Tencent independent game incubator is committed to promoting the overall development of the diverse ecology of the game industry. Follow the public account [Tencent GWB Game Unbounded] (ID: gwbaccount) to unlock more in-depth game development information.
![Tencent Independent Game Incubator is committed to promoting the overall development of the diverse ecology of the game industry. Follow the public account [Tencent GWB Game Unbounded] (ID: gwbaccount) to unlock more in-depth game development information. 2022GWB Tencent Independ - DayDayNews](https://cdn-dd.lujuba.top/img/loading.gif)
022GWB Tencent Independent Game Grand Prix official website address:
https://gwb.tencent.com/awards2022/#/home
Why aren’t you sleeping yet? One more game and then sleep.
Why aren’t you sleeping yet? After fixing the bug, go to bed.
Why aren’t you sleeping yet? After putting the child to sleep.
I can finally sleep...Why is it getting light?
...
In recent years, more and more life simulator games have been launched. Players are not brave men fighting dragons, nor Link bravely saving princesses, but real people. Act truly authentically. With such expectations, we experienced the demo of "Lei Pa Xia". It was afternoon when we started the game, and it was already dark when it ended. The whole process of real and magical game experience was very interesting.
So far we can say that it is unlike any other game on the market. It seems to have a relaxed and casual style but has a "hardcore" operating experience. The story of staying up late at night but still having countless to do lists is you and me. . It can be said that the moment you open the game, you are a tired man.
With strong interest and curiosity in the game, we found our old friend Mr. Gao Ming, the producer of Candleman Game Studio, and talked with him in detail about this game that is completely different from " Candleman " and " The story behind the new game "Wuxingyou".
In 2017, at the 39th Ludum Dare theme game production competition, Gao Ming looked at the announced theme "Running out of Power" and fell into thought. Adding different subjects before this theme means completely Different development directions. In the end, Gao Ming, who focused on life, chose to use people as the main theme, using the image of a character lying tired on the ground, supplemented by the corresponding crawling movement method of a caterpillar, and the basic concept of a three-dimensional platform crawling game, to complete the prototype of the game. This is The original appearance of "The Tired Man".
It is worth mentioning that after the competition, "Tired Man" achieved very good results - it should be said to be very good, surpassing the predecessors of "Candle Man" by many, and also won the "Humor" category. Instant champion. In addition to the competition results, the game prototype has also become popular on live broadcast platforms at home and abroad, and these are results that are completely beyond Gao Ming's expectations.
Encouraged by these achievements, after the completion of the "Candleman" project, Gao Ming and his team agreed that "Leipaxia" was a game with potential in gameplay and outstanding strength in the market, so they decided to start the project. Develop it into a complete game. After determining the theme of the game, Gao Ming began to think about how to provide players with content of sufficient quality at the story level to satisfy everyone's curiosity about the story. After all, when almost everyone sees "The Tired Man", they will be curious about what happened to this character, why is he lying on the ground tired, and why is he tired and not sleeping? He believes that this is due to human empathy, which allows everyone to have more empathy for the protagonist of the game and pay more attention to the story of the game.
But in terms of story writing, the team does not have professional staff. Fortunately, the previous project experience of "Candle Man" has at least accumulated some experience: in addition to understanding that writing a good story is very difficult and time-consuming, we also found that based on If you write about your own real experiences and feelings, you will be more likely to write a moving story (without professional skills) - to put it bluntly, it is actually the "true feelings" taught to us by our teachers since we were young.
The story of "The Tired Man" was initially only broadly positioned in the category of "urban white-collar workers". At the same time, some other typical tired and late-night story cases were also considered, such as parents taking care of their children, students rushing for exams, and shopping in shopping streets. wait. But when deciding to select a story and make it the first story content of the game, Gao Ming and his team decided to choose the most conservative and true-to-life solution - that is, to depict the story based on their own identities as independent game developers. The story of an indie developer who stayed up late the last night to catch up on the version of .
Although this topic and profession are relatively unfamiliar to the general population, with their understanding of themselves, I believe they can transform the "strangeness" into a "mystery" and capture the connection between profession and identity. commonalities (for example, everyone is a parent and a child), and write a game story that is generally interesting to the players. On the other hand, the living conditions of game developers have attracted more and more attention at home and abroad in recent years. Topics such as working overtime and staying up late, equality and other issues are also quite popular. Gao Ming believes that if this story is written well, it should also arouse greater resonance in the industry.
After the theme was determined and the character image and personality were basically established, Gao Ming began to think about how to use to bring the desired experience to players, and the development process during this period was full of twists and turns.
Gao Minghe and his team initially followed the idea of traditional three-dimensional platform action games. This can be regarded as using the experience they accumulated through the "Candleman" project: collecting gold coins, traps, level design, and even There are enemies to fight! The early games were also faster and required higher operating levels. It was a Platformer that looked very fresh and played very devilishly. But two things happened later, prompting Gao Ming to make significant adjustments to the direction of the project.
2.1. Difficulty weakening
First of all, Gao Ming found that in various offline exhibitions, "Lei Pa Xia" can especially attract a wide range of people, women who cannot play games and have never touched a controller. , children are willing to try it, but although they are interested, they do not have the strength to "control" this game. Continuously seeing potential users turn away disappointed prompted him to decide to continuously reduce the game difficulty and operation difficulty of "Lei Pa Xia". This results in the characters in the game moving slower and slower, and the operations becoming more and more simplified.
Although in the game category of physical simulation, "hardcore" is almost inevitable. In addition to the imprecise control brought by physical characters, the various accidents brought by the physical simulation environment will undoubtedly make things worse. . Gao Ming is mentally prepared for this, but in terms of attitude, he hopes to make the game more approachable, so he has been actively conducting player testing and optimization to reduce the difficulty and weaken the frustration. The operation alone has been greatly improved. version.
Up to now, Gao Ming and his team are still very firm in their goal of “lowering the difficulty as much as possible” and are constantly improving the difficulty through testing..
2.2. Level design rights are given to players
The second thing that prompted a major change in the direction of game development was that with continuous development, Gao Ming increasingly found that manually designed levels lacked the fun of repeated play. (This should be a common problem with traditional linear Platformers). At the same time, the placement of many items becomes less important (because characters crawl everywhere and their accessibility is invincible). So Gao Ming and his team gradually tried to add in-game props to the game through random generation instead of placing them manually. They started with collectibles such as gold coins, and then gradually expanded to enemies and traps, and finally developed to allow players to create their own items. Manually arrange the room environment.
This is a process of gradual changes and development within the team. With the hope of creating more gameplay value and the encouragement of player creativity, "Legacy Man" will eventually combine the skills of stage prop masters and film directors. Responsibilities are given to the player, while the game retreats behind the scenes and becomes a provider of tools. He moves step by step from a carefully crafted "box garden world" to a "sandbox room" that encourages creativity .
In addition to the level construction method gradually breaking away from the traditional Platformer, the game content of "Lei Pa Xia" also gradually changed from the high fantasy setting of the traditional Platformer (golden gold coins, personified daily objects as enemies). ) has transitioned to an absurd life comedy setting that is closer to reality. Gao Ming likes to use "TV sitcom" and Chaplin-style exaggerated comedy performances to describe this unique experience style. He believes that this is the team's long-term development process. The process of constantly experimenting and understanding the characteristics of the game, and finally gradually approaching its "core value".
And after it is launched in the future, Gao Ming envisions that "Lei Pa Xia" can become a game with more flexible charging, and you can buy more fun games for an additional fee: in addition to selling the basic game itself, you can also buy it through Additional item packs, room layouts, event card packs, character costumes, etc. are sold in the form of DLC to further enrich and complete the story content of the game and enrich the game experience. For players who are keen on creativity, the "Tag Feature Store" in the game itself can give them a glimpse of their creative minds, but it only scratches the surface. If you want to be more creative and build whimsical rooms, you can also purchase additional "creator currency" to purchase more creative features in the store.
Add light source label
Add "bigger, smaller" label
After countless tests and adjustments, "Lei Pa Xia" presents a more mature and complete gameplay system. Players need to control a tired person lying on the ground, complete various life events in a sleepless night, and achieve their goals tonight. In this three-dimensional space, the player himself is the level designer. Whether you are a visual person who pursues beauty or an efficiency person who pursues functionality, in this game you can practice your own room layout based on your own ideas, and the game will automatically Suitable tasks are randomly generated for you to challenge based on your room, and different layouts will also have a dramatic impact on the challenge process of the game. The slow character speed also makes the game more suitable for players with poor operational proficiency and slow reaction speeds.
To sum up, the gameplay of "Lei Pa Xia" has a low threshold for getting started, but the operating space is huge. Enough freedom and operational fun bring unexpected challenges and surprises to players every time they start. Players can create an unprecedented playground in a small three-dimensional room - not only whimsical and beautiful, but also unexpectedly fun..
The physical simulation of "Lei Pa Xia" is a highlight. The protagonist's crawling method is exaggerated and funny, but it also has self-consistent physical logic rules. In this regard, Gao Ming introduced in detail how the game evolved from the initial physical animation performance to the current realistic physical simulation, as well as the problems exposed during the evolution process, and generously shared how he and his team faced these problems. Efficient solutions adopted.
Gao Ming: “The original Game Jam game prototype did not place much emphasis on dynamic physical simulation. Although the characters at that time could climb walls, the physical calculation of movement was still based on Platformer, which was determined through ray detection. The current standing position of the character only allows the character to go up the wall according to the rules. We can call it "accurate character position determination". Even so, in the initial version, in order to achieve the effect of the character's paralysis, I decided to use ragdoll. This method implements a set of physical skeletons of the character, so that when the character dies (falls asleep), the character can be physicalized to achieve the funny effect of collapsing to the ground. Later, because of the physical skeleton, the body animation of the character when crawling is also limited. It is realized through physical mechanical control instead of key frame animation. It can be said that the physical simulation of the game in the initial version is more reflected in the character animation performance, especially the limp performance when the character does not move. , and the control of the character is not very physical. This system is also commonly used by modern Platformers. For example, the regular movement of the character in Inside is not very physical, but after death, it is completely handed over to the physics engine to simulate the animation.
After the formal project development of "Lei Pa Xia", we tried to add real physical simulations to more and more objects. For example, the previous pillow was a static and immovable object that could be placed on the wall. , and later we turned it into a physical simulation, but the gravity direction needs to be changed accordingly when on the wall. The advantage of this is that the object is more lively in the scene, and the character's actions can trigger the movement of the object, such as collapsing. The character on the pillow will squeeze the pillow crookedly, and the crooked pillow will hit other flowers and plants, making a mess. Physical simulations like this make the scene more "realistic" and more lifelike. It tastes good, and I think this kind of experience is very suitable for "Lai Pa Xia", but the increasingly common physicalization of items has also brought corresponding problems. Because the behavior of the characters has always been based on "fake physics" of rays, Therefore, the interaction between the character and the environment when crawling normally cannot rely on real physical simulation, and often presents a false appearance. For example, the character will feel light and airy when crawling over a pillow, which will hardly bring any mechanical effect to the pillow. And this is still good, but if the parameters are not adjusted correctly, or the position of the ray is a little off, it may also bring catastrophic physical results, such as the character suddenly squeezing the pillow away, and more and more unsatisfactory things like this accumulate. In the end, I changed the character's movement mode to a more realistic physical simulation scheme. In this scheme, the character's body is completely driven by force, which makes the interaction between the character and the environment very consistent with physical reality. But at the same time, it also brings some problems, such as the accuracy of character control will be reduced. But generally speaking, we believe that the overall value of interactivity, surprise, and comedy effects brought by real physical simulation far exceeds the loss of accuracy. It is indeed more complicated and time-consuming to implement such a solution in . Compared with the previous "Candleman", I feel it is more obvious. We need to adjust and optimize the character control almost every once in a while.Relying on previous project experience, I decomposed the various control functions of the body into small modules. Each module is independent of each other and performs its own duties. In this way, the development will be cleaner and more efficient, especially for "Lei Pa Xia" This is a game that needs to review and optimize existing functions every once in a while, making the functions as independent and small as possible, which is very conducive to long-term maintenance, because each time you check a past function, the amount of code you need to read is relatively small. , the connection between modules is also relatively simple, which allows you to quickly load "memory" and enter a working state to solve problems. ”
Minimum crawling unit
Simplified crawling skeleton
Physicalized characters can interact with environmental items with real mechanics
4.1 Protagonist image
The protagonist of the game, Lei Paxia, left a very deep impression on people. It has the impression that it can overcome gravity and crawl against the wall, and it can also interact with all objects in the room. It can be called the "flatbed version of Spider-Man". When searching for the game data exposed in the past, it was found that the image of the protagonist has changed from the previous version. Some changes have occurred, which aroused our curiosity. Gao Ming shared the process of iterating the protagonist's image.
Gao Ming: "As discussed in the previous article about the development of the story, at the beginning, we just The character is positioned as a typical urban white-collar young man, so a white shirt, trousers and a regular hairstyle are enough. Later, as we locked the story on an independent game developer, we set up richer story details for him, such as his past experience, his identity as an artist and programmer , and how he manages his beard, what collections does he have that highlight his identity, etc. As a result, the appearance of the character has changed, and the details have become richer (for example, the badge on his chest, can anyone figure out what it means?) In addition, the picture style has also undergone several changes. Initially, our rendering style was closer to cartoon rendering. At that time, we felt that the cartoon feel fit well with the absurd atmosphere of the game and made people feel unreal, so the strange actions of the characters were not so surprising. During this period, the art style was actually explored in many versions, but the character's style has not changed much. The main reason is that it is difficult to change the character...
At that time, the character's body was not as twistable as noodles now. Instead, like a traditional game character, the skin is made based on real human bone structure. The body is stiff when crawling and cannot bend except for the joints. Later, in order to enhance the feeling of paralysis, I decided to subdivide the character's bones into smaller pieces, thus achieving a simulated noodle feel. But in this way, the number of bones has increased dramatically (one forearm needs to be separated into several pieces), and it has to be reskinned. It is quite troublesome just to build such a set of bones in 3D software, so We temporarily use a large number of capsules as temporary character shapes. Only the parts that cannot bend, such as the head, hands and feet, have relatively detailed modeling. This shape looks very rough, but the movements simulated by the physics are very vivid, which makes up for the lack of details to a certain extent, so we have been using it for a long time, and even participated in several exhibitions with the character in this state.
Finally, when we clarified the theme of the story and the setting of the character, we made up our minds to re-create the character model and skin it based on the noodle skeleton, and it became what it looks like now. Of course, it's not just the implementation technology that has changed, our picture style has also been adjusted to a "trendy" style, or "toy" style as the story is determined.I feel that the feel of toys is the same as that of cartoons, which can greatly weaken the realism of the game and increase the absurdity, thereby reducing "players' concerns about the character's physical condition." At the same time, we also hope that the current "trendy play" style can create enough visual differentiation and attraction so that more players, even non-game players, will be willing to try "Lai Pa Xia". "
It is worth mentioning that Gao Ming revealed that there were once male and female characters in "Lei Pa Xia", but later after locking in the story content, the gender of the character was set as male. But in the future production When creating new character stories, priority will be given to adding a female Lai Pa Hero (Lai Pa Hero?).
4.2 Art style
In terms of art style, Gao Ming and his team also have a unique Persistence. Gao Ming: " As mentioned above, in terms of art style, we started with a more abstract and general cartoon rendering style, and finally stopped at the current "trendy" style . During this period, we did make a lot of attempts in the visual aspect. The main motivation was that we felt that "Lei Pa Xia" was very intuitively attractive, and we hoped to "add fuel to the fire" and "icing on the cake" visually. The middle styles that I have a deep memory of are:
Fantasy cartoon amusement park style: In fact, it is a style similar to "Mario 3D World". Many 3D Platformers favor the fantasy and cartoon-like painting style, probably because this style is very suitable for the world view of Platformer games where one can jump several floors high. On this basis, "Mario 3D World" incorporates more visual elements of children's amusement park , such as rounded object shapes, bright colors, and textures similar to plastic and rubber. As a veteran player of Platformer, when I initially positioned "Le Pa Xia" as a crawling Platformer, I would naturally be the first to think of this style. The reason why I didn’t use it later was that I thought it was a bit ordinary and wanted to try something more special.
Handmade toy style: This is not the same as the modern, neat and rounded "trendy toy" style we have now. It is a visual style that is closer to the traditional wooden handmade toys. The corners of the object The outline is tougher, and the shape also has some unstable hand-made feel - for example, the cabinet is not horizontal and vertical, but a little twisted. The material uses real materials combined with hand-painted forms, and the whole picture looks a bit like a microscopic wooden toy scene. The "micro-toy" feel of this style has actually continued to this day, but later we upgraded the style of the toys and became a contemporary "trendy toy".
4.3 Music and sound effects
The music and sound effects of the game are very in tune with the atmosphere, and they are different depending on the state. change. In this regard, Gao Ming shared several twists and turns in music and sound effects production.
Gao Ming: "In terms of sound design, we have been exploring and trying it ourselves in the early stage. Because we are more familiar with real-style sound effects and ambient music rendering in the "Candleman" project, so "Lei Pa Xia" was initially We also designed the sound in this way. The interaction sounds between the characters and objects in the environment are realistic. The room will also be paved with an environmental sound track that renders the surrounding atmosphere (such as the noise of the city at night, the chirping of insects, etc.).As the project progressed, we had several communications with Zeta, a musician who had previously collaborated on the "Candle Man" project. She gave us a lot of inspiring professional advice. The most influential one was her suggestion that we try to be more professional. Cartoon funny sound effects , rather than real-textured sound effects like "Candle Man", further exaggerating the fun and drama of the game through this funny sound. Then we changed all the physical collision sound effects of items to the "biubiubiu" sound, and the effect was really good.
In addition, we also spent a lot of trouble on the background music of the game. Initially, we considered using music that is close to the atmosphere of the game story as BGM, so combined with the situation of "staying up late", we naturally chose a series of soothing music similar to lullabies and . But later we received feedback that the game itself was already very slow, and the lullaby BGM undoubtedly made it worse, easily making players sleepy. It was also a disaster for the host, because viewers watching the live broadcast would be more likely to become sleepy. So we changed the role of BGM from "enhancing the night atmosphere" to "refreshing the mind and creating a comedy atmosphere", and under this theme, we gradually locked in the current 80s comedy soundtrack, which has some jazz style.
A BGM floor will inevitably be a bit boring. Combined with the concept of "energy value" in the game, we decided to make the BGM change accordingly with the change of the character's energy state. When the energy state is low, let the music It also changes into chaos. In addition to rendering the atmosphere, it can also give players a certain warning effect.. For the time being, we directly use Unity’s built-in audio special effects to implement this variation function, not to mention that the effect is not bad. ”
Recently, Gao Ming and his team are focusing on "Lei Pa Xia", hoping that he can complete the release of as soon as possible next year. And from the initial stage of the project, he decided to adopt the all-platform route, so consoles, PC, Mobile phones and other mainstream platforms will be available, and the versions of these platforms are being developed simultaneously. Fortunately, thanks to the previous transplant experience of "Candleman", the team has some experience in the simultaneous development of all platforms.
When talking about why. When participating in the GWB Independent Game Grand Prix, Gao Ming said: " "Lei Pa Xia" also participated in GWB last year. I participated again this year because the version has changed a lot. This also benefited from the experience gained after participating last year. Some feedback, as well as multiple rounds of testing we've done over the past year, allowed us to make some important changes. By participating in GWB this time, we hope to show the judges and teachers the new changes in "Lei Pa Xia". We also want to know whether the game is on the right path. ”
At the end of the interview, as a high-production independent game team with double guarantee of word-of-mouth sales, Gao Ming and his team did not hesitate to share some experiences for other independent gamers. Gao Ming: “ Over the past year, the experience that has been particularly impressive and easy to share is probably this: do more Playtests. It's not an internal test within the team. It's about finding players you don't know to test your game, and then observing them as carefully as possible to get first-hand feedback . I think that for more innovative games, due to the lack of reference for mature games on the market, Playtest is the only way to gain true knowledge. But finding players and doing tests is a bit difficult in practice, and psychologically resistant (I have to show my precious game to people!).
As for the first point, our recent practical experience is that we can actually reduce the cost and threshold of Playtest based on current network technology. For example, due to the recent epidemic, we can no longer do what we did during the "Candle Man" period. Invite players to come to the studio for trial play, but we will find a way to let players try it at home and record the video to me - now it has become very convenient to record videos while playing games, and network file transfer is also very fast, making this method very convenient. Easy to implement. Although you can’t see the player’s true expression when watching the player’s gameplay video, it is very close to watching the player play live, and there is an additional benefit of trying the game at home (compared to the on-site trial) – the player will not be worried about coming. He feels nervous in unfamiliar environments, so his performance in the game may be closer to reality.
As for the second point of psychological resistance, as a developer, I understand it very well. The game story of the protagonist of "Lei Pa Xia" has "It's not good enough..." clearly printed on the packaging box, so I have experienced it repeatedly. I have had the same mental journey many times: If it doesn’t work, don’t take the test yet… I half-recommended and half-tested on the spot… Wow! What an enlightenment and enlightenment! Therefore, for psychological resistance, I can only recommend that you actually try it once. I believe that the subsequent "outstanding effect" experience will definitely provide you with sufficient "psychological construction" for your next test!
I wish "Lei Pa Xia" will overcome all obstacles and receive rave reviews. I also wish Candleman Game Studio a great future and continue to bring touching independent games to players.
