Zombie Rollerz: Pinball Heroes is a game that combines Roguelike elements with pinball table gameplay, and when you first see this game, a little older players will think of the three-dimensional pinball game that came with the Windows platform in the early years, where the player controls two shrapnel pieces left and right under the screen, repeatedly tapping the pinball to achieve a higher score.
The basic operating principle of "Rolling Bullet Zombie" is similar to that of three-dimensional pinball, but it is very different to play, more action elements, rich skill combinations, and a roguelike mechanism that can be repeated at any time makes players sigh "a cup of tea, a pack of cigarettes, a day in the pinball table".
But there are many things to talk about about this game that mixes classic arcade gameplay with popular meat pigeon elements, such as its predecessor "Zombie Rollerz", which won many awards when it debuted in 2016, such as the development team behind the game Zing Games, one of the founders of the team, Ye Ding, was china's first generation of game practitioners, he studied overseas after graduating from college, and has many years of console game development experience. Zing Games was founded in pursuit of more creative freedom.
GameRes had the pleasure of interviewing game producer Ye Ding about the production of Rolling Bullet Zombies, the repopularity of classic arcade gameplay, and the development of indie games.
Make a fuss about "width" instead of "depth"
Zing Games has already made a demo for "Rolling Bullet Zombies" in 2018, but the official production began in the second half of 2019, before that, the team has been busy with the iterative update of the mobile game "Zombie Rollerz".
From "Zombie Rollerz" to "Rolling Bullet Bar Zombie", although it follows the same art style and basic pinball table gameplay, there are considerable differences between the former, the former is a mobile game, the latter is mainly for the PC/host platform, the former is the continuous operation mode of F2P, the latter is a buyout single machine, the former is self-developed and spontaneous, and the latter is found a publisher.
For a small team like Zing Games, operation will actually consume a lot of energy and time of the team, so when making "Rolling Bullet Zombies", Ye Ding decided to devote more time to research and development, "After all, to do Indie, try to do something you like."
However, from mobile games to consoles, Zing Games does not simply change the business model of the game, it must fully take into account the differences in user groups and operation methods on different platforms. So Zing Games has made a lot of changes to the host/PC, which focuses on the changes in the way it operates:
"If you play with the gamepad, you can't let the player sit idle, you have to let the player get up manually, so you do a lot of things related to the action, such as releasing various skills." In the previous version of the mobile game, the player only needs to stare at the shrapnel on the line, and the skills are mainly passive, and the player will not be required to operate a lot. Console games pay attention to the input of operation, and many skills have been greatly changed, the purpose is to keep players busy and realize the fun of action games. ”
The game's key settings show that the operation of Rolling Bullet Zombie is much more complicated than the traditional marble gameplay
"The fun of action games", which is precisely one of the core elements that distinguish "Rolling Bullet Zombie" from traditional pinball games, it lengthens the baffle, increases the aiming line, reduces the speed of the pinball, reduces the threshold of high difficulty operation required by the traditional marble - the rebound aiming accuracy of the response in a short period of time, while giving the baffle attack ability, adding many active skills, so that the player's game goal changes from hitting a certain point in the fan area to how to use the existing resources to clean up the enemies on the scene.
These resources include environmental damage in the map, the player's marble skill, the damage of the baffle, etc., so the scene of "Rolling Bullet Zombies" is quite lively, the player's hands are not idle, and they also need to learn how to match the skills to play combos, so as to achieve the effect of quick kills.
In essence, "Rolling Bullet Bar Zombie" is an action game based on the play of the pinball platform, and its core charm lies in the combination of various fancy pinball skills and diverse skills, at present, the game is equipped with hundreds of skills.
This attribute is perfectly adapted to the popular Roguelike gameplay, and the purpose of Zing Games' incorporation of roguelike elements is to hope that players can try different Builds. In addition, Roguelike is also more friendly to their small team, if the game adopts a linear mode, they need to do more levels to let players try more skills, and will also destroy the player's game experience, because "it is unrealistic and unreasonable for players to experience nearly a hundred skills in a dozen linear levels", "In the case of knowing that the game will have hundreds of skills, Roguelike is a better choice".
As for how to make the Roguelike element react with Zing Games' pinball table gameplay, Zing Games has a clear idea, and Ye Ding describes it as "backwards".
That is, to infer specific development work from the actual needs.
For Rolling Bullet Zombies, there are two main requirements, one is the length of a single game, and the other is the game rhythm.
"For example, if I play this game tonight, it will be less than an hour and a half. Then we start from the length of time of one and a half hours, thinking about what kind of growth process the player will have in this time, how many levels need to be played, and how long each level will take. ”
In addition, it is also necessary to take into account the length of time inside and outside the level ("Rolling Bullet Zombies" uses a combination of large map exploration and game levels, a total of four chapters, four random maps), limiting the player's game time to avoid the situation that a single level of time is more than 2 hours. At present, the game has a total of 4 chapters, and there is not much time and even the depth that can be mined in a single game, but the game's rich skills can always bring players a different sense of freshness.
Map of the first chapter of the game
In the player's single game growth experience, it is also a retrograde process, including the number of skills obtained, the chance of obtaining, etc., which basically serve several relatively large expected data.
"At what point in time, at what level, what level the player will encounter, what kind of skills they will get, these are basically preset, although there are random elements, but they are random under a framework."
So in "Rolling Bullet Zombies", players actually have a relatively clear play rhythm, at the beginning to test the player's pinball accuracy, after having a must-kill skill, test the player's skill combination, after opening the first chapter, more difficulty will be added, such as the number of enemies, health, the complexity of the map, or new elements.
Zing Games uses a similar approach to verifying the game's numerical balance, using AI to test the balance of various skill sets and the rationality of level design.
In general, Zing Games in the production of "Rolling Bullet Bar Zombies" the overall idea is quite clear, they know their own advantages and disadvantages, the advantage is that they have many years of research and polishing for the pinball gameplay, and have the experience and resource accumulation of the previous mobile game; the disadvantage is that the team is small, so it is necessary to spend energy on the blade, the main research and development, the use of Roguelike mechanism, in the horizontal width of the game rather than depth to make a fuss, to maximize the charm of the game skill combination.
How many more possibilities are there for classic arcade gameplay?
"Everyone is doing it with a particularly 'safe' addition, using a very traditional and familiar old core gameplay set that has been verified on the mobile phone platform, such as match-3 + push map = 'Candy Legend', connection elimination + push map = 'Jelly Splash' and so on." In a media interview in 2016, Zing Games said.
From today's point of view, this statement still has a certain market. Take the pinball gameplay of "Rolling Bullet Zombies", the single-player game field can have pinball table + Roguelike, or there can be marble platform + Galaxy Castlevania ("Yuku's Island Express"), and in the mobile game field, there are also games such as "Monster Marbles" and "World Catapult Story".
GameRes' recently reported "Solitaire Home Design" is also made with the classic "Instant Solitaire" card play + decoration, narrative and other Meta elements.
But this does not mean that the classic gameplay itself has a long-lasting vitality, to be precise, there is a sustained appeal in the ever-changing field of mobile games.
Ye Ding said that when promoting his own game, the label "Pinball" is actually a double-edged sword.
"People will preconceived not think it's a marbles game, not a game that mixes moves, skills, and a lot of builds. We thought about this question at the beginning when we were making the mobile game version - whether to call ourselves a marble game, so that players will have a psychological expectation. But in fact, pinball is only a basic operation, and the action and RPG on top of it are what we really want players to pay attention to. ”
In recent years, the creatives of some popular mobile games in the United States can also be found, they almost do not disclose the core gameplay of the game, either taking the "eye-catching" traffic route, or promoting the peripheral gameplay/meta layer of the game, such as Royal Match and Solitaire Home Design.
In the field of Japanese mobile games where classic gameplay + peripheral design prevails, we can also see more interesting phenomena, such as "Monster Marbles", marbles gameplay + RPG, such as "Zhilong Maze", match 3 + RPG, these two games have about ten years of operating years, and are still regulars on the Japanese iOS best-seller list.
Monster Marbles has been ranking at the best-seller list of iOS games in Japan for the past year, basically maintaining within 20, and from time to time rushing to the top of the list, the game was launched in 2013
In the past year, the ranking trend of "Zhilong Maze" on the Japanese iOS game best-seller list has basically remained within 40, and it also wins the top best-selling place from time to time, and the game was launched in 2012
However, not all mobile games that inherit classic gameplay have similar fates, and it is not uncommon for poor operation, poor flowing water, and closure of services.
CyberAgent's "My Princess Is the Cutest" 8 years 8 years 6th 6th Tsuki Empress 运营, 该该戏运戏运戏弹徏个 8th 8th 8th 8th 8th Zheng Moon Xiamen 运营该戏戏
GameRes believes that when two games that use the same classic gameplay have a very different fate, there must be a lot of experience behind them that can be deeply studied and learned from, including the improvement of classic gameplay, as well as the design and packaging of peripheral gameplay, and more important operational factors. You know, the "Zhilong Labyrinth", which just turned ten years old a few days ago, has launched more than 8,000 characters, which is twice the number of "ウチの姫さまがいちばんカワイイ" for 8 years, and the common numerical expansion of Japanese RPG mobile games also works on "Zhilong Maze", but it does not prevent it from squeezing into the Top 10 of the Japanese best-seller list for a long time.
The 10th anniversary of The Labyrinth of Wisdom Dragon
However, for Zing Games and even Ye Ding, these contents may not be the focus of their attention, even if they once ran a mobile game with marbles + RPG gameplay.
"The last mobile game spent a lot of time on the periphery, including operations, data tracking and so on. Later, I thought that since we had all decided to do indie, why not focus on the game itself. So although Ye Ding has been observing and learning from some domestic and Japanese commercial mobile games, he still positions himself as a bystander, and he prefers to do what he likes to do, of course, this is also related to Zing Games' team genes and the Game Development Environment in North America.
Specific to the game "Rolling Bullet Zombies", when they follow the traditional pinball table operation, they also need to think about how to modernize it, such as incorporating new elements such as Roguelike, and how to face the problem of user base again.
"Introducing traditional gameplay to the new generation is actually a very difficult thing, it feels like a remake, a remake of a movie, although it is quite interesting, but it is also accompanied by considerable unknowns."
This is actually a profound summary of Zing Game's launch of "Rolling Bullet Zombie", because it is not only released on Steam and NS, but also on Apple's Arcade game subscription platform.
Dissuasion of indie game development
Ye Ding admitted that the specific game content of "Rolling Bullet Zombie" has been completed in mid-2021, and the biggest pressure in the entire development process actually comes from platform adaptation and submission for review. After signing a contract with Apple Arcade, Zing Games has to design additional touch screen operations for Apple devices, and has to adapt to different devices and models, and at the end of 2020, Apple's launch of new chips must keep up with the corresponding support work, which has a certain impact on the small team, whether it is the development schedule or personnel arrangement.
The Arcade version of Rolling Bullet Zombies was the first to come online
This is not the end, apple Arcade users and PC, console users are actually quite different, so some Apple players after playing "Rolling Bullet Zombies" do not understand why after each failure will lose everything and then start over, they do not have the concept of Roguelike. This forced Zing Games to modify the Normal difficulty specifically in the Arcade version, allowing players to continue levels indefinitely, replaying levels after each death.
Whether it's introducing the traditional pinball table gameplay to a new generation of players, or incorporating PRG, action, roguelike elements into the basic operation of pinball to make it more modern, any improvement of Zing Games is actually in a state of feeling the stones across the river, they have no reference objects, nor do they have enough resources to do market verification.
While interesting, the unknowns of innovation are large. Maybe that's the norm for indie game development.
Ye Ding repeatedly stressed that since he decided to do Indie, he had to do what he liked to do, but he has always maintained a dissuasive attitude when it comes to doing indie games, whether it is in 2016, when he first entered the field of independent games, or in 2022, when he has been in this field for many years.
"It's always been hard to be Indie, not the hard it has been in the last few years." "To survive better, the team had to think about commercialization, product quality, development costs, and capacity constraints that were contrary to the free-flying development state that Indie fantasized about. Although many successful products can be seen on the market, there are many more products that have been buried. ”
Of course, Ye Ding also mentioned that these problems that need to be considered also have a considerable relationship with the team's genes and the team's environment.
epilogue
From "Zombie Rollerz" to "Rolling Bullet Zombie", it reflects not only Zing Games' research on the classic gameplay of the pinball platform, but also the epitome of the development of Zing Games, an independent team, in the ever-changing game market, they must face many trade-offs and considerations, how to adapt to the new era, how sustainable development of small teams, what is their pursuit of Indie... There is no uniform answer to these questions, after all, the road always has to come out on its own.