Text/Zhang Ketian
A talk about the main game of tower defense Understanding cognition.
Tower defense is a category born out of RTS games. It removes the cumbersome operations in traditional RTS games, simplifies the victory goal, and changes from intense and exciting continuous decision-making operations to a very casual viewing barrage. With the decline of the RTS category today, tower defense still has a place in hardcore mobile games and casual mobile games. The function of the opening paragraph is to give me the definition of tower defense in my mind-to simplify the variant RTS category.
The trend of games on the market for 30 years Hedong and Hexi for 30 years, the super explosive RTS belonging to the last century has basically completely declined now, only StarCraft 2 barely supports it, and other games can’t even talk about it. Mass. However, there are still many active products for tower defense. The Kingdom Guard Battle series on the mobile phone, the enduring balloon tower defense, fieldrunner, guard radish, etc., the latest popular auto chess on the PC side, the Oriental Dream Talisman, including more The early GemCraft TD and GemTD, as well as Legion Wars, have a loyal user base.
Warcraft RPG map "Legion War"
But it is not difficult to see from these towers, mobile games Almost all tend to stand alone. The only multiplayer tower defense mobile game on the market is the balloon tower defense battle. My personal opinion on it is far from satisfactory. And almost all tower defense on the PC side favors multiplayer, whether it is auto chess or legionary warfare.
The reason is also very simple. PC-side players have higher requirements for game strategy and replayability. The ultimate goal of PC-side players is victory, and the game experience they pursue is defeating "people" Is the yearning for being an alpha male engraved in the gene (male does not refer to gender here). Mobile users are pursuing "growth", surpassing the "me" of yesterday, and cognition and feedback on self-improvement. General game analysis will divide players into hard-core mid-core casual players, but I prefer to classify players according to their purpose and enjoyment of the game.
There is no doubt that this classification is not fixed, nor is it fixed because of the platform. Take "Glory of the King" as an example, the game experience most players pursue in the game is victory rather than growth. "King of Glory" is an excellent example of porting a great PC experience to a mobile phone, as well as Fortnite and Chicken. However, this kind of transplantation has only emerged in recent years. Obviously, the functional limitations of mobile phones and the public's cognitive limitations on mobile games have affected the interoperability of mobile games. And now, the concepts of mobile games and mobile games are blurring. I believe we are not far from the era of 3A mobile games (although we are not far from the era when 3A died).
It is for these reasons that the mobile game experience porting the mobile game experience is now a small blue ocean. When most companies are still doing two-dimensional swapping value growth mobile games, we should focus on the strong PVP experience. As a plan for tower defense for several years, let’s talk about some difficulties in designing PVP tower defense on the mobile phone.
Let us turn our attention to the strongest pvp mobile game "Royal War" except for transplanting moba and eating chicken. As a game with pvp experience as the core , "Royal Clash" has grown to the extreme. The treasure chest opened every few hours perfectly divides the fragment time and guarantees the session time. The crown treasure chest guarantees that a session can be played as many times as you want, and the daily task guarantees the player's daily viscosity. Card growth is also done very cleverly, hiding the numerical growth under the technological growth. Every time a player upgrades to the next arena (in other mobile games called unlocking a new map, the routine is the same pay/w8 to play), it feels that they are promoted because their skills become stronger and their rank points become higher. Is notSlowly grinding for many days to upgrade the card by the value.
"Royal Clash" Crown Treasure Box
Play Royal Meta game, the real "game removal meta game" Simple: Rock, paper, scissors. Players are constantly making decisions in the face of the enemy's decisions, one card restrains another. The entire design of "Royal Clash" is based on a concept: Each card must have a card that restrains him. What the player needs to do is to evenly put these cards in the deck, and then choose the one that is restrained from the 4 cards in the hand according to the enemy's deployment during the battle. The whole thinking time is longer than the aiming of FPS games but much shorter than the time you choose to choose arms and tactics in RTS games. I still tend to attribute this kind of decision-making to Atomic Desicion---neural response-level decision-making, which depends on instantaneous reaction speed and cerebellum skill level. Therefore, the core combat experience of "Clash Royale" actually looks very similar to RTS, but the gap is very large. On the contrary, it is more like a headshot experience in FPS. In the constant headshots between the two sides, one of them is empty due to a mistake, and the victory is established.
A similar experience is the compensation in moba. In the long run, this kind of neural response battle may be more suitable for mobile, just as the audience of FPS is much wider than RTS. The biggest advantage of RTS now lies in viewing. In the era of big live broadcasts, viewing and live broadcast effects can even determine the life and death of a game.
Closer to home, there is no real tower defense PVP on the market (except for the rough balloon tower defense battle). At the same time, there are many good tower defense pvp experiences on the end game (or war3 dota2mod market that I am most familiar with): the first to bear the brunt is Legion Wars and Auto Chess.
Legion Wars is a very traditional tower defense-including Resource Management and tower build. Unlike the traditional tower defense, the tower itself is presented as a unit, and every wave will be killed. Putting aside other designs here, let’s discuss some what if assumptions about Legion Wars:
what if Legion Wars is a stand-alone game? He will still be very fun, because RL's card drawing system, players can always have a more Huo hand to form a better army combination, faster economic development path etc. However, the game now becomes a RL game, analogous to killing the spire. After the player has successfully cleared the level once or several times, the content is completely consumed.
what if the Legion War is 1v1 instead of 4v4? In 4v4, the tactics of one company overtaking three aircraft will not appear, and the combination will not appear, other than that, there is almost no impact. The good thing is that the unstable factors of teammates are removed, and the outcome is all on your own. Many mobile games have simplified the number of people in this step. We will discuss this later when we talk about the king of war.
The same problem can also be used for auto chess and king beacon. You can see that these mods have some things in common: in terms of stand-alone experience, Rougelike mechanism is used to ensure replayability, and gambling is used. The draw of cards matches the player’s understanding of the game, allowing players to make the most correct choice under limited options.
For example, if the dispatching of the StarCraft II cooperative mode is no longer selected from all arms, but some arms are randomly selected, the replayability of the cooperative mode will go up at once-you can rely on the combination of Tianhu arms Slinging Imoen, you can also use your own wisdom in a pile of garbage arms to form a reasonable army to defeat Imoen.
Then what is the difference between Auto Chess and previous hits? I think the biggest reason is the chicken-eating mode. As I said in my previous article, I firmly believe that there will be a tower defense explosion of chicken-eating models in the future. The facts have also proved this — chicken-eating mode disperses the frustration of failure Sense , improves the sense of success of victory . At the same time, Simplified Getting Started Difficulty , packaging complex content into simple content, public card pool, double fetters, and losing streak rewards, these magical designs have jointly built the success of auto chess.
My previous article also mentioned that these mods integrate the development and combat of mobile games. The core of the development of mobile games is the development-verification cycle , these mods are all hand-swimming the year-long development process condensed in one hour, just like concentrated drugs year. Tower defense games naturally have this attribute. Players are constantly building towers, and then through battles to verify whether their strategy and strength can pass the next wave of battles, so tower defense games are extremely suitable for this mode. of.
If I am an experienced skin-changing planner, I can already easily summarize how to copy a successful mod: choose a simple fighter to make as the base gameplay (tower defense vs. Legion wars, card battles) (Yu Auto Chess), and then the game rhythm uses a turn-based system, develop-verify-develop-verify repeatedly. The last number of people choose multiplayer battle royale, only one person can win.
But these are not applicable to the mobile terminal. The difference between the touch screen of the mobile terminal and the keyboard and mouse operation of the computer is beyond many people's imagination.
There is a company in Hangzhou that has done a "perfect transplant" of the mobile terminal of the Legion War. Perfect transplantation means exactly the same model on the phone. But this exposes several huge shortcomings of the mobile phone: the screen is too small, and the finger drag/click operation is too inaccurate unless the location is large. The screen is too small means that players can only get information from a small part of the battle area in front of them. It is basically impossible to cut to teammates' homes and enemy bases to observe. The operation experience of dragging the screen and the keyboard and mouse are very different. I think this game is also dead with my toes.
Take balloon tower defense battle as an example. Their pvp tower defense is two players fighting on two identical maps at the same time
Players can also spend money to send balloons to the opposite side when building a tower here, and sending balloons will increase income. Isn't it familiar? Yes, this is a Legionary War reduced to a resource. BTD itself is an ultra-old tower defense with a sequel to the sixth generation and a large number of derivative works. This allows players to have a natural familiarity with his tower and reduces the learning curve. This model looks beautiful, but one problem becomes particularly prominent here-no one has ever explored how the offensive "fun" in tower defense.
Tower Defense is a game category that tends to defend . The monsters that come to be beaten are usually those who cannot fight back. It's cool to sling a meat target that can't fight back, but there has never been a successful 逆塔防 game. Taking the Legion War as an example, there is almost no positive feedback about the behavior of sending blame after the increase in income. Unless this wave of monsters breaks through the king, he will not even see the face of the monster he sent. In front of the king, unless his own monster kills the king and the game ends, the somatosensory monster is still something that gives money to the opposite party. I spent money and gave money to the other side. The experience is as bad as it is. The strange sender in the balloon was a little better. The fog of war was cancelled, and he watched his unit be beaten until he was killed or missed.
In the Legion War, the early monster sending basically played the role of an economic unit. In the later period, the monster sending bears a wave of hope of pressing the opposite side to death. The feedback of sending monsters is autistic and psychological. A healthy tower defense pvp should integrate sending monsters into the game mechanism and provide more positive feedback .
Then we made a small prototype and tried it, and more problems appeared.
column address: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/58426671
