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

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: Zhu Siqi

"it's really hard, but it's the hard things that are fun."

After a long and difficult battle, the protagonist finally came to the end of the journey. Different from imagination, after witnessing uninterrupted disasters and tragedies along the way, there is a kind of serenity floating outside time and space at the beginning and end of everything. Before the protagonist decides the fate of the world, NPC just calmly asks: "will you miss this broken world?"

This strange peace and melancholy after going through dangers and obstacles is my biggest feeling after the "deep fire" of customs clearance. Deep Fire, a 2D Soul game that individual developers have been working on for two and a half years, launched a pre-emptive trial version on Steam on November 30 and is still being updated. Judging from the weekly experience, the completion of the game has greatly exceeded my expectations for personal development. In a process of about 15 hours, players will be able to explore in four large scenarios that arrive by teleport, defeating more than 20 Boss with different mechanisms. As it is a pre-emptive experience version, the details and difficulty of the game are still being polished, but Fire is very confident in the current combat system, allowing disabled players to defeat the enemy after hard work. It also allows hardcore players to challenge unharmed and "level 1 clearance".

After customs clearance, it is still hard to believe that "Deep Fire" is an one-person work. Outside the combat system, some mechanisms and performances create an impressive atmosphere. Like many "Soul" works, the story of "Deep Fire" takes place in a declining world. Although there is no long story in the traditional sense, all the behavior of the player and NPC and even Boss, as well as all the scenery along the way are part of the narrative. As a result, the design of some mechanism-based Boss gives players a strong sense of narrative participation and atmosphere, such as the "moon maker" who always floats high in the air and needs players to parkour, the "noble patient" holding the shield of blessing in the poison pool, and even the "gatekeeper" who opens with illusion as the gatekeeper of the ending map.

There are also NPC in the game reminiscent of "Soul", which comes standard with Fire Girl and "Brother discouraged", flying monsters with the vision of "Salt and Sanctuary" and "Hollow Knight", and "Jump" maps full of traps. But even if there are some familiar elements, after watching the authentic "Soul" and "Elden Ring" released by FromSoftware this year, and even the mushrooming games like "Soul" and some game trailers, "Deep Fire" still brings me freshness and fun to explore.

What's more, the prosperity of similar "soul" games has also aroused a lot of discussion. For example, what exactly is the taste of "soul"? In the face of more popular players, how do developers strike a balance between difficulty and fun? Toule and Fire talked about these issues, and he also talked about the process of developing the game and the idea of trying to express it.

From a more "hindsight" perspective, the popularity of the game "Soul" this year seems to be "deep fire" to catch up with the trend. However, when Huohuo wrote down the word "soul 'rice" in the profile of Weibo, there were not many so-called "soul Like" on the market except those authentic works by FromSoftware. The motivation for the production of "Deep Fire" has little to do with the "soul" craze in recent years.

"I don't think you need to think about what subject matter is hot or what type is easy to do when playing independent games." Fire said, "now that I have decided to play an independent game, the choice of subject matter and direction should not have a motivation other than'I like'." In addition to Soul, there are many other elements that he likes in Deep Fire, such as inspiration from the cartoon "Sword Wind Legend" and various hard science fiction works, as well as the independent game "Star Pioneer". The world background of Deep Fire has more or less the combination of these elements.

In the story of "Soul", the most indispensable thing is the sorrowful NPC. "Soul of the Devil" is the first love of Fire. In 2007, Fire was still addicted to the "Mario" and "Zelda" series, worshiping Miyamoto Shigeru. But under the strong Amway of a hardcore female shopkeeper, he found a second-hand "Soul of the Devil" CD, and has since become a fan of the "Soul" series.

As a developer, Huohuo was very impressed by the mechanisms in "Soul of the Devil" that were different from the mainstream games in Japan at that time. " It gives me the first impression that it is very smart and simplifies a lot of operations. For example, for the first time, the role action key position is changed from the traditional panel area (ABXY) to the shoulder region (L and R), which greatly reduces the cost of understanding. Especially when using shields and bows and arrows, it is especially intuitive for the left hand to raise the shield or draw the bow, and the right hand to wave a sword or shoot an arrow. "

In addition, there are complex level designs. "although you may be scolded by players for saying this, I actually appreciate the intransigence of the Devil Soul at the level." The example of Fire is the "Soul of the Devil" map 3-1 "Prison of Hope". The level consists of a looped four-story building in which players need to circle many times to get a variety of key keys and props. The narrow road, bound jailers and malice hidden in various dark corners make the players passing by miserable.

"it was very disgusting, very depressing, highly repetitive and with very few guidelines. I spent a few hours in it the first time I played." This is how Fire described the thrilling impression that the checkpoint left on him. What's more, after such a suffocating process, it is a magnificent tower with open scenery and a very shocking feeling. "it's a pity that there are no longer that kind of hurdles in the 'Soul' series after that."

It is hoped that the narrow and complicated roads and terrible enemies in the prison make it one of the most hated maps for gamers. Some of the levels in Deep Fire do reflect Fire's interest in this kind of design. "Sifang Temple" is probably the most impressive and lost map in the game. The map consists of a hub organ and the space on the left and right sides. The rotating organ can form four different topography in the space, and there is more than one exploration route on the left and right sides, as well as hidden roads and channels connecting the hidden map. Players are shuttling back and forth, bewildered, and hope prison is the same.

In addition, there is a kind of monster that players avoid in Deep Fire, nicknamed "Fork Monster". They will use pitching to catch the player, and then press into the fire pit to kill, in the early version, once hit, there is no chance of survival. Fire said that the little monster made reference to the jailer in the prison of hope.

In addition to the orthodox "soul", Fire also has a special preference for the "head of the teacup", which is not the "soul". It is mainly the process of repeatedly challenging Boss that makes the fire unstoppable. The precise block system inspired by the block in the "teacup head" eventually became the core of the "Deep Fire" combat experience.

The date on which Fire officially launched the project for "Deep Fire" was February 20, 2020, which later appeared repeatedly in the game's promotional materials. "Deep Fire" was the first independent game produced by Fire, and that day was of great commemorative significance to him.

2 to start work may be able to rely on a cavity of blood, but to make a game out of nothing needs to be down-to-earth. In addition to the soundtrack, the planning, copywriting, programming and art of the game are all done by Huohuo alone.

A large amount of art material is the most intuitive workload. Every background, every character, every enemy, he draws the image himself, uses Google Animation to make various effects, and then imports it into Unity.

"in fact, the workload is not as large as I thought." The fire calculated that according to the working hours of eight hours a day and five days a week, all the art work might have taken eight months. In the two-and-a-half years of development, the proportion is not too much. "of course, art work is not centralized. I am like a child who spends his or her four-wheel drive. When I feel that this pile of things is finished, I can't wait to throw them into the program first, regardless of whether there is a specific way to play and function. Anyway, let's put together a template first. Tie up a protagonist today, tie an enemy action tomorrow, and so on."

This is the design of the enemy in the early days, but only part of the game has been released in the current version, because the picture is really beautiful, and there are sporadic voices wondering whether the fire has hired outsourcing and whether it has used free material. "I really painted it all by myself." Huo stressed, "the example of skeletal animation in the official Unity store was provided to other developers through the course of Unity lecturer McKoon with a sharing mentality at the beginning of the project, not the free material I used."

In terms of planning, Fire made a more stringent plan only after the first testing period, that is, after September 2020. " For example, I will stipulate that I have to make 3 hours of play content within 3 months. These 3 hours must include a complete level, a complete replacement system, a set of guidance and growth system, and then slowly split down. For example, how many sets of equipment I need to support this replacement system, how many monsters and how many Boss I need to put in the level. " Although he has a certain degree of freedom in timing and will not force himself to work overtime even if he is in bad shape, he tries to make sure that he can produce some complete output every week or two.

This is the novice Guan's initial design drawing, with 1: 2 screen (red box is 1 screen) as the cut. respectively convey movement, jump, sprint, climb, attack, block and other basic actions, but Fire wants to emphasize one thing: "it is difficult for independent development to achieve the results as well as expected as on the company assembly line." as long as within the range of acceptance, the uncertainty of the results is also interesting. "

Some unplanned situations are indeed contradictions in the process of building the game. For example, under the influence of the Devil's Soul, several levels of Deep Fire were designed separately from the beginning and need to be transported from the Heart of the Ark. Halfway through, Fire also considered making a large map with strong connectivity like the traditional Galactic Alcatraz game. But after spelling it for a long time, I found that the maps designed at the beginning could not be connected to each other at all, so I had to give up. "the solution is that I added a sentence to the plot to bring the situation back," he said. "just write, this is a broken world."

Other unplanned situations will bring surprises.

The "Ming Huo" system may be the biggest feature of "Deep Fire". It gives different values to the more common mechanism of "precision block", such as blood recovery, prevention and attack, detoxification and so on, making the play process more flexible and rewarding.

Fire doesn't want to design blocks as the core of the game from the beginning. In September 2020, he uploaded a game demonstration on bilibili, inviting players to try two small levels to see if they could accept the combination of cartoon style and hard-core play. At that time, precise block was just a routine action, which could only shock the enemy, which was equivalent to having the effect of "resonance" in the current version. "but I didn't expect that players particularly like it and feel that blocking is particularly refreshing and can avoid injury. I just want to dig deep into this system." Said the fire.

He then designed a variety of Ming fire for players to collect on the map, after the equipment, precision block can increase the attack, defense and other relatively simple effects. With these rewards, almost all the players' actions revolve around blocks, and Fire further strengthens the system into the core features of the game, tied to the player's birth class. Next, all the design of the process revolves around the packaging of the Ming Huo system.

The player character was born with a precise block to bring back the blood. From the beginning of the second week, the birth inscription can be changed into other special functions according to the need. His favorite performance segment is also an unplanned product. After defeating the final Boss, the player will walk down a long corridor. This is an important scene nearing the end, and there is an extremely strong sense of retrospect and ending in the silent scene. "I had planned to put the performance in the secret garden, and there were a lot of my own figures chatting, upgrading, building weapons and so on. But when I actually did it, I found that not so much material for daily operations had been changed into a relatively simple form like this, but the effect was particularly good."

In short, Huo feels that encountering and retaining such deviations is one of the joys of making independent games: "there is no need to be the same as a commercial work, the result has to be the same as expected." that would be boring. "

Although the early version of the game Boss war is a single production, but because everything is hands-on, the cost is quite low, Fire did not encounter any financial difficulties in the development process. After the game was in its infancy and signed for release, the publisher did not interfere too much in his development content. Huo Huo quit his previous job to work on this project, and he feels that the feeling of quitting to play an independent game is not so much self-entrepreneurship as self-creation. "it's great to make a decision alone."

The most difficult thing is actually writing programs. Hot is not a programmer. He used Unity in his previous job, but he didn't really write code himself. Like all fledgling independent developers, he recruited a variety of online courses to learn programming from scratch. When you really can't solve the problem, ask the technology boss for advice. To this end, he put a lot of help to his own Unity technology lecturer "M_Studio McKou" in a very important position.

In particular, action games attach great importance to the feel, this aspect of debugging is often very detailed, even if the players do not necessarily feel. But if the developer is negligent, it will feel "unspeakable weird" when playing. This kind of thing can only be adjusted slowly by experience, and it is changed almost every month. The most recent debugging is to add slope adaptation to the sprint. "in the past, players felt a little stuck when sprinting or climbing steeper terrain, and the movement was slower than usual. Now I have made a slight increase in this speed so that there is no great restriction on movement on the sloping terrain, and the sprint feels smoother."

Looking back at the two-and-a-half-year development process, Huohuo's description is full of the style of his favorite game: "it's really difficult, but the hard things are fun." I feel that the learning process itself is very happy. "

3 although I appreciate the uncompromising attitude of "Devil Soul" in terms of difficulty, Fire's difficulty assessment of "Deep Fire" has also undergone changes shortly after it was launched.

Prior to the launch of the preemptive trial version, Fire conducted a small-scale internal test of the game. Most of the internal test players are the type of people who enjoy the challenge. "they all told me, 'this game is not difficult.' what's so hard about that?" As a result, Fire made some fine-tuning of the game, and the "hardcore 2D Soul" game was put on the shelves on November 30.

Unexpectedly, on the first day on the shelves, the overwhelming feedback was that "the game is too difficult" and "the rebound judgment is too harsh". There are plenty of players who "suffer" repeatedly in Boss, and think that the difficulty has affected their fun of the game.

"I really didn't think that so many people found it too difficult. Maybe there was a bit of a deviation in the direction of publicity." Fire has been receiving all kinds of information among players and soon begins to adjust its balance. Within a week, he issued six update patches in a row, comprehensively reducing the difficulty of customs clearance in one week. The main changes are to extend the precision block decision time, reduce Boss damage, reduce map malice, and there is hope of survival in some places that used to be killed in seconds. Maps as complex as the Sifang Temple are also guided by different colors.

Meet the demands of some players, but caused the dissatisfaction of another part of the players. Some people think that the damage of the new version of Boss is too low, or even "reckless", making some mechanisms meaningless. Some players in the group suggested that fire should not listen to all opinions, to consider what kind of game they want to do.

After the damage of some Boss is reduced, the attack mechanism originally designed is correspondingly less existent and the choice faced by fire, which can be said to be a common problem faced by the sudden popularity of similar "soul" games. Poor word-of-mouth "soul" games have been criticized, in addition to the comparison of metaphysics "no taste of soul", "unreasonable difficulty" and "lack of fun" account for a considerable part. I also focus on Huohuo, how to balance difficulty and fun in this kind of games, and what is the "soul" taste of metaphysics in the player group.

On the issue of difficulty, Huo feels, "playing a game is actually a process of interaction and communication between the producer and the player." if only the developer likes it and the player does not realize the fun, it will become 'self-excited'. "Deep Fire" chooses to reduce the difficulty, in his view, it is not so much compromise as communication.

He believes that the current difficulty is more reasonable, "not as much feedback in batches as before." Next, he will set out to meet the needs of some multi-week or hardcore players, launching new systems like "Zhong Ghost" or "bully contract", including a more powerful "Red Soul Boss" that allows players to fully challenge themselves. " However, we will also make an assessment of the player's performance, such as testing whether your first two Boss games are going well. If it does not go well, the entrance will not be opened to avoid the misentry of 'cute new'. "

In addition, the reward given to the player after a difficult battle largely determines how much fun the player can feel.

In his opinion, there are generally two kinds of rewards for soul games. The first is the actual reward. The most intuitive thing is to give away powerful equipment, or it may provide a lot of information to give players a story with a performance. The other is a step-by-step growth bonus, such as defeating Boss Franks in Soul of the Devil and coming to a place where a lot of fortified stones fall, and players can use them to upgrade their weapons.

"Deep Fire has a lot of rewards for the amount of information. For example, after defeating the Queen, an important stage Boss, there is a long plot scene, and players will get a lot of information about the story in the Queen's room. But in terms of growth, it is not so sufficient. The heroic blood of enhanced weapons is indeed a relatively simple system, which may make some players who like equipment less satisfied. " Fire believes that it can strengthen the sense of growth in the Red Soul Boss system.

Satisfying players' curiosity about the story is also a way to encourage them to explore from this point of view, "Deep Fire" is still more like "teacup head", the battle is biased towards reaction and operation, and less biased towards growth. Although there are dozens of weapons and armor to choose from, the excitement of clearance itself is still greater than numerical value and equipment.

As for the "soul" taste that is always discussed and evaluated in the player group, but the standard is very vague, Fire gives its own understanding from the perspective of mechanism and atmosphere.

"I think mechanically, apart from the limited resurrection points and the most basic framework of resurrection, the core of the game may be the strength bar (green bar)." Because of the existence of the strength bar, players can not attack and run indefinitely, so it is difficult to face multiple enemies at the same time, and push can only be done step by step. This, combined with the complex map and the particularly attractive collection of lights, forms the iconic box exploration experience of Soul. "Deep Fire" follows similar level design principles, but because there is no strength bar, there is indeed a lack of some "soul" features at this level.

The early combat design of Deep Fire is "unity of qi and blood", and the upper limit of blood is the upper limit of strength, but fire still retains the high death penalty of "soul". This not only means that death will lose its soul and become a "living corpse"-in Deep Fire, multiple deaths will go into a state of burns-but also that players have to repeat their existing exploration process and face the resurrected enemy again. This is the most serious consequence in the eyes of fire. It is more convenient for players to "pick up the soul" in "Deep Fire", because Boss will not take the initiative to attack at the beginning, but the troll placement and "jumping music" traps along the way are designed to prevent players from parkour, maintaining the severity of death punishment on another level.

Another embodiment of the "soul" flavor is in the atmosphere. Almost all "soul" games are set in an eschatological world, full of devastation and desperate scenes. But at some point, the player may plunge into a quiet or hopeful picture. A variety of texts, dialogues and performances scattered throughout the process serve this atmosphere. Deep Fire also tries to tell such a story of "there is still hope in despair". Even if the player is still confused about the whole plot until customs clearance, the atmosphere felt along the way is enough to create that kind of "soul" flavor.

Among the desperate stories, the most touching is always the friend. "instead of saying that many games imitate the 'soul' for fragmented narrative, it is better to say that the fragmented narrative leaves room for the style of not telling the story to death and telling in detail. It goes well with the action game system." Said the fire. In his view, the focus of action games is on fighting, which is not a particularly suitable mode for storytelling. So when you decide to play an action game, you have to consider that stories, worldviews and so on all exist to explain the way you play. Fire, as the only "official", will not "hammer" something when the players discuss the plot enthusiastically, so as not to affect the ambiguity in the game. In the final analysis, atmosphere is the most important thing.

In order to pursue this atmosphere, Fire not only absorbs players' suggestions, but also insists on things that do not change, such as the final Boss pre-war running chart. Some of the designs in the picture caused some controversy among players, but he especially liked it, saying that the scene showed "something huge and profound, like the mystery of the universe" in his favorite science fiction.

After the first few days of busyness in the game, the fire relaxed for the time being. He tried to adjust the irregular schedule of game development and walked his dog named Da Jian every day as usual. The game is updated with patches almost every day, and after the update, the game's reputation has also increased, and it has been "particularly well received" on Steam. Of course, Huo Huo was happy about this, but at first he was more confident: "he is very lucky to be able to complete the work he is interested in on his own, without worrying about the abortion caused by the loss of staff, and only need to pay attention to the work itself and not worry too much about the result."

Ideally, after optimizing all aspects, he hopes to launch an official version of Deep Fire in the first quarter of next year, ending the pre-emptive experience and trying not to keep players waiting too long. As for the future plan, the hot answer is still warm-blooded: "I want to do too many games, can't wait to start a new one."

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