Wen 丨 light audit 丨 Shinji
Typography 丨 Feather Night
"Deconstructing serious basic disciplines in a playful way"
More than a week ago, a domestic indie game "Physical World" quietly launched on the Steam Mall, according to the developer, the game was inspired by "CIGA Game Jam 2019". At the same time, "Baba is you", a puzzle game that changes the character's action logic through the combination of map elements to finally pass the level, gives this game a very important inspiration reference.
Unlike this game, Physical World is all about physics formulas
PS: GameJam is a collective term for a type of game creation competition, which is generally a limited time creation of 48 hours or 72 hours
Of course, the developer's mental journey will not be repeated in this article, interested readers can move to know the developer personally answer:
How would you rate the indie game Physics World on Steam? - Zhihu
Without further ado, let's take a look at what design and gameplay this game has to look out for.
How do I use physics knowledge to play the game?
Before I see this question, I believe you must be thinking: I am playing games, why should I think about physics?
It seems that from various angles, you are fine with the logic of thinking like this, but here I want to introduce a concept in the classification of games: functional games (some called serious games).
"Re-understanding Games - The First Functional and Art Game Exhibition" (Source Network)
In layman's terms, in this type of game, "fun" is not the most important, it needs to carry some functions outside of "entertainment", such as "Physical World" is to use the way of the game to popularize physics knowledge, if you pay attention to independent games, this kind of game is actually more common in recent years.
So let's think about it from another angle, if you are new to the subject of "physics" in junior high school, and the teacher asks you to experience such a game, will the boring class become a little more interesting?
Graph source network
So back to the Physics World gameplay: change the physics formula by controlling the character, thereby changing the physics of the entire world to affect the character's movement, and finally reach the little red flag.
Judging from the picture performance, the player controls the cute protagonist "Black Box Lady" to carry the formula on the campus-style whiteboard, although it is limited by the slightly roughness of the team's resources, but it can still make people feel healed before the level.
The game's level design follows a certain difficulty curve: learn skills in simple levels and apply skills in complex levels. The "skill" here does not refer to the skill that the game character can unleash, but the "knowledge" that you as a player can learn by understanding the game information and can be used to pass the level.
Learn to overcome the more difficult puzzle levels step by step through the modification of physical formulas and the use of game mechanics (can not touch the edges of the map, etc.), and experience a series of levels composed of physical knowledge such as gravity, friction, buoyancy, circular motion, momentum, etc., which is the whole process experience of this game.
Talk about the improvement space of the game
Physical World, which went on sale on November 15 to the deadline for this article (November 24), has only 25 reviews on the Steam store page, showing that the game's popularity is very average.
Similarly, the game's ratings are not very high, mainly due to the poor operation experience of the player.
Speaking of operation experience, in fact, it can be divided into two aspects: operation difficulty and operation sense, and the operation difficulty is sometimes deliberately setting the numerical value of the more "anti-human", such as the more typical "Human Defeat", and even including the "I am a small fish" written in the last game recommendation, which is counted as part of the game mechanism.
Screenshot of the game "Humanity Defeated"
The operation difficulty of "Physical World" is mainly reflected in its character control is inertia, which is a hidden mechanism, some of the squares that cannot be pushed are not because the game has bugs, take two steps back, use the inertia of the sprint to push, and there is also a hidden mechanism that when the character holds the formula symbol in his hand, he cannot push the block, and these small operation details are not optimized to give people the impression of difficult operation.
Another point is the sense of operation, that is, the feedback during operation, which is mainly caused by the lack of game sound effects and the small number of frame animations of game characters.
Sound effects are actually very good to solve the problem, character walking, hitting the wall, pushing the box, are can add sound effects to make the player's operation feedback better, and the current jumping, landing sound effects are not a good match for the character, and the box rubs on the wall, the box hits the wall, through gravity to eliminate the map block, these small details are missing the sound effect on the feedback assistance.
And there are some comments criticizing the character zombie jump, which is actually the production team may not have more resources to make the animation, the character jumping jump, the air, the landing animation are standing upright, the only thing that is moving is the ponytail that shakes back and forth, and a fleeting dust bounces up at the heel when landing. It can only be said that this is "not very physical".
In addition to the characters, there are also small mechanisms like this one that violate the laws of physics for the purpose of level design:
Take a closer look at the center of gravity of the pink strip
In addition, another point in terms of game feedback is that the collision range of map elements is not obvious enough, which is widely used in various trap levels (some levels in the game use traps to control formulas). For example, here:
The player can stand on the ground, but two thicker vertical lines of the same color as the ground can be crossed, which is a very strange design for the player.
Then the analysis of the design and play experience of "Physical World" is here, and finally mention that the developer has opened up the function of the map editor for this game, compared to the map editor of other games, the editor of this game is indeed very simple to get started, very suitable for completely inexperienced Xiaobai to build their own game levels, interested friends do not miss Oh.