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

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: intelligence Ji (ID:paperji), author: Jiayan, Audit: Qianli

In February this year, the "Atomic Heart" from the Russian branch of Mundfish Studios gave domestic players a little Soviet science fiction shock.

The game's bold imagination of the future without the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the inexplicably high mechanical NPC all show the energetic aesthetic of the Russian people. Even the lack of playability and other defects seem to fit the "stereotype" of Mao flavor design.

According to the general understanding of Russian games in China, there were war games such as "War Thunder" in the early years, highlighting a big scene and a tense and exciting rhythm; in recent years, there has been a lot of searching and grabbing of Takov's like works, fps "escaping from Takov." The style is very recognizable.

Of course, the Russian concept of the game is more than just the hairy smell of gun oil, metal and hard core. Apart from the above masterpieces, they also have their own views on small and medium-sized independent games. Just because the audience of independent games is often not as extensive and the discussion is limited, it is inevitable that people do not understand the developers behind them.

Like before, the famous bizarre publisher Devolver released "Circular Warriors", which relies on novel play ideas that build maps to help brave people cycle their experience equipment. But it took me a long time to learn from some news that it was developed by my Russian brother. At that moment, I probably understood why the game was so rough and interesting.

Recently, a work gave me a similar feeling: "thriller 3: Ingrid Confessions", which was released on steam last month.

This is the third work in a series of small independent games from Russia, which solves puzzles horizontally, focuses on touch and mobile exploration, and uses props to solve organs and puzzles. Although the number of reviews is small, it has a positive rating of 97% in Steam. The first two parts of the series are also very well received, and their reputation is quite good.

Interestingly, for the whole series of "thrillers", the game is several orders of magnitude more popular on domestic video sites such as bilibili than on the Steam platform. Live commentary videos can be played as high as 100,000 or even millions.

After all, the theme is a dark fairy tale, the game flow has scary elements but not too much, and the process of solving puzzles is compact without procrastination, which satisfies the curiosity of light players and netizens.

Therefore, it is a series of games that you may have seen, but have not played, and it is not easy to know that it is developed by the Russians.

Just in time, we contacted the game production group creepy brothers ("scary Brothers") and talked briefly about their games and some digressions.

About the origin of the name "scary brother". According to their original words, the original name of the studio "Deqaf" has nothing to do with it now. I asked "what does Deqaf mean?" and the answer was "not at all", just "on a whim". Later, they found that the "thriller" series had good word-of-mouth and commercial performance, so they simply changed the name of the studio to the current one. Brothers means "brothers", referring to three key members who are not related by blood. To tell you the truth, it smells like hair.

The three brothers have worked together to develop games since 2010. Despite the initial decline of Flash at that time, they still produced as many as 50 Flash games, which can be regarded as high production. Most of them can still be found on the flash game website, which is the kind of cartoon but exquisite flash sketches. I chose two simple games, and there was the simplicity and happiness of playing "flat Kids" in 4399.

With the end of the flash era, the three brothers self-taught Unity began to move to Steam, continue to play their respective roles as programmers, art, and sound effects, and discuss play design together. Years of friends and working experience have turned the three "brothers" into three "uncles", but they still often hit it off in development. In the years of the epidemic, several people lived in different cities in Russia to telecommute, but did not slow down the development of the game, but maintained the efficiency of launching a "thriller" for about a year and a half.

"after all these years, we are still very enthusiastic about developing games, which can be said to be a part of life," they said.

But just transferred to steam, the three brothers are not clear about the direction of production, following the ideas of the flash era, they developed several different types of Mini Game, strategic, horizontal action adventure, the actual response of these games in general, but a closer look at the game can find that the completion of the game is not low, at least the sale is clearance, the theme is a variety of.

Until the "thriller story", they found an area of expertise. Their childhood love of exploring and solving puzzles, coupled with the fact that when the programmers of the three brothers were at school, the first game they developed was a dark fairy tale theme, so they decided to create a dark fairy tale puzzle game.

The reason why I said earlier, it is hard to imagine that the game is developed by Russians, and there are also factors in the selection of fairy tales. "thriller" uses European fairy tales that are more familiar to readers all over the world, rather than native Russian fairy tales. In the early days of the game, there is no clear story about the material, but you can see the classic images of children picking mushrooms, witches and huts in the woods. In the last two works, the concept of fairy tales gradually became clear. The second generation was Grimm's fairy tales, and the third generation was further mixed with elements such as Pinocchio and the Tooth Fairy.

The stories of the three works are independent, but through some scenes and plot details, you will find that they are in the same worldview and are inextricably linked. So that those careful players who play all the way can get an extra sense of achievement.

As for why the three brothers associate from European fairy tales to dark fairy tales, you may also know the reason. Famous as Grimm's fairy tales, the original target audience of the Grimm brothers is not children, but to "tell some stories to adults in a fairy tale tone". Now for those fairy tales that are suitable for children, the inner truth of the story may be similar, but the wording must be whitewashed and processed. If some well-known fairy tales are restored to their original posture, they will be "unsuitable for children" and "dark".

For example, at the beginning of the game "thriller 3", the little girl Ingrid waded through the dirty water with bread pads and fell into the underground world, which was taken from Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "the Girl stepping on Bread". The original description of this story is very dark, and if it were made into a game scene intact, it would be more curious than it is now.

("Girl stepping on Bread"), while the game's reference to well-known fairy tales is "enough", the three brothers want to arouse interest from deja vu settings, and then use their own development to present to players.

With regard to game plot creation, they have their own methodology. They will brainstorm a lot of text based on classic fairy tales, and then screen out what they think is good, like panning for gold. It may be through such an operation of "choosing the best among the best" that the protagonist Ingrid of the third generation can be portrayed as a super brave little girl who conforms to the aesthetic taste of Mao and drags her words.

As the protagonist, Ingrid is true in the face of those dark fairy tales of demons and ghosts, as well as dark curiosity scenes. The dangerous act of standing up to death flag in other thriller games seems to have failed in Ingrid.

Like what to negotiate terms with monsters who are several times bigger than her, and directly diss monsters are ugly, no matter. Because of this strange setting, players will be curious about the following deployment. The atmosphere of the game process is also able to strike a balance between dark people and passionate adventures.

The art style of the game has a medium-to-high level, which puts the dark fairy tale's cold curiosity in place. However, from the past works of the thriller brothers, we can see that their style is not fixed, but continue to explore their own style a long time ago, after many types of works try and optimize.

This omnivorous temperament in creation is also reflected in daily life. When I asked the three brothers what games they usually play in their spare time, they first mentioned two high-intensity competitive games, "Watch Vanguard" and "FIFA", because they often gang up. At the same time, it also lists many other types, which finally seem to be afraid of my misunderstanding, specifically adding the types they have been developing, "like adventure, puzzle solving games, we also like very much."

(watch Pioneer actually costs a lot of yuan from an art point of view.) in "thriller 3", the actual playable content of the game is made up of puzzles. Puzzle design actually inherited their design ideas in the Flash era, very retro. In other words, "not very reasonable" belongs to the kind of riddle that is solved in order to understand the riddle. They will not deliberately pursue the coordination with the scene, the plot to design puzzles, so a little counterintuitive, let players find it difficult.

Especially when you do not understand the realistic archetypes behind some of the images in the scene, this difficulty will become more prominent, and from time to time there will be situations that are completely confused, but there will be a strong sense of achievement after unlocking.

This ancient and hard-core puzzle development idea leads to the "old difficulty" in the development process is not how to design the puzzle. On the contrary, they had a lot of fun in the specific development, and only found that they often got stuck when they gave it to their relatives and friends around them. As a result, the most difficult part was to repeatedly test the feasibility of the game and the difficulty of balancing the puzzle, which took them a lot of time than they expected.

Even "in the last two weeks before the game is released, we are still making a lot of changes to introduce reasonable tips." Even so, it's not easy to find puzzles when you play now. Have to sigh again, it is right (Mao) taste.

Fortunately, with the development and accumulation of many works in the past, the rich "thriller 3" has the longest series of processes. Under the premise of not serious clearance, from the first generation of about 2 hours of customs clearance, rose to 6 hours, the whole puzzle intensity online, the introduction of good and evil system and multi-outcome content, so that players have their own strange experience of writing dark fairy tales.

Not only that, the game in line with my inherent impression of the Russian game, on the basis of some Russian unique delicate emotions, which is not easy to give those hairy works.

After talking about the game, I had a little digression with my thriller brother.

For well-known international reasons, Russian developers and players are not doing very well right now. Many Western game developers have stopped selling games in Russia, and the withdrawal of development tools software has made Russians become "legitimate victims". The environment for making and playing games is getting worse and worse, and many Russian practitioners choose to leave the country.

In an article published by the Russian satellite news agency in February today, the author mentioned that the Russian government has been actively supporting the domestic game industry since last year, but it will take time to see results.

The great wheel of the times, not only those big companies feel the impact, the more small and medium-sized game developers, the easier it is to be crushed before making a sound.

On the steam page of the thriller brothers production group and on the official website, in addition to drawing the three brothers, there is also a sentence written:

Try your best to live and make good games.

I took this sentence to ask the three brothers, they said that the operation of the studio is not optimistic, naturally there is no publicity funds, as in the past, we still need to rely on existing income to barely support day-to-day operations and new work development. In order to actually receive revenue from games on the game platform, they had to change banks and open accounts in another country.

The three brothers think that the key lies in whether they are good at "maintaining enough motivation", while motivation is a "very complicated thing". "in Russia's independent gaming industry, there are also many dreamers who want to make the game they have in mind." but because of the changing environment, they will gradually forget their original goals. "

So, it's the same question that has been asked by countless people thousands of times: how to stick to your original mind when the real difficulties come. They believe that, first of all, they want to "try their best to make every game", and then they can think more-to get people's attention and be bought by their favorite players.

As a result, we talked about our peers who play games. When it comes to the favorite Russian game of the last two years, the three brothers have been given the "Black Book". It sells well on steam and is well evaluated by domestic players. Interestingly, this is also a dark-style game that depicts a series of adventures that took place in tsarist Russia. It has a cartoon but heavy artistic style, while the story mainly shows the folklore of the Slavs.

Obviously, this is a highly recognizable Russian game, in line with most Russian imaginations of a game that resonates with history. Although the national character is very strong, as long as the game is good enough, it can still be favored by players all over the world.

At present, the thriller brothers are still fully committed to the development of the next new film, which will be the new "thriller story". They mentioned that one day, if they had time to develop another game, they were pretty sure it would be an exploration game or an interactive novel game, "after all, Russian players prefer both."

As one of the many independent Russian studios, we can foresee it from the scary brothers. In the future, we will play more "Mao Wei" games. It's not about politics, it's about nationality, it's about cultural differences, it's not about messy ideological barriers--

It's only about the art of games.

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