Now if there was a horror game in front of you, would you try it?
Grape Jun has also thought about this problem many times, no way, in recent years, horror puzzles, rules and strange talks, has become a tool for many games to fight for a sense of existence, but the result is that similar elements are overflowing, losing their original style, so that many people love and hate-
Everyone likes suspense, brain-burning and horror, but they are afraid of being made by low-quality scripts and performances - instead of spending effort to step on the thunder yourself, it is better to brush similar ** at station B to act as an electronic mustard.
There are often players complaining about the story under similar games.
Coincidentally,I found a unique horror and strange talk game when I brushed station B:"Tired of the mountain night talk,This game opened EA on Steam some time ago.,The demo of just one and a half hours came to an abrupt end.,Let many people still be unsatisfied.。
After watching the live broadcast, many players even think that this game has a bit of "Fireworks" flavor.
What's even more amazing is that when I chatted with the producer of "Night Talk in the Mountains", I learned that this was the initial work of their team of 9 people.
Before switching to game development, Dusk had a smooth career, and after graduating from university, he was successfully admitted to the civil service and worked for 9 years. During this period, he played a lot of stand-alone works and indie games, and later often wrote stories, and took on the script outsourcing ...... many gamesOver time, he wanted to make a game of his own.
"Tired of the Mountain Night Talk" tells the story of the male protagonist hitting a ghost in the tube building.
Despite its simple story template, the game has a unique flavor from the start: instead of trying to scare the player at the beginning, it starts with a simple turn-based card combat tutorial that tells you what the core experience of the game is.
After a round of experience, I found that the battle is indeed one of the biggest highlights of "Tales of the Mountains". The specific gameplay is similar to "Killing the Spire", after the player consumes action points in the game, the player can defeat the monster through a variety of attack, defense, and buff cards, and the monster can also randomly drop the new cards required by the player.
Crazy buff, then dry up the enemy in one go".
Cards will be dropped after the battle ends.
Fighting monsters - collecting cards - fighting monsters has become the core gameplay and development cycle of "Tales of the Mountain" - yes, this game also has an element of development. Every time a monster drops a new card, there is a certain increase in value or mechanism, so in addition to building a genre and finding restraint, the player's clearance skills can also collect combat materials and clean up mobs to obtain powerful cards.
Players can build newly acquired cards into their decks.
Although the combat logic is simple, the game has put a lot of thought into the packaging.
The combat gameplay of "Tired of Mountain Night Talk" has a clear name: tired (yā) to win the battle. The word "disgusted" itself has a strong folk cultural color, meaning to suppress evil things through curses.
And the principle of the game's combat is also that the protagonist fights and convinces various ghosts through his spiritual will. The names of the cards used by players are also mostly "Bewitchment", "Vigilance", "Refutation" and the like.
At the same time, the monsters we need to convince have their own realistic prototypes, most of which come from campus weird stories, urban legends, folk ghosts, childhood shadows, and so on.
For example, the setting prototype of the game's monster cat-faced granny,**A supernatural event that was widely circulated at the end of the last century,Its monster image is also consistent with the description of the story.,Cat face、Body、Infinite power ......In order to highlight the terrifying temperament of the monster, the production team also deliberately chose **cat as the design prototype, and iterated several versions based on this.
The design of the monster Jinhua cat is more ingenious, and its skill set fits the background story: in the background story, the Jinhua cat is a monster that first confuses people and then sucks away its essence; The Jinhua cat in the game will give the player a hand through a feint, and when we think it is weird, a slam (the player will take a lot of damage when he has too many cards) immediately teaches everyone to be a man.
It almost nibbled me to death.
In addition, based on the combat packaging of ronpa (using language as a means of attack), the game additionally designed a rather unique imaginary destruction mechanic. That is, each monster has a different color of text floating around it, providing it with various bonuses, or deducting the player's health per turn, or providing damage bonuses to monsters; Players can use cards to break through these words and weaken monsters.
Refutation can dispel conjecture at the same time.
Deals damage to the monster itself.
Every unbroken conjecture.
will have the protagonist draw a card.
The addition of the imaginary destruction mechanism makes each monster have several text parts that can be replaced, and with it comes the combination and change of monster skill mechanisms, design ideas and combat experience; At the same time, players can also have more fighting styles and genres to choose from, such as smashing the monster itself in one go, or breaking the text first, step by step.
In addition to the simple skill effect, the imaginary destruction also strengthens the atmosphere of "Tales of the Night" as a horror game - after all, the jittering and floating text can still bring a lot of visual tension to the player; The text content can also quickly show the character characteristics of the monster and assist the game's narrative content.
That's right, "Tales of the Night" does not actually have an obvious linear narrative, but will cram a lot of fragmented narratives into such a module as imaginary destruction.
For example, after completing the stage plot, players can freely explore within a certain range of the game map, collect battle props, decryption items, and various fragmentary copywriting stories, etc., so as to piece together the themes and clues under the current chapter.
Copywriting materials scattered all over the place.
The stories that have been collected can be seen in Notepad.
At the same time, there are also a lot of plots, clues and tutorials in the game from conversations with NPCs.
For example, the character Gu Du is a young and old, straight-mouthed little girl, although she doesn't care much about the male protagonist, but she is always in the safe house waiting for the player to return, introducing us to the game world view, combat ideas, etc., and will also provide blood recovery items after our defeat - similar to roguelike games, continuous defeat and death is also an important way to promote the content of "Tired of the Mountain".
After being defeated and dying, the ancient capital gave us a health regeneration item.
Due to the extremely low cost of defeat, neither the maps we have explored nor the items carried by the characters will be affected, so players can find out the maps, clues and monster distribution in the chapter by constantly saving and reading files, collect battle props, and then challenge monsters after being fully prepared.
Of course, some people may share the same concerns as me: will frequent defeats and save files reduce the horror tone of the game?
According to the production team, players can expect to keep reading files, after all, driven by curiosity, any mechanics in the game that can be explored by this group of players may be thoroughly played.
At the same time, they believe that the horror of "Tales of the Mountains" is on two levels: cognition and numerical values. The former is like the players who were startled by the terrifying monsters and movements at the beginning; The latter is a sense of crisis that is accidentally killed by a monster.
The protagonist dies for the first time.
The design idea of their games is to transition from the former to the latter, and then recreate the cognitive horror through new maps, new plots, and new monsters, and the cycle forms a closed loop of experience - many souls-based games have a similar design.
To this end, they have prepared more than 30 hours of experience content in the full version of "Night Talk of the Mountain", including more than 70 kinds of monsters and more than 400 maps - all of which are crammed into a small silos.
Why does "Nighttalk of the Mountains" stuff so many things into small scenes? Why is the tube building so stuffed?
Here, the production team used a fairly simple folk concept: ghosts hitting walls. The seven-and-a-half-month tube building runs through the two worlds of yin and yang, and can naturally connect many parallel spaces full of ghosts and monsters.
Although the concept is simple, they put a lot of thought into the details to make the scene of the tube tower have a sense of depth and culture, so as to have a foundation to carry more content.
The cat's motion design once made me think it wasn't 2D
For example, at the beginning of the project, they went out many times to study the architectural style and life atmosphere of the southeast coastal cities. This makes the artistic details of "Night Talk in the Mountains" quite down-to-earth, with the breakfast shop on the side of the road, the bus stop signs, the clutter and bicycles piled up in the corridors, the tattered small advertisements on the shop doors and telephone poles, and the drying racks hanging randomly on the railings, ......These designs even make people think that they are real-life scenes, as if there are really NPCs living in the game.
Swipe left and right to view.
For the more than 400 maps mentioned above, such as offices, schools, ......They will use a map design similar to Metroidvania and Souls, through looping and twisting route planning and many shortcuts, so that players can experience the full content of the game as low as possible.
There are already shortcut tunnels in the demo.
Although there is only one theme scene in the game demo, I believe that with the superposition of more than 400 maps, these theme scenes will in turn strengthen the tube building, or the depth of the entire game, and finally reach the point where the sparrow is small but has all the organs.
The same simple concept, complex design, and the aforementioned hypothetical destruction.
I believe that in the eyes of many people, these floating words are like miscellaneous soldiers around monsters, and they are over; After we have been cultivated, or defeated a few more rounds, we can defeat the monster directly without even paying attention to these words.
But in reality, the design of imaginary destruction is quite complex. As mentioned earlier, the text it shows not only matches the monster's personality and mechanics, but also has an impact on the current battle through skills or status; The black text that appears when the monster is defeated in the end also needs to be eliminated by the player using rational or emotional cards.
Attack emotional statements with orange cards and rational statements with blue cards.
Using it incorrectly will deduct the player's health.
Once a similar choice is made, the game's hidden values will change, which will gradually change the game's graphics style, the player's combat experience, the fate of the NPCs, and even the direction of the main story - in short, imaginary destruction is a systematic mechanism that runs through the whole game, but it is just as complex as the map of "Night Talk in the Mountains", but it is only the tip of the iceberg that is shown to the player.
The solution of simple concept and complex design may also be applied to the design ideas of the entire horror game category.
How should this be understood? I briefly discussed with Twilight a few elements of a horror game.
At the heart of one of the horror games is the unknown. It's a fairly simple concept, but it's not easy to really understand the concept and design content that will give players the creeps.
For example, a brief disassembly. Terror is first of all the imagination and mental tension under the unknown. Let's recall that many American horror movies and Chinese zombie films, the most terrifying thing about them is the wind and grass before the ghosts appear?
Creating a little movement when the player is nervous is also a common solution used in many horror games, such as jump scare, which is the most effective means of this type of design. There are many similar designs in "Night Talk of the Mountain", such as the player will suddenly be startled by the contents when opening a cabinet door;
Or simply there is nothing in the cabinet, and it is pitch black, which can also make many people think about it.
Secondly, what goes further than the unknown is the sense of disobedience that originates from reality and is different from reality, which will always give players a sense of unease, which is an atmosphere building method that many Chinese horrors will use. For example, a mediocre couplet is weird when it is pasted in the corridor;
The wedding scene that should be festive, I always feel creepy when I look at it twice.
What impressed me the most about "Night Talk in the Mountains" was that there were black-and-white photos of many people hanging on the walls of the safe house - it was not scary, but there was always a sense of weirdness that could not be talked about.
In the end, it is to condense the above two points into concrete things, so as to achieve more effective reach. For example, everyone may know a folk warning: don't look back, this is actually a typical case of condensing horror into rules, and many horror stories, film and television dramas, and games will use this rule.
When it comes to rules, the popular rule talk in the past two years is also a condensation of the two elements of the unknown and the violation - you will find that most of the rule talk is about daily life, but it reveals a strange feeling that is different from daily life, which is where the violation lies.
And in addition to the strange talk of the rules, there is also the adventurous spirit of everyone to challenge the rules: don't let me do this, I want to.
Rules and challenging rules may be an important factor in the popularity of such strange stories. I also encountered such a design in "Night Talk of the Mountain", such as the monster on the ground can block the protagonist and cause damage to it, and I tried a few more times to see if I could walk through it;
Also, the ancient capital once told the protagonist not to run away when encountering ghosts, and when we explore, we can encounter a white ghost: the faster we manipulate the protagonist to run, the higher the ghost's desire to attack; On the contrary, if the protagonist stands there and does not move, following the rules, the ghost loses its attack power.
Of course, as long as you run fast enough, it won't be able to catch up with you.
In fact, if you think about it, the design idea of other types of games is the same, the core of the concept simplification is to lower the threshold of understanding for players, and it is best to use one sentence and one thing to represent the theme, characteristics and core of the game, rather than piling everything in front of the player;
The original intention of the design complication is to make players feel surprised at all times, and there are always hooks to attract them to explore independently, which is like emergent design, and many game designers' ideas and easter eggs can be packaged as players discovering and trying out by themselves, which not only ensures the mystery and style of the game, but also satisfies the curiosity of players.
Just like the cat in the game, the art image is just a pair of eyes, but everyone who has played the game may know that it is a cat.
Of course, simple concepts and complex designs are not a one-size-fits-all formula, and really good content still requires creators to constantly polish and trial and error, and we can only be patient before they can really dig out mature works.
Game Grape Recruitment Content Editor,