发工作室也仍然频繁地创造复合游戏,特别是在日本市场。通常决定一款游戏是否是复合游戏是源于其核心机制,但决定固定套路游戏则是源于其执行。因为在固定套路游戏中有一些重大的设计改变是源于制作技巧,即使其核心理念是复合游戏。问题中的技巧都是基于内容渠道,即源于非游戏软件开发实践。最初的理念是,在软件团队中存在一个带有高技能水平的开发者领导,在他/她之下有一些开发者下属。开发者领导并不会直接参与产品的制作;相反地,他/她会为开发者下属创造代码工具帮助他们去创造软件的许多可行面。最高级的开发者具有非常高的技能水平,许多年的创造经营,所以经常被挑选出来承担该任务。高级开发者的存在是为了解决像代码结构,标准等等更大且困难的问题。而初级开发者更容易被替换;通过使用高级开发者所提供的工具,他们将解决一些更简单的任务。初级开发者面对的是包含许多反复的工具执行的乏味编码活动。

电子游戏制作人看到了这一编程渠道的效能并开始基于同样的方式进行设计。想象这一结构的一种好方法便是将任务分为创造与执行。

silos of art design code implementation(from thegamedesignforum)

silos of art design code implementation(from thegamedesignforum)

该结构的创造是出于商业原因,但它会基于这种方式影响游戏设计。内容渠道的一大后勤优势在于低级别的人员是可扩展且可替代的。初级开发者和关卡设计师可以被快速移出项目,从而确保开发团队能够更轻松地扩大或缩小制作。项目设计的基本理念是在关卡设计开始前便确定好的,在这一制作方案中,关卡设计师并不会偏离总体规划太远。因此在某种程度上他们是可替换的,而早前的游戏开发者却不是如此。但这并不意味着项目中的高级人员将负责创造出所有优秀的理念。设计师领导需要考虑许多支持该渠道的优秀建议。不过同样地,内容渠道中的初级设计师如果未争得高级开发者(忙于其它事物)的同意是不能轻易尝试他们的新理念。所以尽管较低级别的开发者能够帮助创造新设计理念,他们也很难去执行它,所以这种情况很少会出现。当上级设定了机制后,大多数剩下的游戏设计努力便是关于在有限的变量中校准挑战。

这突出了内容渠道对于游戏设计的最大影响,并且也是固定套路设计背离复合设计的一大原因。一些来自复合时代和街机时代的日本开发者说过,试验,失败和意外发现都有可能引导着他们想出最棒的理念。不管是日本的设计团队还是早前较小的美国工作室都热爱不同类别的创意界限。这里的差别在于定性自由vs定量自由。复合时代的严谨小团队发现创造连贯且具有挑战性的游戏的最佳方法便是使用持久的质变。设计师并不需要不断提升平台间的距离或敌人落弹的速度,甚至是屏幕上敌人的数量。相反地,这些游戏最困难的部分在于定性复杂而不是定量增加。平台将伴随着不断增加的复杂行为移动,落弹呈现出更多变且更复杂的模式,敌人出现于能够美化其行为的情境中,但这在数量或速度上却不是必要的。在一款复合游戏的最后,所有的这些内容都将基于新颖的方式进行重叠。因此,游戏的复杂性将是源于混合并匹配玩家已经熟悉的理念,并创造看似新奇但却让人熟悉的情境。

因为自上而下的内容渠道属性,其内部的初级开发者和设计师并没有试验界线去创造复合设计团队所创造的各种复杂,重复的挑战。为了能够让可替换的设计师和开发者致力于单独的任务,美术师们必须依赖于我们所谓的固定套路设计结构。固定套路是被一个游戏关卡所隔开的离散内容组块,即对于彼此不会产生太大影响。固定套路2-1的结果并不会真正改变固定套路2-1或2-3等等的开始状况。固定套路设计师使用像再生和大型弹药缓存等内容去确保玩家能够始终开始挑战每个新的固定套路。这意味着游戏设计师不需要致力于连续的固定套路。致力于固定套路2-2的设计师只能告诉致力于固定套路2-3的设计师存在14个敌人士兵,2个敌人坦克,6堵齐胸高的墙,以及一个火箭发射器。然后2-3设计师将在2-2真正完成前完成其固定套路。所有的2-3设计师必须在2-3需要比2-2更复杂或更简单之前知道这点。如果变得更复杂,他/她将增加士兵和坦克的数量,或减少齐胸高的墙壁的数量。或者他们也可以置换出三个常见的士兵并添加3个红色且带有更多HP还能够创造更大的破坏性的士兵。所有的一切都是定量的,因为定量挑战最容易执行,且最容易快速传达给设计团队中的其他成员,还最容易基于问题一致性而进行迭代。

最初的《光晕》便是这一趋势的典型例子。当最初的《光晕》诞生时,许多人写下了有关他们在单人玩家关卡设计中的困惑。与90年代的射击游戏相比较,这款游戏中只有少数敌人类型,甚至在游戏上半部分中更少。因为有许多其它内容,所以平台游戏或益智游戏能够摆脱只设置几个敌人的情况。但《光晕》就并未拥有这些优势,所以它比《毁灭战士》或《半条命》拥有更少的单位类型,从而导致其单人玩家战役在主流射击游戏中显得很奇怪。显然,多人游戏是《光晕》真正关注的焦点,但是它们却为每一款游戏创造了单人玩家战役。在战役中存在许多定量压力的例子,即让设计师所使用的少数敌人变得更有趣。该活动的第二个关卡只呈现了设计师用于推动挑战的多个机制中的一个。

在防卫一个被占领的结构期间,敌人单位将集体攻向玩家。这是用于其它位置,存在其它技巧能够传递敌人,但它们却是在做同样的事。在此,设计师能够为了提升或降低难度而转动许多数值旋钮。运输船能够运输更多或更少的敌人,或者运输更多出色的敌人而不是普通敌人。运输船可以频繁地发动攻击。运输船可以被广泛地隔开从而扩大整体的危险区域。在单人玩家战役的整个过程以及难度设置的过程中,这些变量都是不断上升的。初级关卡内容创造者不需要冒险或试验重叠的机制,他们只需要插入适当的组件数便可。在这一过程中存在着一些创造性;《光晕》设计师创新地使用地形而创造出一些非常有趣的时刻。最终,地形可以无需引进新机制而基于多种方式进行使用,而定量改变将是游戏创造的基础。

你可能会意识到源自一连串定量固定套路的根本模式:障碍轴恢复其突出地位。跨越固定套路所进行的简单定量调整将自然地专注于沿着障碍轴移动,并见证了能力轴的更少使用。这并不意味着固定套路游戏便是伪装的街机游戏,因为它们并非如此。街机时代的游戏倾向于通过使用1或2个变量(游戏邦注:如敌人数量和敌人速度)而沿着障碍轴移动。而固定套路游戏更倾向于更大规模地调整更多变量,但却是基于同样的方式进行调整。同时,就像我之前所说的,固定套路游戏可以基于某种方式结合复合技巧到设计中。固定套路游戏的设计倾向于通过依赖定量方法随着时间的发展而提升游戏难度让人们回忆街机时代。

我敢保证你们中的有些人心中肯定存在一个异议:并不只是射击游戏具有这样的固定套路设计。只是比起其它类型,射击游戏更频繁地坚持这一模式,但却并非更强烈。最强烈地坚持固定套路的是MMORPG。你们中的许多人已经在MMO中添加了最大级别的袭击与地牢;通常这些实例包含了会遇到许多敌人和boss的独立组件。在一些袭击中,在boss间甚至不存在任何基于暴徒的固定套路。MMO类型的硬核玩家经常会致力于更高级别的内容重复,无数次地与同样的固定套路相打斗。许多这类型玩家在MMO中受挫,并发现因为无尽的重复而导致自己之后不能再有意义地加入一款MMO中,并且高度定量游戏玩法也将在这一过程中变得更加透明。

独立游戏和游戏设计历史

有趣的是,不断提升的预算和保守的授权完善的一大影响便是在公司主流之外出现了许许多多游戏开发。独立游戏正以极快的速度发展着,这主要多亏于像Steam,Desura和Newgrounds等数字发行服务。既然4人团队能够花1,2年时间去创造一款游戏,然后通过数字发行卖出50万份游戏,那么创造独立游戏便是可行且有利可图的行动。关于这种情况的一大结果便是引来一股全新且有趣的复合潮流。例如独立游戏《守护者冒险》便将JRPG关卡和装备系统与塔防目标结合在一起。

似乎主要AAA级工作室都不会冒险创造这样的游戏,但这也证明了复合设计技巧仍然是有用且关键的。还有许多这样的游戏正在创造更多专注于游戏玩法而不是浮华的外观的创造性复合内容。

关于独立革命还有另外一面,即反射出固定套路设计中的某些趋势。我要声明的是这些趋势并非描写所有或大多数独立游戏;独立游戏非常多样化,这也是它们有趣的原因。但独立游戏中存在一个流行的趋势,即通过使用街机风格设计去服务硬核利基群体。街机游戏繁荣于20世纪70年代末期以及20世纪80年代初期,但从总体上看来电子游戏失去了很多关注,直至任天堂带着其复合设计出现在人们面前。部分原因是源自电子游戏的逐渐衰败,但是还有部分原因是关于街机游戏设计的自然结果。街机游戏倾向于通过调整一些变量提升障碍轴。对于大多数硬核用户来说,这将变得无聊且让他们受挫,这算是游戏设计两大罪恶。伴随着市场上的无数玩家,服务一个利基群体已经变成一件可能的事了。特别是随着廉价制作和数字发行的出现,利基游戏也将持续发展着。

对此我能想到的最佳例子便是《超级食肉男孩》系列。《超级食肉男孩》将平台难度带到了一个全新层面,同时还使用了最基本的复合设计元素。复合设计在所有平台上都留下了让人难以忘记的标志,但《超级食肉男孩》更多的是关于它们那不断曲折的障碍轴。

游戏从未停止对更快的速度,更高的灵巧性,更准确的计时以及更简单的试错学习的需求。这些都是一款街机风格游戏的印记。对于那些会因为解决了困难的问题而兴奋的用户来说,这真的很棒。尽管更出色的商业市场并未买进游戏也不那么重要了。实际上,存在一个使用了街机风格同时还在独立市场上大受欢迎的整体游戏类型。射击游戏的子类型可能是惩罚障碍轴的最纯粹的现代化身。根据你的看法,你可能认为整体的类型是基于街机风格,但现代的利基游戏尤为如此。

Jamestown的开发者离开了在AAA级公司的工作从而去创造不是面向大众市场的游戏。尽管其设计较为优雅,但却是倾向于斯巴达式。在关卡和难度设置间移动着,游戏难度的数字导向型就变得更加明显。这是没有定位的街机游戏,但却随着游戏用户的增加而变得越来越可行。

未来

我们很难去预测电子游戏的未来。不久前许多人认为社交游戏(游戏邦注:特别是Zynga)将完全主导市场。但这种情况并未出现。存在一些有关游戏设计中的循环模式的证据,尽管将这样的模式投射到未来仍具有问题。既然许多固定套路游戏和独立游戏都重新使用了街机风格设计的核心功能,我们便可以期待在未来再次看到这种全新的街机时代的发展与衰败,紧跟着再涌来一股全新的复合设计浪潮。多亏了数字发行的发展,面向业余开发者和半专业开发者的全新定价模式和强大的游戏创造工具的出现,独立游戏正不断发展着。独立游戏更有可能使用全新或实验性的游戏设计理念,因为它们并未拥有保守的公司监督。同样地,当设计师采取源自利基游戏的大胆且新鲜的理念并将其重新整合去创造主流复合游戏时,全新IP的下一个繁荣时代也会到来。

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

Part 4: The Set Piece Period

The third era of videogame design, the set-piece period, began around 1998 or 1999. Unlike the beginning of the previous two eras of videogame design, there was no one watershed idea that spread suddenly, changing the industry as a whole. Rather, new design trends slowly developed as Japanese game design ideas came into contact with Western software production methods. Videogames are, after all, a kind of software, and software production had seen enormous development in the business world. It was inevitable that as the videogames market expanded and production teams grew, corporations would apply extant software production methods to the game-making process. This is not to say that videogames before 1998 were designed without respect to business or technology limitations. The practical aspects of development have affected videogame design from the very beginning. The very invention of the axis of obstacles came about because of a technological shortcoming, a moment of serendipity that changed videogames forever. Years after that, Nintendo designers pioneered the use of composite games, but in order to do so they had to have a game console that was actually powerful enough to support the many, long levels made possible by composite design. These considerations, however, are largely technological. What the Western boom in videogame production did was to change how team members worked, especially in the way the role of lead and subordinate designers changed.

It is important to note that the practice of composite design never died out in the way arcade design eventually did. There are plenty of small and mid-sized design studios still churning out composite games today. Even the largest and most business-conscious development studios still make composite games frequently, especially in the Japanese market. Often a game can be a composite game in its central mechanics, but a set-piece game in its execution. The reason for this is that there are significant design changes in a set-piece game that stem from production techniques, even if the core concept is for a composite game. The techniques in question are all based in the content pipeline, which was derived from non-game software development practices. The original idea is that in a software team there is one lead developer with a very high level of skill, and then under him or her are several more junior developers. The lead developer does not work directly on the product; rather, he or she creates code-based tools? that the junior developers use to create the many visible facets of their software. The senior developer has a very high degree of skill, many years of experience, and is often hand-picked for the job. The senior developer is there to solve the big, far-reaching problems like code architecture, standards and such. The junior developers are more fungible; with the tools they have been given by the senior developer, they solve much simpler tasks. The junior developers do the slightly more tedious coding activities that involve numerous, repeated implementations of the tools that the senior developer has created.

Videogame producers saw the effectiveness of this programming pipeline and began to experiment with doing design and art the same way. A good way to visualize this structure is to divide tasks into invention and implementation.

This structure was created for business reasons, but it had an impact on the design of games made this way. One of the logistical perks of the content pipeline is that lower-level personnel were scalable and fungible. Junior developers and level designers can be moved into or out of the project quickly, making it easy to scale up or scale down the production. The fundamental concepts of a project抯 design are so well-developed before level design even begins that, in this production scheme, it抯 hard for the level designers to deviate too much from the master plan. Thus, they抮e replaceable in a way that earlier game developers were probably not. This doesn’t mean that the senior personnel on a project are responsible for all the good ideas. Many good suggestions do go back up the pipeline for the lead designer to consider. Still, junior designers in a content pipeline generally can‘t try their new ideas without having to go up the chain of command to a superior who is occupied with many other things, instead of bringing those ideas to a team member who works with them every day and can help try them out right away. So while lower-level developers can help create new game design ideas, it’s harder for them to do that, and so it will probably happen less frequently. After the mechanics are set from above, most of the remaining game design effort is spent on calibrating the challenges within a narrow range of variables.

This highlights the biggest impact that the content pipeline had on game design, and one of the reasons why set piece design diverged from composite design. Several Japanese developers of the composite and arcade eras have said that experimentation, failure and serendipity led to their best ideas. Both Japanese design teams and earlier, small American studios enjoyed creative latitude of a different sort than their content-pipeline peers. The difference is in qualitative freedom vs quantitative freedom. Close-knit, small teams of the composite era found that the best way to make a game both coherent and challenging was to use persistent qualitative changes. Designers didn‘t need to constantly increase the distance between platforms, or the speed of enemy projectiles, or even the number of enemies on screen at the same time. Instead, the hardest parts of those games tended to be qualitatively complex, rather than quantitatively enhanced. Platforms moved with increasingly intricate behaviors, projectiles came in more varied and more complicated patterns, enemies appeared in situations that embellished their behavior, but not necessarily in greater quantity or at greater speed. At the end of a composite game, all of those things would overlap in novel ways. Thus, the complexity of the games would come from mixing and matching ideas in which the player was already fluent, creating situations that seemed new yet familiar.

Because of the top-down nature of the content pipeline, the junior devs and designers within it didnt have the experimental latitude to make the kinds of intricate, recombinant challenges that composite design teams did. In order to be able to have interchangeable designers and developers working in separate silos, those artists had to rely on the design formation we call set pieces. Set pieces are discrete chunks of content spaced across a level of a game in such a way that they have minimal impact upon one another. The outcome of set-piece 2-1 doesn’t really change the starting conditions of set pieces 2-2, or 2-3, etc. Designers of set pieces use things like regenerating health and large caches of ammo between set pieces to make sure that the player is always starting each new set piece 揻resh.? This means that the same designers dont have to be working on sequential set pieces. The designer working on set piece 2-2 can simply tell the designer of set piece 2-3 that there are fourteen enemy soldiers, two enemy tanks, six chest-high walls, and a rocket launcher. The designer of 2-3 can then finish his or her set piece before 2-2 is even fully complete. All the designer of 2-3 has to know before hand is whether or not 2-3 needs to be harder or easier than 2-2. If it’t harder, he or she increases the number of soldiers and tanks, and/or decreases the number of chest high walls. Or they can simply swap out three normal soldiers and put in three red 揺lite? soldiers who have more HP and deal more damage. Everything is quantitative, because quantitative challenges are the easiest to implement, easiest to quickly communicate to other members of the design team, and the easiest to iterate with stylistic consistency.

The original HALO serves as a good example of this trend. When HALO originally came out, many people wrote about how baffled they were at the design of the single player levels. Compared to shooters of the 90s, there are remarkably few types of enemies in the game, and even fewer in the first half. A platformer or puzzle game can get away with having few enemies because there‘s so much else that goes into it. HALO doesnt have those advantages, so the fact that it has vastly fewer unit types than Doom or Half-Life made its single player campaign seem odd among mainstream shooters. Obviously, the multiplayer is the real focus of the HALO franchise, but they did make a single player campaign for every game. There are plenty of instances of quantitative pressures in the campaign that make the few enemies the designers do use more interesting. The second level of that campaign shows just one of several mechanisms the designers used to propel the challenges.

During the defense of an occupied structure, enemy units come at the player in waves on drop-ships. This is used in other locations, and there are other techniques for delivering enemies, but they all accomplish the same thing. Here, the designer has lots of numerical knobs to turn in order to scale the difficulty up or down. The drop-ships can carry more or fewer enemies, or carry more elite enemies instead of basic foes. The drop-ships can come at greater frequency. The drop ships can be spaced more widely so that the total danger area is increased. Both across the course of a single campaign and across difficulty settings, these variables keep rising. The junior level content-creators don抰 have to take risks or experiment with overlapping mechanics, they simply plug in the right number of pieces. There抯 definitely some creativity in that process; the HALO designers used terrain creatively to make a few very interesting moments. Ultimately, though, terrain could only be used so many ways without introducing new mechanics, and quantitative changes were the bedrock upon which the game was built.

You may recognize an underlying pattern that results from a succession of highly quantitative set pieces: the axis of obstacles has returned to prominence. The easy quantitative adjustments across set pieces naturally focus on movement along the axis of obstacles, and see less use of the axis of abilities. This doesn’t mean that set-piece games are really arcade games in disguise, because they aren’t. Games of the arcade era tended to move along the axis of obstacles through the use of one or two variables, like number of enemies and enemy speed. Set piece games tend to adjust significantly more variables than that, but they do adjust them in the same way. Also, as I said earlier, set piece games can and do blend composite techniques into their design in one way or another. The design of set piece games just tends to recall the arcade era in its heavier reliance on quantitative methods for increasing the difficulty of the game over time.

As a quick answer to note an objection I抦 sure some of you have: it抯 not just shooters that do this kind of set piece design. Shooters adhere to this formula more frequently than other genres, but perhaps not more intensely. The genre which adheres to set pieces the most intensely is the MMORPG genre. Many of you have done max-level raids and dungeons in an MMO; generally those instances consist of discrete encounters with packs of enemies and (more importantly) bosses. In some raids, there aren抰 even any trash-mob set pieces in between bosses. Hardcore players of the MMO genre will often spend the majority of their play doing max-level content repetitions, fighting the same set pieces dozens or even hundreds of times. Many of these players eventually get burnt out on MMOs and find themselves unable to ever meaningfully participate in an MMO ever again, because of this endless succession of repeitions, and the highly quantitative gameplay that becomes increasingly transparent through them.

Indie Games and Game Design History

Interestingly, one of the effects of escalating budgets and conservative franchise re-hashes is that there is an increasingly large amount of game development occurring outside of the corporate mainstream. Indie games are growing at an incredible rate, thanks largely to digital distribution services like Steam, Desura and Newgrounds. Now that a four-man team can spend a year or two making a game, and then sell half a million copies of it digitally, it is both possible and profitable to make indie games. One of the results of this is a wave of new and interesting composites. The indie game Defender抯 Quest, for example, combines the JRPG level and equipment system with tower defense objectives.

It seems unlikely that a major AAA studio would ever risk making a game like this, but it does prove that composite design techniques are still useful and vital. There are many other games just like this that are making innovative composites that focus on gameplay rather than flashy presentation.

There’s another side to the indie revolution, though, which mirrors some of the trends in set piece design. I want to state up front that this trend does not describe all or even most of indie games; indie games are very diverse, and that’s why they’re interesting. But there is definitely a prevalent trend in indie games to serve an ultra-hardcore niche through the use of arcade-style design. Arcade games flourished in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but videogames in general suffered a huge drop-off in interest until the emergence of Nintendo and its composite designs. Some of this was just the newness of videogames wearing off and killing the fad, but some of it had to do with the natural consequences of the design of arcade games. Arcade games tend to move up the axis of obstacles by tweaking just a few variables. For all but the most hardcore audiences, this can become frustrating and boring, the two greatest sins of game design. With hundreds of millions of gamers in the market, however, it has become possible to serve a niche. Especially with the rise of cheap production and digital distribution, niche titles can be made sustainably.

The best example I can think of is the Meat Boy series. Super Meat Boy in particular takes platforming difficulty to great extremes while employing only the most basic elements composite design. Composite design has left an indelible mark on all platformers everywhere, but the Meat Boy titles are very much about their ever-steepening axis of obstacles.

The game never stops demanding more speed, dexterity, better timing and simple trial-and-error learning. These are all the hallmarks of an arcade-style game. For the audience who is thrilled by the punishing difficulty, this is great. It doesn’t matter that the greater commercial market doesn’t buy into it they don抰 need to. In fact, there’s a whole genre of games which use the arcade style and are flourishing in the indie market. The bullet hell subgenre of shoot-em-ups is probably the purest modern incarnation of that punishing axis of obstacles. Depending on your opinion, you could say the whole shmup genre is in the arcade style, but the modern bullet hell niche is especially so.

The developers of Jamestown left their jobs at AAA companies specifically so they could make games like this titles without mass-market appeal. The design, though elegant, is rather Spartan and very punishing. Moving between levels and difficulty settings it becomes clear just how numerically-oriented the game’s difficulty is. This is an arcade game without the quarters, made possible by the growing audience of games.

The Future

The future of videogame design is difficult to predict. Not too long ago many people thought that social games (Zynga in particular) would come to completely dominate the market. That hasn’t happened. There is some evidence of a cyclical pattern in game design, although projecting that pattern into the future is admittedly questionable. Still, now that many set piece games and indie games have reclaimed the central feature of the arcade style of design, it wouldn’t be surprising to see this neo-arcade period peak and then fall off, followed by a new wave of composite designs. Thanks to the proliferation of digital distribution, new pricing models and robust game-making tools for amateurs and semi-professionals, indie games are on the rise. Indie games are more likely to employ new or experimental game design ideas, since they have no conservative corporate oversight. As such, it is likely that the next great flourishing of new IPs (i.e. the next great series) will come when designers take bold, fresh ideas from niche indie games and recombine them to create mainstream composite titles. After the publication of the next Reverse Design, I抦 hoping to do a series of shorter articles on some new game design ideas that have become prevalent in the last few years.

The point of these articles is to serve as an introduction that will make it easier to understand the historical context of Reverse Design: Super Mario World. Super Mario World is an amazing example of composite design at its best, and concretely illustrates many of the points made in this article. At some point, I抦 hoping to create an entire textbook based on videogame design history that will be used at the university level. The Reverse Design series is a first step in that direction, providing much of the primary research into games that should form the basis of any theory. The hope is that game design majors will be able to learn game design through history the same way that music students learn through music history, or film students from film history梐nd so on. There may be another Kickstarter somewhere down the road for this, after the rest of the Reverse Design series has been published.

Reverse Design: Super Mario World should be online in the next few weeks after it gets back from our editors. Until then, feel free to shoot questions or comments about this article to me on Twitter @tgdfweb or through the submissions link.(source:thegamedesignforum


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