The time when the first PV of "Heart Deep Dream" was announced on the B station was July 24, 2021, although the number of plays has just exceeded 100,000 so far, but the praise of players in the comment area is not few.
On the one hand, it stems from the choice of aesthetic graphics as the background and the attempt to play like Galaxy Warrior Castlevania, on the other hand, it is a domestic Buff bonus, although the first PV display content is limited, and some places are slightly stiff, but the player still gives tolerance and recognition as much as possible, and looks forward to its arrival.
However, when it did arrive, many players "changed their faces".
"Heart Dreamland" was developed by Shanghai Candle Dragon under the umbrella of Wangyuan Shengtang, and when it comes to Shanghai Candle Dragon, players must have flashed works related to the IP of "Ancient Sword Qitan" in their minds. But last year, Shanghai Candle Dragon said that it would launch two special products, one is to inherit the plot of the "Ancient Sword Qitan" series, focusing on the two-dimensional style of "White Thorn Corridor", and the other is very inconsistent with its style, that is, the protagonist of this article - "Heart Yuan Dream".
"Heart Dreamland" is the first electrocution of Shanghai Candle Dragon in the game of Galaxy Warrior Castlevania, and to put it bluntly, the first contact with many players has disappointed many people to a certain extent, and it has also shown the unfamiliar side of many teams when driving this kind of gameplay.
Galaxy-like Castlevania games have seen a blowout in recent years, and outstanding products abound. The outbreak of products has led to the quality and diversification of categories, making many products in audiovisual experience, gameplay design and many other aspects, not only with their advanced gameplay amazing, but also through unique differentiation to win the public's recognition.
The project team once admitted: "When the project was just established, the Galaxy Warrior-like Castlevania game was a niche game, but in the past two years, the excellent works in this category are like a blowout, and almost every month there will be new eye-catching works." ”
From the above remarks, it can be seen that the project team has a certain understanding of the great changes in the market, but when it is necessary to face, the project team seems to be passive and conservative, and this emotional disadvantage is largely retained in the "Heart Dream", which makes the product hard and injured countless, and even some aspects can not complete the self-consistency.
Eyes lit up
I have to say that "Heart Dream" has a good first impression.
The whole picture of "Heart Dreamland" is mainly beautiful and fresh hand-drawn style, and each scene is depicted and produced by the original artist and animator. This style gives the player a sense of intimacy, making them unconsciously want to get closer because of their healing beauty, and to reap positive experiences that spread from the senses to the mind.
Especially at the moment, many high-quality Galaxy-like Castlevania games are relatively unique in terms of graphics, but in addition to the Ori series, few products will touch the aesthetic and fresh style and play it out. "Dream of the Heart" chose this path, which can be said to be both in line with the public's preferences and wanted to make some of its own appearance.
On the official account of the B station of "Heart Dreamland", half of the submissions are about the artistic creation of the work, which can be seen with heart. The design of the heroine Renee is also very colorful, using a two-dimensional style of creation, the characters are very fine, the official also gives it the corresponding live wallpaper and standing painting display, the action is also sharp in addition to maintaining a little girlishness, in order to enhance the value of the role.
However, according to official disclosures, the early design of the protagonist is non-human, and the image is more suitable for the elf, and later tried to combine with the traditional Republican style clothing, and gradually evolved into the current appearance.
Early protagonist design
From the voice of shouting "wife" in the bullet screen, it can be seen that this kind of "taking the length of the second dimension" does appropriately break through the inherent circle of "Heart Abyss Dream", and also allows the player's attention to shift from the gameplay to other fields by a few points.
In terms of music, the performance of "Heart Dreamland" is decent, the aesthetic scene is gentle and gentle, the road encounters a strong enemy when thick and exciting, the sound effect of the game has been criticized by players before, in the first beta version, the core tone of the game sound effect tends to be ethereal, in line with the style of the work.
The story of "Dream of the Heart" is not complicated, the background is in a world created by the gods - the garden, the ancient giants in accordance with the will of the gods, maintaining the peace of the garden, and the increasingly inflated desire of human beings in a vain attempt to rob the gods of the gifts, at the expense of force. In order to win the war, human beings forcibly opened the door to the Sea of Souls with a forbidden ritual, and the flood gushing out of the door completely reduced the human kingdom and territory to ruins, and the human race suffered heavy casualties, and only the surviving immigrants survived in the ruins.
The garden garden of the bustling period in the official concept map
Renee, the protagonist to be played by the player, lost her memory during the war, and was pulled by the wheel of destiny to start a journey to explore the past and memories. The whole story is more compatible with the gameplay, and the plot will become one of the players to explore the entire big world, and as you gradually deepen, you will solve the unknown little by little.
Starting from the plot itself, the creation of gods, the guardianship of giants, the destruction of greedy human beings, all kinds of content are doubtful, and the foggy plot also makes the official more flexible in design, whether it is fascinating or not, it will have to wait for the official release to be able to see at first sight.
Sanding is also needed
A good Galaxy Warrior-like Castlevania game, good map design is a necessary condition, beautiful and fresh for the "Heart Dream" map to create a beautiful skin, and it also needs a reasonable bone to ensure the playability of the map.
The quality of the map is geometric and requires a superior sense of exploration, which on the one hand refers to the logical design of each area (room) and the depth of traps, puzzles, and hidden content on the other hand.
According to the official statement, "HeartLand Dream" will have more than ten large regional maps, and the first beta version is only a corner of the map, and its design still follows the consistent style of such games, with the connection of undesigned content to distinguish areas. For example, in "Heart Dreamland", the player will experience a boring, only forward road, or a design of taking the elevator directly up, jumping off the platform and rushing down, which are the connecting passages that isolate each interval.
What the player has to do in each interval is to find the target and solve the target, perhaps in order to let the player have a familiar process, the design of the first few intervals of the "Heart Abyss" is nothing more than the platform jumping to the exit, and defeating the designated monster in the target range. Unfortunately, the platform jump design, the consideration is not very complete, the vertical distance of most platforms is limited to the height of a big jump, the horizontal distance takes into account that the player wants to use the sprint, so it is stuck between the big jump and the sprint + big jump, the game has a multi-segment jump design, but there is no scene to correspond to the jump of other dan positions in addition to the big jump, which weakens the playability of the map to a certain extent. However, the game also thought of setting more problems for players through the sliding shovel, but it is more monotonous in terms of presentation, and I don't know if there will be new tricks in the official version.
The design of the trap in "Heart Dream" is really eye-catching, such as the way the fence hurts people is not automatically triggered according to the law of time, but will be triggered when the player touches the mechanism, which tests the player's control of the rhythm and has a hint of national style.
The game will also "hide" something in the map, and in the first beta version, the hidden content is almost always in the form of "unconventional terrain", such as the abrupt platform design of a place, or a small flaw deliberately exposed in the background. All in all, for the presentation of the sense of map exploration, "Heart Dream" has its own ideas, and there is also a lot of room for improvement.
The protagonist in the game has two main weapons, two trinkets, a secondary weapon, head, body, feet 8 equipment, the main weapon is responsible for melee attacks, the secondary weapons are magic attacks, and the rest provide attribute bonuses. Perhaps it is a first test, so the design is more monotonous, and the difference between the two main weapons, the sword and the scythe, is reflected in the attack range. Officials have said that a variety of different main and secondary weapons will be made, and there may be more changes in the official version. There is also a design for material drops in the game, but the materials do not have much meaning except for selling money, and there is no play system to support them.
The game also sets up a mission system, when the player encounters an NPC, you can choose whether to accept the mission request it makes, and the task is most likely related to the exploration of the plot and map.
The heart of the game is the player's skill map, which is still just a "curved straight line", and the official also said that there will be a richer design in the future.
Whether it is the "shielding" of the jump platform design to the segmented jump, the hidden content in the map and the mundane of the equipment mechanism, it exposes the unfamiliar side of the production team in this field. Many places may "learn their skills", or they may have a whim, but because of the lack of a rigorous framework in their minds, even if some designs are embedded in them, they will also be discounted by what is missing, which in turn will cause the logic of "Heart-Deep Dream" to be inconsistent.
There are countless criticisms
At the beginning of this article, it is mentioned that the player has changed his face, not from expectation to anger, but more like the disillusionment of dreams, and resorting to the comment area has become "picking mistakes".
In the "Heart Abyss Dreamland" development codex on station B, the producer said that the game content will emphasize the two parts of level exploration and battle content, the former is acceptable, and the latter is exactly where players criticize the most.
Below the open video of the public test, the most liked comment is about the game's stiffness.
Someone has asked relevant questions before, and in the official development codex, the producer has elaborated, first because of a "source of evil" GIF diagram, so that the official in the design of the protagonist action abandoned the spine action and use frame-by-frame hand-drawing. It can be seen that the problem of rigidity is related to "frame".
The official also acknowledges that as long as one frame of frame-by-frame hand-drawing has a problem, there will be a situation of abrupt action, and the stiffness of the action often stems from the lack of frame number. Therefore, in the two phases of the development codex, the official said that it is necessary to further optimize the action, whether it is skill action reframing or transitional action reframe, so as to ensure the silky smoothness of the action. However, from the results, further optimization is needed here.
There is also that logical inconsistency - jumping, and this place, in the past year, there have been players to give advice.
Why it feels uncomfortable to jump, before the big guy on the B station has answered, in his opinion, the jump of "Heart Dream" did not consider inertia when designing, so that the characters jump up and down to maintain the same speed, contrary to common sense.
The official also talked about the lack of blow sense in the development codex, saying that when the PV was released for the first time, it was not completely adjusted, and later for the overall strike effect, a systematic adjustment was made, including the monster's hit feedback, knockback, action, flash white, and pull.
In the beta version, the monster does have some hit feedback, such as a momentary pause when hit, some monsters that shake high before attacking, the player can directly kill the monster by combos, but the monster's hit feedback is not obvious, especially when the monster makes an action, the player's attack will not affect the monster's behavior, in short, some attacks will be counterattacked by the monster, and the player must give up the attack in order to avoid bleeding.
This lack of feedback is reflected in all aspects of the game, and the feedback of the protagonist when attacked is not obvious. Many side-scrolling action games will design a more exaggerated feedback action when the player is hit, either short-term invincible, or powerful displacement, the purpose of which is to allow the player to effectively get out of the attacked area. For each game, this degree needs to be grasped by the logic of its own game, and for "Heart Dreamland", its current understanding is not clear.
The feedback is not clear, reflected in the player experience is inexplicably continuous bleeding
There is also the feedback brought by the scene, such as when taking the elevator, when ascending, the elevator will have an obvious friction sound effect, but if it is not on the elevator, the player cannot feel whether the elevator is moving, because it does not have a friction sound caused by a gradual elevator slide, nor does it have the vibration of the chain caused by the elevator when it ziplines down, which is also a negative experience brought about by the lack of small details.
In addition, the attack of the sprint in the game is not coherent, the player's sprint, attack and other behaviors are independent of each other, only when the sprint is over, showing a standing state, or the falling state after the end of the air sprint, the player can play the attack, which castrates the upper limit of the game.
Write at the end:
"Heart Dream" is a product with strengths and weaknesses, and the strengths and weaknesses are prominent, the advantages can attract many people to play, but the shortcomings will also make many people give up it.
The reason is that although the official has completed the transformation from a lover to a developer from a name, in terms of creation, there is a lack of a more systematic understanding of such games, and many things, although there are, are relatively scattered and cannot be embedded in a reasonable framework, so natural and unexpected.
At the same time as the first test was released, the official also announced the crowdfunding channel of "Heart Yuan Dream", of which the highest grade of a 16888 yuan quota was quickly bought, and many players joked that "Heart Yuan Dream" had the support of "a big brother on the list". As of 5 p.m., the crowdfunding amount of "Heartland Dreamland" on the Modian network was close to 180,000 yuan, far exceeding the expected 60,000 yuan, and the number of supporters exceeded 1,000 people, and the crowdfunding amount on kickstarter was more than $16,000.
Real money and silver will not lie, "Heart Dream" still has a lot of room for improvement, some people believe that it will be good, some people expect it to be good, perhaps when it is officially released, it will be a new look, let the players change their faces again.