Author: Kris Chen

嗯…听说可以写中文所以…..

一学期下来感觉自己可能是全班玩游戏数量最少的人（之一）？喜欢游戏设计开发的原因更像是，游戏是一种自己比较喜欢的表达方式。所以一直以来自己的关注点也集中在叙事和表达上。加上自己经常有一些稀奇古怪的想法，游戏也是实现他们的非常好的方式。

比如说第一个project的“和过去死亡的自己合作”

3Dproject想说的关于“存在与感知”

final project的拼字与在游戏中反思现实中存在的教育问题

（趁机在这里记录一下这学期都做了些啥）

但自己一直以来也局限在这些方面。因而在这门课上也学到了自己曾经忽略或是感觉“好像跟我想做的没什么关系就懒得去管”的东西，并且意识到他们的重要性。

比如说风格，拼字游戏随便设计了一个攻击“怪”的机制，却没有考虑到游戏的整体风格和感受。

比如说难度设计，新手引导，机制的复杂性。

比如说如何将想要表达的东西更好的融合在游戏里，或者说表达和机制并不是很match的时候要怎么办

比如说美术风格与机制和叙事如何统一

还有音乐

比如说工作量，每次想的挺美结果都做不完lol

同时这门课也给了我机会去实现自己想做的：设计稀奇古怪的机制，当编剧….

因为之前用过一点unity所以上课讲的技术上并没有感觉很难，但我这个主修CS的人虽然代码能力还可以其实并不太喜欢写代码于是非常感谢sven和pato写掉了大部分lol

但也加深了我对unity的理解，技术上我主要处理各种插件的使用和解决稀奇古怪的bug。常常搞出些“不入流”但是能解决问题的办法。这对我来说或许比“重复写内容相似的功能代码”对自己的提升要大很多

一直想把游戏当副业来做，既可以实现自己的想法/搞钱，还不用受别人制约（想的挺美）

总之在这门课上学到了很多，非常感谢Ian老师，也非常开心可以认识大家。

希望我们的遗书可以上steam卖钱lol

Core Game play

In the game, the player need to jump through the platform to reach the destination, in the meanwhile also collecting coin. The player has the special ability to swap the space between himself and any object of the game.

Core gameplay flowchart ：

Highlights:

I changed many of the source codes and templates to achieve the behavior I want:

To make the player able to stand on the side and edge of the platform (as the game shows there are many tilted platform), I changed the 2D collider shape. I added coin in the game so that the play can pick or shoot with a new scriptable object. It is to make the coins will not appear even if the player restart the game. I also changed the behavior of the weapon to make it a space swap gun. This part is the most difficult as I need tp investigate the source code and the structure of the assets to find the place I need to change.

The demo video only shows the fastest way to finish the level, there are many other paths to take with more challenge and coins,

After reading the article, I found the popular mobile games actually follows the design concept strictly, while also in a innovative way. I would like to use the game I’ve playing recently, 王者荣耀, as an example

Axis of obstacles & Axis of abilities in the game

Since the game contains 10 real people and a bunch of Ai troops, the pattern may look very chaotic at first, but a close look shows that in the game, the axis of obstacles is designed to follow the graph in the article:

The design of the crystal tower serves strongly for the cycle and boosting the group war, since, the group war is often focus on destroying or protacting the tower.

At first, the two parties compete to kill the AI troops to earn exp. and money, which is the easiest part. Meanwhile small fights may break, but there are usually severe casualties and the operation is relatively easy. Finally a group war breaks out, which is the most difficult part in the cycle and requires a lot of attention and skills for the player.

At the end of group war, the losing party will face a more difficult start of the cycle than previous start, but for the winners they are not making things easier. Due to the special design of the game map, the next tower to destroy has higher blood, also it is closer to the base of the losing part but further to the winning part, which means the losing part has faster and stronger supporting power under the next tower.

Therefore, the new starting cycle is actually more difficult for both parties.

As for the axis of abilities, 王者荣耀 goes a long way beyond the games listed in the article. 

In one game, the player gradually gets more skills and equipments, but the highlighting part is the abilities of analyzing the warzone situation, making judgement and having fluent operation. Those abilities are not gained in one game, but in playing and practicing in a large number of games. What’s more , the increased ability is not a increased value in the avatar (like increase speed for a plane), but an ability of actual player.

Composite Game

In some ways, the game is actually a composition of action game and education simulation game （养成游戏）,  just as the above picture in the article shows.

While the ultimate goal is to put down the tower in the enemy’s base, to achieve the goal one not only need fighting skills, but also need to earn money to cultivate the hero. Player happily kill AI and get more money to buy equipment (use action game skill to solve ed/rpg problem). In the game players alsoneed to decide what equiment to buy and what route to get money according to the warzone situation and stratigies (use ed/rpg skill to solve action game problem)

I used four nights to pass the first four chapters, then turned on infinite dash and infinite life to pass the others. Even in this situation I still cannot find all the hearts and strawberries.

The game has excellent music. Yet what interests me most is the way it expresses a story and characters.

It seldom has direct story narritation, but all the formation of the character is merged in the environment and in the gameplay. This type of story telling and shaping characters is very novel for me. 

Usually to shape a character, the character faces some events from the outside environment, in handling such events the character expresses itself, and the character may grow up in some critical events.

Celeste differs from the common routine in that, using the special setting of the mountain that “reflect the person” there is no events or obstacles from the outside environment. Madeline, the character is facing and chellenging herself, throughtout the whole game. Madeline is not only the character we control, it is also the challenge we face. All her feeling, thoughts, personalities and even growth are shown not only from the dialog and the character, but also the environment {which strictly speaking, is also the character herself}.

But there is one thing that I dislike about the game.

As the game, the fun of playing it mainly come from repeatitive works: dying and retrying at every chapter, and finally the players are satisfied from mastering a series of operation that can pass the chapter. I think this type of hard fun is not suitable for many people, at least me, because it requires, at least, one have enough time to spend on the game through the repeatitive work.

Many people hear the high ranking of the game. After work they download it and play, then found it is too hard to even pass the first chapter. They can only spend perhaps 1 hour on game every day so perhaps they can never pass chapter 3 (for me I spent 4 hours continuouly on it and I think if I play 1 hour everyday I will forget the feeling to pass the sections I learnt from the previous day). This type of fun is only for those with enough time and patience.

Inspiraton

In the game, the player has the ability to travel back to the start of the game when it dies, while the previous “itself” still remains in the game. When the player dies and restart the level, a tim shadow of the player will be generated. The shadow will move on its own according to the previous movement of the player, the player need to cooperate with “itself” that exist before the world restart to solve puzzles and defeat enemies.

Suggestion of the Professor

Professor recommanded a package to realize the idea, he alsp suggested that instead of let the “time shadow” to behave completely the same to the player’s past (including transform, shooting and other interactions with the environment), we could only save the transform in order to reduce some technology difficulties.

Professor also suggests to make the difficulty a bit easier, and make more levels using this mechanism in the future.

Tech

I use object recorder to record the operation of the user and put it on the time shadow. It causes the main problem now:

as the function is from UnityEditor but now UnityEngine, the game could only be played in unity edity, but not be able to build.

so I attached videos of the game, if you want to play it, you can have the src files from me and run it on unity editor

Link

The first video is too large to be uploaded here

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nEj7I9eIpqtaY-xFfEbfMsiHwPrESlti/view?usp=sharing

the one below is a complementary video, plz watch the first one before this 🙂