Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Creating a touching user experience has always been one of the goals pursued by game designers. "as long as there is a touch in the heart, it is experience." Whether it is fps or action games with less plots, or narrative interactive games and role-playing games with more plots, one of the goals is to let players create their own stories and generate emotions through experience, and turn this emotion into situational memory. When you think of it, you can't help but find someone to share it.

Experience Design and Creative thinking is a method of experience design shared by the former head of the Paradise Wii project. It includes:

1. How to do intuitive design that makes people want to play?

two。 How to make amazing designs that people indulge in

3. And how to make players find someone to share the story design.

The picture above is the full picture of today's creative thinking. This article will combine this book with some of the reader's own thinking to make a summary.

First, intuitive design players rely on their own strength to understand that the way the game is played is the result of intuitive design. What we need to do is actually very simple, first establish a hypothesis, and then let the player try in an uneasy mood, and finally the player will be happy to find that the hypothesis is correct. In this way, it creates intuition and has a pleasant experience.

1. Guide the player to make assumptions that the most important rules are communicated to the player in the first place. Hints need to be intuitive. Take the familiar Monument Valley as an example, the core rule of Monument Valley is to manipulate the villain to the square end position.

We can see that at the first level is an one-way street, with the character controlled by the player standing at the end of the road, at the bottom left of the screen, and at the other end, at the top right. This takes advantage of the player's reading habits, and there are no visual interference elements in the scene, only the starting and ending points and an unconnected road. Players can make intuitive judgments and make assumptions at the first time: do you want to connect the road and go to the other end?

two。 Let the player try in an uneasy mood. The player made the assumption of going to the other end. So how do you connect the roads? There are no related text hints in the game, but we all know that the faucet can be twisted, and a mechanism here looks very much like a faucet, can it also be rotated? The player throws himself another question and tries it in a state of unease.

3. Found that the assumption is correct and happy players try at this time to find success, and can reach the finish line, players will realize that rely on their own strength to fully experience the process, generate intuition, have a happy experience.

Design principles to be followed:

① concatenates intuitive designs into a certain length of time. I felt interesting for a period of time when the player first started.

Every experience in ② must be brief. Avoid the card process to make players feel uneasy.

③ improves the success rate of intuitive design. The initial setup needs to be simple enough. Designers can take advantage of what people have in common and try to design, such as the faucet-like mechanism just mentioned.

Second, surprise design, of course, no matter how carefully intuitive design is done, if you repeat this experience over and over again, it will still make players feel tired and bored on the big screen, that is, mental saturation or habituation, after receiving the same stimulation repeatedly, the reaction will become weaker and weaker.

1. What is surprise? In Russell's emotional ring pattern, surprise is high-intensity and neutral pleasure. Surprise arises when you suddenly and closely pay attention to something. So when the brain weakens because of tiredness and boredom, it is necessary to immediately add a high-intensity surprise experience that the brain does not expect.

two。 How to create surprises? There are three main points:

① takes advantage of people's preconceptions (1. Prejudices about premises 2. Daily prejudices) let players make expectations first, let players have misunderstandings.

②, try.

③ was in a surprised mood

Design principles to be followed:

① can accurately grasp the time of tiredness and boredom.

② achieves a misleading worldview.

③ designed to misunderstand the arrangement of exposure.

For example, the classic theme of "pafupafu", which is the classic theme of the Warriors fighting the Dragon every season in the rpg game, is when the stimulation of the game to the players gradually weakens after a long period of main line and play (accurately grasping the time of tiredness and boredom), when the players produce to the game: well, this is a warm-blooded king game. When you set the mindset (to build a well-misunderstood world view) to make the big health npc appear. Provide players with a blushing and heartbeat experience (a well-designed arrangement for misunderstanding exposure) to create an amazing experience.

However, in a game, the cost of arranging elaborate surprise points is relatively high, and it is impossible to use the same surprise design to create fluctuations over and over again. There is a lower-cost way to use some of the taboo themes of human nature to design surprise points. In the face of different scenes, surprise also has different changes.

In the book, several representative themes are sorted out for reference. The first four categories are positive themes, which are widely used in every corner of the experience, because the designer's goal is to let players experience the end thoroughly. And these experiences depict what human beings instinctively want.

Positive theme:

1. Male and female theme (feeling of heartbeat) (feeling of shyness)

two。 Food theme (delicious feeling) (hungry feeling)

3. Profit and loss theme (feeling of wanting money) (feeling of not wanting to lose)

4. Identity theme (sense of identity) (sense of belonging)

Negative themes: when creating a sense of horror and shock, they tend to use these themes that are avoided in daily life.

5. Filthy theme

6. Violence theme

7. Confusing theme

8. Death theme

Special theme:

9. Fluke mentality and accidental theme (playing with probability, being lucky, praying to heaven)

This point can be used in adventures, drawing cards, gambling, and knowing how to hit. It is very topical and sharing.

In terms of skill design, for those convicted by the egg officers of tomorrow's Ark on April 1, it can be said that the skills of ta are basically of no practical value, but they are very flexible. His 1st Skill has a 5% probability of 680% in the next attack, because the 5% metaphysical probability may cause the first pass when the agent fights in peacetime, the Boss is directly taken away by two times four critical strikes, while in peacetime the agent can not make a critical strike at all, causing the Boss to break through the line of defense (encountered unexpected circumstances during the first pass), and the agent turns over, which is very effective.

10. The theme of private life

Players' own secrets, tastes, and intelligence. For example, pinch the face and name. This kind of content, which seems to expose the player's heart, will produce a strong sense of surprise.

This reminds me of undertale's second deltarune (triangle rune), which solemnly set up a customized appearance at the beginning, choose the part you like and name it, and build it to make players feel that they can customize the theme of their private life, but directly put aside the player's initial presupposition and create a surprise.

When designing the rhythm of the game, we need to master the frequency and rhythm of intuitive design and surprise design, so that surprise design is intertwined with intuitive design, and reasonable planning can fully mobilize the emotions of players. In the process of arrangement and combination rhythm, we must need some design to undertake these segments, at this time our highlight today-story design is very important.

Story design in narratology, the story is called narrative, and the story contains two elements, namely the content of the story and the exposition of the story. To put it simply, what happens is the content of the story, and how to convey it is the story. The content of the story and the exposition of the story must be combined into one in order to form the narrative. Games, like articles, sound and video, are all a way of telling stories. What methods can be used to design stories in the game?

1. Laying the groundwork for environmental stories, rhythms and comparisons, and foreshadowing, all three themes are designed to stimulate players' storytelling instincts and to allow players to become the narrator of the game and the experience design to tell the story.

Sea turtle soup is a mind game that guesses the truth of situational events. The game is that the questioner puts forward an incomprehensible event, and the participant can ask any question in an attempt to narrow the scope and find out the real reason behind the event. but the questioner can only answer the question with "yes", "no" or "no relationship". The fragmented information provided by the sea turtle soup is the way to convey the environmental narrative, which allows players to spontaneously collect all the intelligence configured in the environment and gradually construct the whole story. With the human brain's storytelling instinct, players can automatically generate reasoning about the story by providing only fragments of information.

But designers can't simply break everything up and configure it at will. In every picture that makes up the game, we also need to pay attention to the arrangement method.

In the book, all kinds of scenes in the game are classified, taking the amount of information as the vertical axis and the operation as the horizontal axis to draw a chart.

① film has a large amount of information, little interaction, and is very passive.

② exploration can get a considerable amount of information. You can operate at your own pace

The combat situation of ③ is urgent, there is little intelligence available, and it can focus on active operations.

Take the opening scene of "two-person trip" as an example. The beginning is mainly Cody and Mei quarrel to become puppets, and then to encounter the first boss vacuum cleaner after embarking on the search to change back to their own journey, if the amount of information conveyed as the vertical axis to draw a line chart, or to operate as the vertical axis for another line chart to draw, it is not difficult to find that no matter which kind, have created ups and downs in the form of waves. This is rhythm and contrast. The use of rhythm and contrast can not only reduce the boredom of players because there are no ups and downs, but also make the future prediction of the story itself simple and simple. What does this mean? First of all, each scene is shortened, reducing the amount of information that players need to deal with in the scene as much as possible, and what they need to do becomes easy to understand. On this basis, through the film-exploration-battle-film this strong contrast of emotional ups and downs, so that players unconsciously aware of the ups and downs pattern, resulting in intuitive prediction. The use of rhythm and contrast can make players feel the passage of time ups and downs, forget the existence of time.

When an information no longer explains the true intention, it is a foreshadowing to prompt it first, and then through the time difference to make people aware of its true intention, and to have a sense of pleasure that suddenly awakens.

Through environmental stories, rhythm and contrast, as well as foreshadowing can stimulate and mobilize players' curiosity and curiosity, and get a full experience. Through this series of transfer operations, we can draw the player closer to the story described in the game.

After talking about the groundwork that can be set at the beginning of the story design, another theme of the story we are going to tell is growth.

two。 Growth although it is said that when players manipulate the growth of the characters in the game, it will not have any impact on the players themselves; but through the fictional growth in the game can provide players with a touching experience-allowing players to generate their own stories through the experience.

The book lists three common themes that can be used to design experiences for players to grow up.

① collection and repetition

The space effect can be used to stimulate players to conduct repeated behaviors that are constantly collected. For example, when you see the text below, the brain will unconsciously fill in the number 5 in the space between 4 and 6, which is the space effect.

1234_6

The most common thing is to leave space for uncollected items when collecting maps, which can stimulate players' desire to collect constantly. Such a design is also accompanied by the need for players to be aware of the overall appearance, and take this as the target motivation to replay. For example, in the Animal Forest Friends, the image collection system, as an important method of play, exists not only in the form of interface, but also in the form of a whole museum scene. when players wander through exquisite scenes with a sense of ritual and see those empty fish tanks or booths, it will stimulate players' desire to complete the image guide.

This reminds me of an option-driven puzzle game "Twelve minutes", which takes place in a small apartment. You need to collect clues, find props, go through all kinds of events, and finally try to escape the shackles of infinite reincarnation during the 10-minute cycle of reincarnation. There are basically only three periods of time mentioned in the game: the 12-minute "real" time in the room of the protagonist and his wife, the time of the protagonist and the suspected father in the study, and the night of eight years ago mentioned in the dialogue. And the relationship between the three time and space and the sense of separation of time and space is that the author can leave blank, the purpose is to make players realize that there is a huge space in the story, and then let players who want to know the outcome of the game continue to collect clues. Constantly reincarnation to increase the amount of new information. The amount of knowledge and speculation added to each reincarnation is the growth that players can feel. Such a design allows players to unwittingly play repeatedly for reincarnation, forgetting the passage of time.

In addition to adding spaces and making players aware of the overall appearance of ②, adding beats can also promote us to repeat over and over again.

The interactive mode of most audio games on the market is actually very simple, nothing more than a few gestures, but why is it so popular? The reason is to add the beat. The Chaijani effect shows that as long as the problem remains unsolved, it can keep people tense all the time. In a short period of five minutes, the instant note buttons in the music game require players to respond in a very short period of time, especially those that are very difficult, and all kinds of note keys are almost seamlessly connected and constantly need players to click. there is no gap to relieve tension. The audio game will also add the strong positive feedback of continuous combo and the negative feedback of miss to enhance the players' loss of heart and mood fluctuations in the process of playing. in this way, players will naturally repeat the operation, gradually improve their proficiency, and finally more and more can not stop. An important design in which uninterrupted beats officially play a decisive role.

Keep repeating and then grow, and then you can challenge some more difficult things. Or take the audio game "cytusII" as an example, after unlocking the low-difficulty level, it will unlock the more difficult mode. On the basis of the same mode of play, players can rely on their own intuition to make choices and decisions, and gradually build their own adventures, which is also one of the indispensable elements of growth. When designing choices and decisions, we should also pay attention to giving timely feedback to players, so as to make players feel that success and failure are their own strategic problems, so as to further guide players to develop their willingness to grow. Choice and discretion can also guide players to make choices, such as setting the discount strength of gift packages in the mall, and adding contrast to guide players to choose those hard-earned gift bags.

③ empathy is to be able to bring yourself into the role.

There are three conditions for empathy: the first is that the player is interested in the protagonist, the second is that the player believes that the protagonist has the same idea as himself, which is the core of empathy, and the third is that the emotional need of empathy is something other than hatred. Designers expect to be able to design an experience that meets the above three conditions at the same time, but it is impossible to empathize with the players at the beginning of the game, that is, one condition cannot be met. The Chaijani effect can also be cited, and the designer can raise an unsolved problem at the beginning. And these events must be strongly related to the protagonist in order to arouse the interest of players. When the player sees the protagonist suffering at the other end of the screen, the mirror neuron can take the feelings of the other person in front of him as his own empathy. For example, the nightmare suffered by the protagonist at the beginning of the wizard and the demagogic poison on the protagonist at the beginning of the cold start. Because of the unfortunate experience of the protagonist, players began to be interested in the protagonist. The second condition for empathy is that the player and the protagonist have the same idea, so that the player's psychological state changes from the objective spectator perspective to the subjective first person perspective. At this time, you can create conflicts and contradictions, such as adding a person to the story to make trouble with a troublesome traveling companion, and then design to make the player like the traveling companion, and then create a series of experiences of abusing the traveling companion. For example, the islanders in Mojimori, the islanders assigned by the players at the beginning of the island are completely random, and some small animals may not be liked by many players, so the players will have no feeling for these small animals at first. Komori sometimes sets up conversations that require players to force gifts to the islanders to trouble the players. at this time, if the player does not like a small animal to cause trouble, the player may think: why does this small animal appear on my island? so annoying. But sometimes small animals will make some cute moves, such as giving you their own nicknames and giving players gifts, which will make players feel: well, this little animal is still quite cute. After a while, the player chatted with the animal again and found that he wanted to leave the trail and travel somewhere else. Any player would hesitate to encounter such a conversation for the first time. This is the key moment when the player and the protagonist share the same feeling of hatred. At the end of the story, the players and protagonists who were tired of traveling companions finally managed to overcome their disgust and sympathize with the protagonist.

3. Will through three themes related to growth, players can continue to grow. The story has come to an end, and both the player and the protagonist have experienced a series of stories "reborn". Next, you can introduce some of the more impressive experiences of the sublimation theme, such as the best part of the song. The third step in the story is will, which is to let players make their own decisions to describe their own story.

There are four sublimation themes that can be referred to in the book, which can impress you and have the desire to talk to you.

The negotiation of ① life allows players to decide the experience of life and death.

② unknown experience that players have never had before.

The leeway of ③ explanation deliberately does not explain everything in the story, leaving it blank for players to think about.

④ goes back to the starting point after a long growth story, reflecting on the mental journey of the protagonist's growth.

In retrospect, if you want to be a master of rhythm to control the player's experience, you have to drive a variety of emotions that gradually connect the context of every moment and move the player's heart. The experience needs to be transformed into the situational memory of the player after playing. When an experience makes feelings fluctuate, it stays in memory. The process of experience-emotion-memory is always stimulating and driving our life.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: GameTube (ID:GameTube), by Ting Lan.

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