作者：Michael Cook

今天我想谈谈年初发行的《月之猎人》，即来自Kitfox Games的行动RPG游戏，并且最近刚刚进行了一次较大的免费内容更新。几个月前我就想和你们谈谈这款游戏，我认为如果你喜欢程序生成或对程序生成感兴趣，你就应该玩玩这款游戏。游戏很华丽，拥有不错的音效，很有魅力，同时最重要的还是它能够帮助你理解如何在游戏中使用程序生成内容，并且它也带给了《Rogue Process》生成器一些灵感。所以今天我便要和你们谈谈这一内容！

Moon Hunters(from gamasutra)

在《月之猎人》中，玩家扮演的是一名英雄探险家，将经历一场有关5日世界动荡的旅程。玩家所选择的每一天的故事都将是程序生成世界地图中的全新部分，即将创造一个包含怪物，珍宝以及一些能够带给玩家奖励或问题的特殊遭遇的关卡。你将在这个关卡随意进行探索，战斗与交谈，并在晚上扎营休息。5天后你将经历一场重要的战斗，而故事是以胜利还是失败告终总是取决于你的选择，并且你的英雄的特性将受到你的行动的影响，并最终被列入神话英雄的万神殿中。你将在沿途开启一些全新角色或服装，如果你足够幸运的话你还能够在夜空中开启一个星群，并揭示更多游戏故事和主题。

当你在玩像《洞穴探险》或《雨中冒险》等程序生成游戏时，你每一次游戏都将面对全新的世界。像《Nethack》等游戏甚至将其写入自己的游戏信息中。这便意味着虽然玩家可以学习游戏内容，但是他们的第一次游戏与第十次游戏，或者与我的第一次游戏却不存在真正的联系。程序生成是游戏机制中一种内在技术，是没人能够看到的隐藏内容。

为了真正理解程序生成我多花了一些时间，但是《月之猎人》在使用程序生成方面却是采用完全不同的方法。每次当你在玩《月之猎人》时，你都不是在一个相似的地方和不同人玩同样的游戏—-只是你是作为同一个人在同样的背景下玩游戏。《月之猎人》的每一个游戏攻略都是关于同样的人，同样的地点和同样的背景。而不同的地方便在于那个人讲述故事的方式—-每一个攻略都是关于被传递给一个全新世代的神话故事，所以全新故事叙述者的错记，修饰与困惑都将重新塑造这一故事。程序生成器也是其中的一部分，从根本上来看它是存在于游戏内容中并且能够帮助玩家更好地理解游戏及其信息。

从美学层面来看这真的很棒，Kitfox Games找到了一种非常适合程序生成的隐喻，即包含了这些系统将创造的变量，特质，甚至是错误。但在多次玩了这款游戏后，我认为它已经超越了美学层面并深深地影响着游戏方式了。你经常会在游戏中经历一些小插曲，如在游戏场景中遇到一台被废弃的雪橇，或者撞见一群遇到问题的人。如果你选择去了解这些情况，你便需要做出决定，就像你可以参与选美审判，或者也可以选择放弃表决。你可以盗取珍宝并在之后随便丢弃，或者全盘托出。这些插曲都将让你的角色展现其特性，如Foolish或Cunning，而这些特性也将决定着游戏最终对于你的角色的英雄评判。

但是其中的一些活动或游戏区域也带有一定的要求。就像为了挑战大块头的矿工，你需要变成Foolish。而为了战胜发现你的盗窃行为的愤怒的猎人，你需要变成Charming。所以你需要去寻找能让自己变成Foolish的东西或者去回想在哪里看到能够表现出Charm的内容。你需要开始学习程序生成器所储存的链条与版式，并尝试着去发展其可能性空间，同时观察如果你在特殊时候或特殊位置开启这些特征会怎样。而每一次你都将因此获得奖励，即可能是一些小情节，开启一些新内容，或者是关于你未曾发现或完全理解的链条提示。

Moon Hunters(from gamasutra)

这也将把玩家带进故事叙述过程中，因为当最大化游戏特定元素时，玩家便会发现自己扭曲了故事的叙述方式。如果你只是像平常那样在玩游戏，你的故事便只是关于对抗邪教的英雄故事。但如果你尝试着扩大一个特征或探索一个子任务，那么最终战斗在游戏故事中也就不再那么重要，并且你也将看到一些其它主题。故事讲述者可能会引用某一寓言故事去帮助其他人，那么你的英雄便需要致力于找寻解决自己所遇到的问题的最佳解决方法。故事叙述者或许会告诫人们贪婪的弊端，那么你的英雄便可能是那种一直在盗窃且不懂得分享的人。玩家去对抗程序生成内容的行为也就变成了一种复述故事的行为。

《Rogue Process》拥有许多程序生成器。为了PROCJAM，我最近彻底检查了公司logo生成器也完善了标语生成内容，尽管离完成还有一段距离，我还是觉得这么做会比较好。在PROCJAM结束后我添加了来自Marsh的许多全新建筑模板，现在我们的摩天大楼拥有一些奇怪的装置，通风管，码头以及倾斜的屋顶等等。游戏的生成器非常多样化且有趣，它们将为游戏世界添加更多味道，而玩家也不需要太多去顾虑它们。他们并不需要去理解生成器，他们只要将其想成有个小小的关卡设计师待在游戏中为他们呈现无数静态内容便可。

《月之猎人》给了我许多灵感去以不同方式处理事情，同样地它也隐藏了一些内容链条让玩家去寻找并开启，而我同时也希望让玩家能够事先了解生成器并对即将出现的内容做好准备。游戏的早前阶段将出现城市中本来就有的公司，并呈现出他们的计划以及玩家在这里可能会遇到的情况。这将让玩家能够预测到程序生成器的一些计划并更好地适应自己的道具和技能。这也将提供给玩家策略优势，并且他们同时也可以通过了解在攻略中预示着特殊链条的模式去寻找秘密并开启新内容。

（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）

Moon Hunters & Procedural Space

by Michael Cook

Today I want to talk about Moon Hunters, which is an action RPG by Kitfox Games that came out earlier this year, and recently had a huge free content update. I’ve been meaning to talk about this game for months, and I’m only getting around to it now, but here’s my advice: if you like procedural generation or are interested in thinking about procedural generation, I think you should get this game. It’s beautiful, it sounds great, it’s charming but most importantly I think it has something to say about how procedural generation can be used in a game, and it’s helped inspired some of the generators at work in Rogue Process. Today I’m going to tell you how!

In Moon Hunters you play as a heroic adventurer, and go on a journey through five days of world-changing events. Each day of the story you choose to travel to a new part of the procedurally generated world map, which generates a level full of monsters, treasure, and some unique optional encounters that might give you a reward or pose a problem. You explore this level, fighting and talking as you wish, and then camp overnight. At the end of the five days there’s a big fight, and win or lose the story concludes with a summary of your choices, characterising your hero based on what you did and adding them to a pantheon of mythological heroes. You might unlock some new characters or costumes along the way, and if you’re lucky you’ll unlock a constellation in the night sky, revealing more of the game’s story and themes.

When you play Spelunky, or Risk of Rain, or most procedurally generated games, the implication is that each time is a fresh run through the world. Games like Nethack even write this into their lore. This means that while the player can learn about the content of the game, there’s no real connection between the first time you play the game and the tenth, or my first time playing the game. Procedural generation is a technology embedded within the game’s machinery, behind the back of the stage where no-one can see it. It’s like asking whether anti-aliasing factored into your last playthrough of Dishonored 2.

It took me a little while to realise this, but Moon Hunters takes the exact opposite tack in its use of procedural generation. Each time you play Moon Hunters you’re not playing the same game in a similar place as different people – you’re playing the exact same events in the exact same place as the exact same people. Every playthrough of Moon Hunters is about the same people, the same places, and the same events. What changes is the person telling it – each playthrough is the mythology being handed down to a new generation, and its variations and differences are the misremembering, embellishment, confusion and flourishes of a new storyteller. The procedural generator is a part of this – it basically exists in the game’s lore, and is crucial to understanding the game and its messages.

This is wonderful just on an aesthetic level – Kitfox Games have found a metaphor that suits procedural generation perfectly, something that embraces the variation, the idiosyncracies, even the mistakes that these systems make. But having played the game many times through now, I think it goes beyond aesthetics to deeply impact the way the game is played. You’ll often come across little vignettes either involving something in the scenery like an abandoned sled, or a group of people with a problem or a question. If you choose to investigate you usually get a decision to make – you can judge a beauty contest, for example, or abstain from voting. You can steal a piece of treasure and lie about it later, or come clean. These vignettes often lead to your character gaining traits, like Foolish or Cunning, and these traits all pay into the game’s final assessment screen that immortalises your characters in the stars.

However, some of these events or game areas have requirements. In order to challenge the huge, hulking miner, you need to be Foolish. In order to win over the angry hunter whose opals you stole, you need to be Charming. So you start to look out for the kinds of things that might make you Foolish, or you start to remember where you last saw that event that let you demonstrate Charm (and hope that it comes up). You begin to learn the chains and the patterns that the procedural generator has stored up in it, to try and push at one far corner of its possibility space, to see what happens if you unlock these traits at this particular time and turn up in a particular place. Each time you’re rewarded – either with a little bit of plot, a new unlock, or simply a hint about another chain that you haven’t yet discovered or fully understood.

This brings the player into the storytelling process too, because by trying to maximise certain aspects of the game you find yourself warping the way the stories are told. If you’re playing normally, your stories are simply about some heroes who fight against a cult and either win or lose. But if you’re trying to maximise a particular trait or explore a subquest, then the grand final battle becomes a less important part of the story, and instead other themes emerge. Maybe the storyteller is relating a parable about helping others, and your heroes seek out the best resolution to all the problems they encounter. Maybe the storyteller is warning people about greed, and so the heroes are kind of dicks who steal all the time and never share. The player’s struggle against the procedural generator becomes a co-operative act of story retelling.

Rogue Process has a lot of procedural generators in it. For PROCJAM recently I overhauled the corporation logo generator and improved the slogan generation too, and although it’s far from finished I’m feeling much better about it. After PROCJAM ended I added in a lot of new building template art from Marsh, and now our skyscrapers have strange fixtures jutting out of them, ventilation ducts and landing docks, sloped roofs and more. The game’s generators are varied and fun, and they add character and flavour to the world, but the player ultimately doesn’t have to think about them too much. They don’t need to understand the generator, they can treat the game as if it just has a miniature level designer sat inside pumping out endless, static things for them to see.

Moon Hunters has inspired me to approach things a little differently, though, and in the same way it hides little chains of content for players to find and unlock, I also want to give players the ability to ‘sight read’ the generator and prepare for what might be coming. Early stages in the game will establish what corporations exist in this city, what their plans are, and what the player is likely to encounter on this run. It’ll give the player an opportunity to foresee some of the procedural generator’s plans for this playthrough, and they can begin to adjust their items and skills accordingly. This will obviously give them a tactical advantage, but it’ll also allow them to find secrets and unlock content too, by learning patterns that indicate a particular chain exists in this playthrough.

I’m hoping to blog soon about some of the recent work we’ve been doing on the game, but it’s hard to trade off the time writing about the game against time that could be spent working more on it! But I had to write about Moon Hunters because it’s 40% off on Steam right now and a huge content pack just dropped for the game for free. Please do take a peek and see what you think, and feel free to tweet me about the game.（source：gamasutra）