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Will Freeman解构休闲游戏设计的艺术

发布时间:2015-04-07 11:13:13 Tags:,,,,

作者:Will Freeman

在并不遥远的游戏产业历史中,“休闲”这一词得到了明确的定义。

在快速发展且充满多样化的游戏用户中,“休闲”游戏就像最初声名鹊起那般快速失宠了。一些关于骑马为主题的盗版件以及Wii TV广告中的陈词滥调将“休闲”这一词变成了产业中粗俗的代名词。直至今天,我们还能在一些角落中发现一些质疑声。

然而,引出“休闲”这一词的趋势却继续延伸着。今天玩游戏的人比以前更多了,越来越多收集游戏出现在了非游戏的流行文化词典中。

休闲游戏并未消失。它只是摆脱了这个名字。今天有许多广泛吸引了大众市场且具有易用性的游戏获得了巨大的成功,它们甚至还获得了各种奖项。像《Threes》,《纪念碑谷》以及《过马路》便是非常典型的例子。

同时,像《部落战争》和《Candy Crush Saga》等游戏的身影也仍旧频繁地出现于世界各地的公共交通中,就像免费游戏巨头公司依然在努力将“休闲”游戏变成有利可图的品牌。

如此休闲游戏得到了巨大的发展。但是你是如何做到的呢,在这个领域中如何才能设计出带有潜能的高质量游戏?

休闲游戏设计师一开始总是伴随着一个广泛的问题:用户。如果你正在为传统玩家创造一款硬核打斗游戏,你便有了明确的立基目标用户;这是你需要满足并了解其喜好的群组。

而对于休闲游戏,你的潜在用户却是“所有人”,至少是“愿意接近游戏的所有人。”在今天这类型用户非常广泛,并且各种各样,所以你似乎很难去满足他们的需求。

瞄准所有人

所以你该如何创造一款能够吸引尽可能多的用户的游戏?

来自《Threes》的创造者Sirvo的Asher Vollmer说道:“你必须考虑你的用户,这便是我在做的事。在我的早前游戏中我所犯的最大错误便是未能真正考虑用户,并创造出不能真正吸引任何人的大杂烩游戏。从而导致自己因为没人喜欢游戏而失落不已。”

Vollmer说道,因为这一原因他才构想出面向特定用户的《Threes》。

Vollmer表示:“用户并不是这个星球上的所有人。而是这个星球上所有拥有手机的人。这便意味着我们需要创造适合人们使用手机方法的游戏,如参考他们的游戏时间。”

换句话说,手机本身便是《Threes》的目标用户。Vollmer基于人们玩手机的时间长度去设计游戏,并构想这是一款没有计时器的游戏。

他解释道:“我的确拥有非常广泛的用户,在这个星球上有许多拥有智能手机的人,但仍然有部分人是我们设计游戏的目标。”

Clash of Clans(from develop-online)

Clash of Clans(from develop-online)

成功之路

其他游戏设计师使用了不同方法去创造广泛的吸引力。来自《过马路》的开发商Hipster Whale的Matt Hall便是其中之一。

Hall声称这么做能够让一款游戏吸引到更加广泛的用户:“对于我所创造的每一款游戏,我都尝试着明确游戏的目标用户;甚至目标可能只是一个个体。”

他继续说道:“这就像一个镜头,即一种集中注意力的方式。为了让游戏吸引所有人的注意,你必须面向某些人去创造游戏。这就像是通过狭窄的范围去吸引更多人的注意;选择能够代表所有人的个体作为对象。否则你最终可能只是将一些能够吸引所有人的内容随便混合在一起而遭遇最终的失败。”

对于Hall来说,正是设想一个单一的个体才能让他面向所有人进行设计。

尽管对于其他人来说,他们可能会考虑用户对于游戏的理解。就像Supercell,正是这家年轻的公司创造出了《部落战争》这款大受欢迎的手机游戏。

Supercell的游戏设计师Veli Vainio说道:“你不能假设用户之前曾经玩过你的游戏。”

“有经验的游戏玩家总是清楚各种比喻和惯例,如‘射击一个红色的桶便会爆炸’或者‘红心代表角色的生命’。”

Vainio继续说道,而对于那些很少玩游戏,或者最近不怎么玩游戏,甚至从未玩过游戏的人来说,桶并不等于爆炸,他们可能以为红心代表的是爱。

“当你基于不同文化去考虑不同的象征时,事情会变得更加诡异。”

“为了让玩家做出精明的决策,你仍需要与玩家进行交流。这种情况就跟你尝试着与那些与你使用不同语言的人进行交流一样。”

“在这种情况下你需要从现实世界中寻找灵感并尽可能地将你的信息分解成一些最简单的形式。”

基于那些较聪明且拥有一定常识的用户进行思考能够帮助你创造出具有潜在普遍性的成功游戏,而如果不考虑如何吸引适当的用户的设计会怎样?

JuiceCubes(from develop-online)

JuiceCubes(from develop-online)

休闲就是硬核

在某种程度上,这与传统游戏或硬核游戏幕后的过程并没有太大区别。至少这是Pocket PlayLab的首席执行过Jakob Lykkegaard的看法。对于Lykkegaard来说,这是一个非常直接的过程。

他说道:“对于创造任何具有易用性的游戏并不存在任何秘密。关键在于尽管你的游戏拥有许多玩家可以做的事,你总会希望他们每次游戏都能学到一些东西。”

“游戏质量很大程度取决于视听呈现,不管游戏是休闲的还是硬核的;质量仍然是取决于互动视听的一致性,不管你的游戏是否是休闲游戏,这一原则都是不变的。”

关于深度,Lykkegaard相信休闲游戏是一种相对复杂,要求较高且具有意义的互动内容。

“带有需要做出特殊移动而得到解决的关卡设计或者需要复杂的互动才能够摆脱的障碍的三消游戏能够将玩家置于一种深入的思考状态中。”

Lykkegaard继续说道:“一款优秀的休闲游戏拥有浅显的学习曲线并且会缓慢引进全新挑战,让玩家能够随时选择并停止游戏,并且他们会为了迎接更多挑战而回到游戏中。”

在Ustwo,也就是位于东伦敦的《纪念碑谷》的开发商采取的是一种稍微不同的方法,即对于该公司来说一款高质量休闲游戏也就是做到该工作室的技术总监所谓的真实性与易用性之间的平衡。

其技术总监Paul Pashley说道:“真实性意味着我们需要确保游戏专注于概念最强大且最原始的元素;不掺杂任何不必要的功能并保持最初的设定。”

这通常意味着团队所作出的决策是与人们公认的机智相违背,但根据Pashley,有时候违背传统才能够确保整体游戏的一致性。

他说道:“例如在关于每个关卡的‘In Which’文本中所描述的那样,也许‘泄露’关卡叙述听起来很疯狂,但对于我们来说却正合适。”

而关于易用性,这是关于用户反馈的尝试和测试方法。

Pashley解释道:“我们始终确保每个功能对于目标用户都是可理解的,没有人会对任何游戏元素感到困惑。这意味着我们着眼于一些带有儿童般新鲜视角的事物并且不是与任何游戏范围相干的假设内容。”

优雅的系统

着眼于像《Threes》,《纪念碑谷》以及上述提到的所有游戏的发行,我们会发现许多互动多样性的存在:从《过马路》到《部落战争》,始终保持一致的元素便是简单与优雅,并且它们都未曾以牺牲用户粘性和娱乐为代价;这并非所有休闲游戏都能够做到的。

Sirvo的Vollmer说道:“你会发现许多太过简单的游戏。就像在应用商店中我便发现许多游戏太过无聊。在某种程度上,优雅的设计是对于分隔机制的抵抗。这是传达你的任何游戏的核心机制都应该带有许多影响的一种有效方法。”

很明显Vollmer在最近的一些游戏中都使用了这一方法,如即将问世的《Close Castles》。在《Threes》中,滑动一个砖块具有多种影响。它将重排屏幕上的众多砖块,创造出新砖块并整合一些砖块。

Vollmer继续说道:“移动一个砖块便会带动许多事情的同时发生。有时候玩家可能并不希望这些事件的同时出现,而随后游戏便会管理这些事件。”

“所以我觉得通过整合许多影响到一个动作中将会创造许多优雅的结果。这是非常具有吸引力的。即便如此,像《纪念碑谷》和《过马路》等游戏对这种方法的使用却是不同的。”

在Supercell,他们非常重视核心循环;这些内容并不能带给那些已经了解免费游戏设计理论的人惊喜。但是Vainio却相信核心循环将作为游戏设计简单性堡垒的基础。

在分享来自地球上最成功的游戏工作室的更多技巧前他提出了一些建议:“找出你的游戏的乐趣所在并围绕着它们去创建核心循环。只有做到这点你才能开始往游戏中添加更多系统。在添加功能时不断问自己这个问题:‘如果我添加这个功能的话典型的玩家是否能从中受益?’然后优先选出大多数玩家觉得有趣且有用的功能。”

Crossy Road characters(from develop-online)

Crossy Road characters(from develop-online)

维护设计

当然了,设计一款休闲游戏只是一个开始。在开发者的工作永远没有尽头的时代里,维护,更新与天津新内容将为休闲游戏业务添加一整套全新的技能组合。每一种技能都是功能本身的一项主题,但是就设计休闲游戏来说,用户留存是在游戏发行前所培养起的技能,即作为创造游戏的创造性过程的组成部分。

Hipster Whale的Hall说道:“我从盈利世界中的那些人身上所学到的一件事便是,用户获取和数据都是关于用户留存。之前我并未真正去考虑用户留存,直到某一天我在游戏大会上与一名专家进行了交谈。”

随着时间的发展,Hall渐渐明白了一些事;即使一款游戏与《Flappy Bird》一样成功,如果人们只玩2分钟的游戏,那么一切都会成为泡影。

Hall说道:“我们发现有一半的人在下载了《过马路》后玩了2周的游戏。这是很疯狂的,这为人们分享并推广游戏创造了一扇巨大的窗口。这种情况持续了好几周。而如果人们只是玩了2分钟的游戏,他们便不可能向好友分享游戏。所以我们从免费游戏世界中意识到,理念的重要性在于是否能够留住玩家。”

而《过马路》是如何留住这些玩家呢?根据Hall,他们是基于玩家想要分享的内容去设计角色。这是专注于游戏设计的一个领域,并且经过证明这在《过马路》中是一种强大的工具。

简单游戏的设计其实是一项复杂的任务,但有一点非常明显:事先衡量你的目标用户,并仔细考量平台,机制和简单性,如此你便拥有足够的机会去创造一款高质量,成功且具有易用性的游戏。

本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转发,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Smart Casual: The art of casual games design

By Will Freeman

In the not-so-distant history of the games industry, the term ‘casual’ was clearly defined.

Made famous in an era where much excitement surrounded the growth and diversification of game-playing audiences, ‘casual’ fell from favour almost as quickly as it rose to prominence. In-jokes about equestrian-themed shovelware and the cliché of the Wii TV advert family made the concept of ‘casual’ something of an industry four-letter word. To this day, it’s greeted in some corners with scepticism and suspicion.

And yet the trend that spawned the word ‘casual’ has continued and accelerated. Today, more people play games than ever before, and the giants of accessible mobile gaming have seen their names enter the pop-cultural lexicon of the ‘non-gaming’ public.

Casual hasn’t gone away. It’s just shed its name. And today there are numerous releases that are accessible, broadly appealing and mass market that are also critically acclaimed, successful, admired in the industry and, in some cases, festooned with awards. Titles like Threes, Monument Valley and Crossy Road.

The biggest mistake I made was making a hodge-podge game that didn’t really appeal to anybody.

Asher Vollmer, Sirvo

At the same time, fingers prodding at Clash of Clans and Candy Crush Saga continue to be a regular sight on public transport across the world, as the free-to-play giants continue to make ‘casual’ titles into startlingly profitable brands.

Casual, then, has grown up. But how do you get it right, and what are the best in the field doing to design quality games with the potential to become ubiquitous?

The problem for casual game designers starts with a broad problem; the audience. If you are making, for example, a hardcore fighter for traditional gamers, you have a niche to serve; a group to target and a defined taste to meet.

With casual games, though, your potential audience is ‘everybody’, or at least ‘everybody with access to games’. That audience today is so vast, and so varied, it can feel impossible to meet their needs.

TARGETING EVERYONE

So how do you make a refined game that appeals to the broadest possible audience?

“You absolutely have to still consider your audience, and that’s exactly what I do,” offers Asher Vollmer of Sirvo (right), the small team behind puzzle sensation Threes. “The biggest mistakes I made in my earlier games was not considering an audience at all, and making a sort of hodge-podge game that doesn’t really appeal to anybody. And that would just leave me sad that nobody likes it.”

For that reason, says Vollmer, he envisioned a particular audience for Threes.

“That audience wasn’t everyone on the planet,” says Vollmer. “It was everyone on the planet with a phone. So that meant making it as native to the phone as possible, and making a game that fitted the way people use phones, such as the time they play.”

In other words, the phone itself was Threes’ intended audience. Vollmer designed for the length of time people play for on a phone, conceiving a title that was not realtime, with no timers.

“I definitely had a very broad audience, in that so many people on a planet have a smartphone, but there was still something I could design for,” he explains.

ROAD TO SUCCESS

Other game designers apply a different approach to the pursuit of universal appeal. One is Matt Hall (left), one half of Crossy Road dev Hipster Whale, which saw its refined spin on ‘Frogger meets Flappy Bird’ delight huge swathes of the public.

“Every game I make, I try and find someone to make the game for; almost an individual,” reveals Hall, who asserts this can make a game appealing to a much broader audience.

“It’s like a lens; a way to focus,” he continues. “To make a game that’s popular with everyone, you have to make it for someone. It’s about broad appeal through narrow appeal; choosing a single person that can represent your everybody. Or you might end up with a mish mash of stuff that tries to appeal to everyone, and fails.”

For Hall, it is envisioning a single individual that lets him design for everyone.

For others, though, it’s about considering the audience’s understanding of games. Take Supercell; that relatively youthful company behind the mobile powerhouse that is Clash of Clans.

“You can’t assume that your audience has played games before,” asserts Supercell game designer Veli Vainio.

“Experienced gamers know various tropes and conventions, such as ‘shooting a red barrel will make it explode’ or ‘red hearts mean character health’.”

But, says Vainio, for those consumers that have rarely, not recently or never played games, barrels don’t equal explosions and red hearts just mean love.

“Things get even weirder when you consider different symbolism in different cultures,” he continues.

“You still need to communicate these things to your players in order for them to make informed decisions. At this point it’s almost like you are trying to communicate to someone who doesn’t speak the same language as you do.

“In such situations you need to draw inspiration from the real physical world and break down your message to the simplest form possible.”

Considering the audience with intelligence and a little common sense is vital in crafting a highly successful game with the potential for ubiquity, then, but what about design beyond that conceived purely to attract the right audience?

CASUAL IS HARDCORE

To a degree, it isn’t too different from the process behind a traditional or core game. At least, that’s the opinion of Jakob Lykkegaard (right), CEO of Pocket PlayLab, which signed with the Rovio Stars publishing initiative to see its tile game Juice Cubes meet with significant success. To Lykkegaard, the process is a fairly straightforward one.

“There is not much of a secret in making any game accessible,” he suggests. “The key is even though your game has many things that players can do, you always focus them on learning one thing from it at a time.

“The quality of the game is pretty much about audiovisual presentation, whether or not the game is casual or hardcore; quality is still based on the consistency of the interactive audiovisual, and this principle works the same way regardless of whether or not your game is a casual game.”

And regarding depth, Lykkegaard is confident casual games can be relatively complex, demanding, and absolutely boast meaningful interactive substance.

“A match-three game with a level designed to be solved by making a specific move, or [with] obstacles that require complex interactions to get rid of can also put players in deep thought [needed] to solve them.

Lykkegaard continues: “A good casual game has a shallow learning curve and introduces new challenges with a slow pace, allowing players to pick up and stop playing any time they like, but always return for more.”

Over at Ustwo, the East London outfit behind the hugely adored Monument Valley, the approach is a little different, and delivering a quality casual title is about what studio tech director describes as a balance between authenticity and accessibility.

“Authenticity means we needed to keep the game purely focused on the strongest and most original elements of the concept; not get sidetracked into unnecessary features and to maintain the authorial voice,” states technical director Paul Pashley.

This often meant the team making decisions that were contrary to accepted wisdom, but according to Pashley, sometimes countering convention felt more in keeping with the tone of the rest of the game.

“For example, the ‘In Which’ text that proceeds each level,” he offers. “It sounds crazy to ‘give away’ the narrative of a level, but it felt right to us.”

As for accessibility, it came down to the tried and tested method of user feedback.

“We made sure that every feature was understandable to everyone that we user tested on, and that no one felt alienated by any aspects of the game,” explains Pashley. “This meant looking at things with a fresh, child-like perspective and not assuming knowledge of familiar gaming tropes.”

SYSTEMS OF ELEGANCE

Looking at releases like Threes, Monument Valley and all the others mentioned above, there is much interactive variety: from Crossy Road’s twitch to the god gaming of Clash of Clans, but one consistent element is a simplicity and elegance not at the expense of engagement and entertainment; something not all casual leaning games get right.

“You can find a lot of games that are too simple,” offers Sirvo’s Vollmer. “There’s a lot of them on the app stores that I think are too boring. Elegance of design is, in a way, the resistance to compartmentalising mechanics. That’s a very fancy way of saying that the core mechanic of whatever your game is should have lots of repercussions.”

It’s clearly an approach Vollmer applies absolutely to his more recent games, such as the forthcoming Close Castles. In Threes, sliding a tile has multiple effects. It rearranges many of the on-screen tiles, it spawns in a new tile, and it merges some tiles.

“That’s a lot of things happening at once all connected to this one verb that is moving a tile,” continues Vollmer. “Sometimes the player doesn’t want all of those things to happen at once, but then the game is managing those things.

“So, I feel you can get a lot of mileage and elegance from overloading a lot of repercussions onto a verb. And that can be very appealing. That said, games like Monument Valley and Crossy Road approach it very differently.”

Over at Supercell, meanwhile, there’s a particular focus on core loops; something that won’t surprise many who have read up on their free-to-play design theories. But the core loop is something Vainio (above left) believes can serve first and foremost as a bastion for simplicity in game design.

“Find out what makes your game fun and build the core loop around that,” he advises, before sharing more tips from one of the planet’s most successful game studios: “Only after that should you start adding more systems to the game. Always ask yourself this question when adding a feature: ‘will a typical player benefit if I add this?’ Prioritise features that the majority of your players will find interesting or useful.”

RETAINING DESIGN

Designing a causal game is just the start, of course. In an era when the developer’s job is never done, maintaining, updating and adding new content introduces a whole new skill set to the business of casual. Each is a subject for a feature of its own, but on the matter of designing casual games, retention is something that can be fostered before release, as part of the creative process of making a game.

“One thing I’ve learned from those people in the world of monetisation, user acquisition and data is about retention,” reveals Hipster Whale’s Hall. “I’d not really thought about retention before, until I was speaking to one of the experts at a game conference.”

Over time, something became obvious to Hall; even if a title is as successful as Flappy Bird, it doesn’t matter if people are only playing for two minutes.

“We saw half the people that had downloaded Crossy Road playing regularly two weeks on,” Hall says. “That’s insane, and it creates a huge window for people to share the game, and that spreads. It went on for weeks. People aren’t going to have much chance to tell their friends if they’re only playing a game for two minutes. So we gained from a concept from that dastardly world of free-to-play; the idea of how important it is to retain players.”

And how did Crossy Road retain with such energy? Designing good characters that people wanted to share, according to Hall. It was an area of particular focus as the game was designed, and it’s proved a powerful tool in the viral journey Crossy Road has taken.

The design of simple games is certainly a complex task, but one thing is clear: with a measured approach to your intended audience, and careful forethought about platform, mechanics and simplicity, there remains ample opporttunity to make a quality, successful, broadly accessible game.(source:develop-online)

 


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