Text/Black Cat
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At the recent Steam New Product Festival, a "maverick" horror puzzle game, Black Sheep, caught the attention of the game Teahouse.
On the one hand, there are very few games that focus on the real social problem of "school bullying", and on the other hand, since the publisher Gamera released the game PV last year, the 2D horizontal version of the realistic style, the horror and spooky plot performance has made many players who like thriller suspense look forward to pulling up.
In fact, it is not difficult to guess from the name "Black Sheep" that this is a horror decryption game with the theme of "Black Sheep Effect". As for what is the "black sheep effect", it can be roughly understood as "the strange effect of a group of good people bullying a good person while other good people sit idly by".
Usually, the perpetrator is called a "butcher", the victim is called a "black sheep", and the bystander is called a "white sheep". However, the strange thing is that in the black sheep effect, the motive of the perpetrator is often not out of simple malice, for example, there is often a dilemma of sacrificing personal interests for the sake of the collective interests, so it often causes the strange phenomenon of "the victim is innocent, the perpetrator is unintentional, and the bystander ignores", and the final outcome is lamentable.
In the game "Black Sheep", the cause of death of Xia Mengpu, who is the "Black Sheep", has become the fuse of all strange events, and the player will play the role of bystander "Li Xiangfan", exploring adventures in the ruins of the school after the flood crossing, pursuing the shadows of the past, so that those sins buried deep in the bottom of the river can see the light of day.
The game teahouse invited the main producers of the "Black Sheep" game, Ah Guo and Wen Yun, and asked them to talk about what is "Black Sheep" from the perspective of a producer.
01
The game architecture is derived from Bishe's creativity
Teahouse: Thank you both for the interview. Please introduce yourself first.
Ah Guo: Hello everyone, I am Ah Guo, the producer of "Black Sheep", and I am also a "tool person" in the team, responsible for all the work outside the program.
Wen Yun: Hello everyone, I am Wen Yun, the screenwriter of "Black Sheep". Previously, he was a screenwriter for animation, film and television, and now he is mainly responsible for the script of "Black Sheep".
Teahouse: What kind of team is the "Finished King"?
Ah Guo: We are a relatively young indie game development team, there are currently 5 people, and the average working age is about 2.3 years. Because it is an indie game team, each member is a "generalist" and wears many hats. In addition to the program, such as art, copywriting, level design, arrangement we will all be involved in a little.
At present, there are two students who are fixed in charge of the program, and Wen Yun and I are mainly responsible for the level design, copywriting and overall planning of the game, and will also help the main beauty to share some art work.
Team members
Teahouse: Why is the team called "The King of the End"?
Aguo: That's an interesting question. I don't know if you've seen Haruki Murakami's "The Ended Kingdom"? This is actually a meme, "The Finished King" was first a team name that we used to participate in the Chinese Indie Game Competition. Literally, it's more like we're in a very EMO state every time we compete, a bit self-deprecating, and it becomes a meme.
Teahouse: Did you get any good places in the competition?
A: We've been involved in 18 and 20 years. In 2018, I still participated in the graduation project, and I received a nomination for Best Art. Wen Yun just entered the group in 20 years, and with the help of professional screenwriters, we won two award nominations that year. One is Best Art Visual Effects and one is Best Screenplay.
Teahouse: Why did you choose to make a psychological horror game with the theme of "school bullying"?
Ah Guo: In fact, the prototype of "Black Sheep" comes from my original graduation project, mainly trying to express the theme of gradual deterioration of group and individual relations in a closed environment. So in the initial scenario, we didn't want to confine the story to a high school campus.
Of course, you also know that the graduation design of the university, in addition to having an idea, must also establish a correct orientation for it, and you can understand it as something similar to positive energy. So I thought that since this was the case, I would plan the relationship between groups and individuals to the social problem of school bullying, so "Black Sheep" only continued the original idea.
Teahouse: That is to say, the campus background of "Black Sheep" is mainly to carry the theme of individual and group relations?
Aguo: You can say so. However, after I entered the society, gathered team members, and formally cooperated to develop the game, I realized that personally, I was actually reluctant to use the term "school bullying" to characterize "Black Sheep", and I preferred to return to the previous starting point, that is, to tell why the relationship between individuals and groups deteriorated.
Of course, the curious parts of the relationship between people, such as bullying, squeezing, cheating, and independence, will also be part of the game that it wants to embody. We didn't think about solving the problem of "school bullying" through "Black Sheep", but we threw this problem to the player through the story of the game, and then hoped that the players who had played it could have some thinking and some gains.
So, in terms of the overall flow of the game, in addition to the school bullying, we actually added some positive and hopeful seeds.
Key clues can be deliberately blurred
02
Psychological suspense and fear from human nature
Teahouse: "Black Sheep" should actually refer to the "Black Sheep Effect", in this effect, there are "Black Sheep" (victims), Aries (bystanders), butchers (perpetrators) these three groups, how do you think about the theme of "Black Sheep"? How do I map the relationship between the three in the game?
Ah Guo: In the original design, I did not characterize other identities in the game except for the black sheep. The reason why the game is called "Black Sheep", not "White Sheep", not "Butcher", is because we hope that the main expression of this game is that Black Sheep has become a victim of a group pressure.
For example, in the micro-closed, power-flowing environment of the campus, the black sheep is an innocent role that has been taking on group pressure. And the butcher and the white sheep, these two identities, in fact, will be changed.
Campus scene
Teahouse: I found the era background of "Black Sheep" very interesting, especially with a sense of age, how did you design and conceive?
Ah Guo: At the beginning, my bishi did not define the time of the game, but later I found that if "Black Sheep" did not happen in the past but in the present, then the whole campus environment is actually not so closed, because there are Internet factors, such as live forums, mobile phone stickers, etc., which will make the whole story more complicated and not easy to interpret.
In the past, the whole environment was more closed than it is now, you may be in a closed environment that cannot communicate with the outside world, and what we want to emphasize is the complex social relations in this closed environment. Another point is that what happened in the past may be more acceptable to the player. Because we can't change the past, and when the player is playing, it's more like the witness is experiencing what has happened.
Wen Yun: As for the sense of age, you may notice that there will be a lot of scenes and events in the game that meet the sense of age, and NPCs will also talk about some relevant backgrounds, mainly to feed the game background to a certain extent.
The details are very dated
Teahouse: At present, Demo gives me the feeling that "Black Sheep" is a game with heavy reasoning and heavy plot weakness fear and weak decryption, is it just Demo, or is the overall style of the game like this?
Ah Guo: I think the game as a whole is more inclined to the style of narrative decryption. Wen Yun and I both prefer suspense-style games, so we discussed the idea of combining reasoning gameplay during the production process. However, in the official version, what we want to highlight is the narrative decryption of these two pieces.
Wen Yun: In the area of horror, "Black Sheep" is more inclined to the psychological horror atmosphere, not so bloody and supernatural, and more wants to express the deterioration of the relationship between people, this deep sense of terror of human nature.
Teahouse: As a horizontal game, "Black Sheep" has a very realistic scene, how do you deal with it?
Wen Yun: I have a say in this area, mainly because we will go to the ruins to explore the "field investigation".
Since I made such a game, I think I still need to put myself in the shoes of physical explorers to think about what kind of psychological struggle you would have if you were trapped in such a closed environment, so I went to the nearby ruins to explore the night and took some photos and videos.
Originally, I wanted to cut these photos and videos into a realistic style game PV, but the scene is too messy, but for the art effect, it still has a certain reference value.
The picture is more realistic
Teahouse: During the course of the expedition, did anything "happen" that impressed you?
Wen Yun: I remember that one of them was an abandoned chemistry laboratory, there was a human-shaped ash, and there were four chairs around it, and I was "optimistic" that maybe the anchor was playing some kind of ghost game, right?
Teahouse: In the game, I was impressed by the changeable perspective, such as the protagonist walking into some rooms, the perspective is in a state of snooping, how do you think about this?
Ah Guo: In fact, in the design process, we divided the foreground, mid-shot and close-up, which will make the protagonist of the player's operation create a sense of peeping when placed in this scene. There's also the exploration section, where we use some first-person perspectives, all to enhance the player's sense of substitution.
Snooping perspective in the scene
Teahouse: The characters and events that appear in the demo at the moment make me feel that the whole story is complicated, can you talk about this aspect?
Wen Yun: In fact, the whole story is not so complicated, it may be that the smoke in the prologue is more, and we as producers may see the plot more thoroughly.
To give a very simple example, in the game there is a lost plot of the class fee, I saw a lot of bullet screens and comments said that they have also experienced. In fact, it is such a simple thing, falling on different people, and the ups and downs of the mentality are completely different. Some people will want to escape, some people will want to catch the murderer, some people feel that it is not about themselves to hang high, some people want to make small reports, and even some people want to plant stolen goods, and strange things can often produce many different stories.
We wanted to make a partial group portrait of the campus that can describe the relationship between people. The protagonist of our manipulation, Li Xiangfan, as a bystander who looks at the overall situation, will experience these events that have happened, and even eventually slowly come out of the perspective of a bystander to become a person who indirectly helps, and even becomes a person who actively helps the "bullied".
This is a group portrait drama between individuals and groups
03
Disruptive plots require an objective look at everything
Teahouse: In the game, I noticed that the protagonist is nearsighted, so when he looks at the text material, he will occasionally produce visual blur, why do you want to do this detail?
Ah Guo: I can interpret this. Compared with 3D horror games, 2D is inherently deficient. Because many 3D are first-person perspectives, the sense of substitution and immersion are relatively strong, and the 2D perspective does not have such an advantage. So we added some close-ups, and even added perspective blur to the close-ups, just to give players some realism. In fact, the earliest this is applied to some Flash games, including text descriptions will produce corresponding sound effects, all in order to achieve this effect.
Teahouse: At present, the game has not been dubbed, will it be added in the future?
Ah Guo: This actually has some of our own considerations, one of course because of the cost problem, the current team is still relatively small, in the cost control of this piece will be more stringent. There is also a more important thing is that the player will have a basic psychological expectation of the character, if the voice of a character is more dramatic, it will greatly affect the subsequent game experience.
However, I have also noticed that many players want to have a localized dubbing, and later we will make a separate voice package with sufficient funds to give players a more choice.
Highlights will be highlighted
Teahouse: I found that the "school bullying" in "Black Sheep" is more psychological violence than physical violence, why do you do this?
Ah Guo: Like physical bullying, more violent scenes will also have in the later stages, but we have done some control. In fact, if you have watched Korean or Japanese film and television dramas about "school bullying", you will find a very interesting phenomenon, most of the protagonists play an avenger after being bullied. I've been bullied, so I may end up killing you all with revenge, which seems very relieving, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem.
So in "Black Sheep", Li Xiangfan plays the role of a bystander, and I want him to have a more empathetic sense with the player. Because in real life, it is impossible for everyone to be involved in bullying and fierce "butchers", and not everyone can be so unfortunate, once was bullied "black sheep", we play more of a bystander "white sheep" role.
The first appearance of "Big Sister JK"
Teahouse: Is it because bystanders can see the big picture better? Because he is a bystander, he can stay out of it.
Wen Yun: It can be understood like this. The store page of "Black Sheep" actually mentions that the unknown full picture can not be assumed, even if it is a simple thing, changing different perspectives and different identities, you will get different views, and players will constantly examine their own naturals during the game until they find the real butcher in the flock. Therefore, we will deliberately throw some smoke bombs or spearheads in front of us to make the player think who seems to be the bad guy.
Who killed Xia Meng, is the squad leader, is Feng Qing or so-and-so, this will give the player a one-sided initial perception and thinking stereotype, and then we will use other perspectives to tell the whole story. Of course, this is not done to whitewash anything, but for the subversiveness of the plot. We want players to feel that the view of some things is still too subjective, if you look at some things objectively, you must understand the whole real process, so that you can make a relatively true and correct judgment.
Pinyin has a sense of age
Teahouse: Just now you seem to have mentioned that there will be different perspectives, I noticed that there are other characters in the game store, will they play different roles in the later stages?
Wen Yun: Yes, the perspective of the experiencer will change in the later stage.
Ah Guo: I can only say that other roles may be played, but the role may not be as much as Li Xiangfan (laughs).
Teahouse: In the overall structure of "Black Sheep", the real world, the surface world and the inner world are selected, which makes me feel very similar to "Silent Hill".
Ah Guo: In fact, many horizontal games will have a table, the setting of the world transformation, this structure is suitable for carrying the narrative structure and decryption, and will also make the game itself have more exploration value. If I were just laying out the straight story of what happened without letting the player explore the process, the overall experience would be more like a film and television drama.
So we did use a similar table, the structure of the table and the structure of Silent Hill.
But on the basis of this structure, we also added some of our own understanding, some backgrounds that conform to the worldview, to create a motivation for it to run in the game's story.
A terrifying and eerie inner world
Teahouse: The mirror save in the game often reminds me of Silent Hill, is that a tribute?
Ah Guo: In fact, what I thought at the beginning was that Li Xiangfan went to the toilet, washed his face in the mirror and sobered up, but at that time, this "face washing" effect was not made. I really didn't expect it to be similar to "Silent Hill", of course, in the future, we will still make the face washing effect, otherwise it may become a terrier in the future.
Teahouse: In the later stages of Demo, there is a gameplay that relies on evidence to deduce the truth, which makes me play the feeling of "Projectile Theory Broken", which feels very hardcore, how did you design and consider this part?
Ah Guo: This is actually a gameplay that Wen Yun put in, and from my point of view, the purpose of our doing this is mainly to make it easier for players to sort out the story line and have a general understanding of the key plot. If the evidence doesn't match, it's possible that the player doesn't have a general understanding of the story.
Another point, maybe at the time I didn't realize that this gameplay would make the game hardcore, I actually wanted to make the game simple, but it was precisely after the emergence of this hardcore effect that it was sought after by many players who liked this type of game.
Wen Yun: Let me add. To borrow a line from Chen Fei in the game: "If you can't even convince me, don't go out and shame people."
Because "Black Sheep" itself is still mainly narrative, for me, in terms of the rationality of the story, the logic of the characters' behavior, and the motivation, it must be able to convince the player. That's why I added such an attempt in the game, if the player can sort out the ins and outs of the events through his own arguments, then at least let him feel the authenticity of the whole story, and he will have a sense of accomplishment for himself, thus resonating.
The final reasoning decryption part
Teahouse: I see, so is this reasoning play limited to the previous chapter of the demo, or is the whole process there?
Ah Guo: There will be later, but it may not necessarily appear at the end of the chapter, and it may also appear in the middle of the chapter.
04
"There are 107 days left before Xia Meng's real death"
Teahouse: I noticed that there is a hidden Easter egg in the current game Demo, can you reveal a little bit about how to trigger it?
Ah Guo: This Easter egg is really tricky, but it seems that there are already ways to play. The trigger condition is that when you first see Xia Meng at dusk, return to the classroom and don't enter the ruins, and then talk to Xia Meng and Chen Fei more than 7 times, you can unlock hidden achievements.
Wen Yun: That means that once you enter the ruins, you miss this hidden achievement.
Flashback memories are available in black and white
Teahouse: As it is, I said how I couldn't find it. I suddenly thought that in Demo, there is a scene that needs to take sides in Xia Meng and his classmates, if you choose to believe In Xia Meng, you can't continue the game, you set it up on purpose?
Ah Guo: Yes, this design is more like an act of persecution of the environment and the group on the individual. I actually want players to realize here that if I choose to believe in Xia Meng, I will be isolated with her. If you look closely at the scene, you will find that all the tables and chairs have run to the ceiling, and there is only one desk in the scene, which actually means that you are standing against most people.
"Opposite"
Teahouse: I thought there was some hidden option, but after trying a dozen times, I still couldn't continue the game.
Ah Guo: You remind me that in the future we can put some Easter eggs here.
Teahouse: I've made a little contribution to the game. Back to the point, how long has the game been developed so far.
Ah Guo: If you count the original Bishi, it should have been more than 4 years, but "Black Sheep" is toppling and redoing on the basis of Bishi, only extracting some ideas, so if you calculate according to the establishment of the company, it will take more than 2 years.
Teahouse: How much of the total process does demo content account for at present?
Ah Guo: We envisioned creating a real teaching building scene for players to explore, in addition to the teaching building, including some other scenes of the stadium, as well as the content of the real scene, so if you calculate it, it is about 1/6 of it. Our expected total flow should be around 7 hours.
What does the final Easter egg mean?
Teahouse: At the end of the game, there is also an Easter egg that "there are 107 days left before the real death of Xia Meng", is there any official interpretation, it should not be the game release time, right?
Ah Guo: I can't disclose this at the moment, but I can only say that this time is directly related to the world view of the game, and to some extent, it may also be related to the ending of the game (mystery).
Teahouse: Okay, so let's look for answers together in the formal game, thanks to both of you for this interview.
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