2022N. Game NetEase Game Developer Summit was held online from April 18 to 21, and Jiang Yuyuan, a NetEase game design expert and producer of "Ace Racing", shared the combing of the game from project establishment to product core experience establishment, to product innovation and content expansion.
In the product "Ace Racing", you can see the figure of domestic cars, and you can also see that there are national infrastructure projects such as Guizhou Beipanjiang Bridge in the track, it can be said that "Ace Racing" uses its own way to record some of the microcosm of China's current development. In this project, we can see that games are not only a way of entertainment, but also a window for cultural display.
Here's what we've seen:
Hello everyone, my name is Jiang Yuyuan, I am the producer of the racing game "Ace Racing", "Ace Racing" is the first racing game developed by NetEase. The content I share today is mainly based on the research and development process of "Ace Racing", from project establishment to core experience to product innovation and content expansion. Starting a racing game from scratch is like starting an engine from scratch, stepping on the gas, and driving on the road, so I'll use "driving" later in the article as a metaphor for the development phase of the project.
Ignition: About "Starting from Zero"
The first is the ignition stage or the project establishment stage.
About starting from scratch, I would like to talk about my own story first. I studied mathematics, a standard science man, and I chose economics for graduate school, and this theory transfer was the first time for me to start from scratch. After I graduated with a Ph.D. in 2015, the right job for me might be to work in a university or to go to some research institute or financial institution. However, at that time, I especially liked to play games, so I came to NetEase as a new recruit to do game planning, and this change of career for me can be regarded as the second time to start from scratch.
After joining NetEase, the first project I was first exposed to was an MMO project. Three years later, in 2018, I started a project to do Ace Racing. From the traditional MMO category to the racing category that the company has never done before, this is actually the third time for me to start from scratch.
Why talk about this? We found that when interviewing students, we were often asked questions: some students felt that they had not studied game design before, had no foundation in this regard, although they also liked games, but worried about whether they were suitable for this position in the future. I think my experience is the best answer to this question, as long as you like it enough, you can always have the courage to try from scratch.
Speaking of projects, it doesn't really make much sense to start from scratch in a results-oriented market, and more often than not, starting from scratch means falling behind in the starting point and progress. Even when I was told that I would make a racing game in the future and share my R&D experience with everyone, I still thought it was unrealistic.
But in NetEase's open and free R&D environment, we can more easily explore new projects. I remember in 2018, I went to ask the leader if he could do a racing game. On the one hand, there are no market opportunities for racing games like this realistic picture, multiplayer racing as the gameplay; on the other hand, the team is also willing to invest. The leader's reply was: "You can try it, and it is best to try it seriously", so we had the first demo team.
Getting Started: Polishing the Basic Experience
In the initial stage, polishing the basic experience is a process: everything is difficult at the beginning, and it is challenging to get involved in a new category that has not been developed at all, especially the racing class with a relatively high barrier to entry.
First of all, we need to carry out a series of art and technical pre-research, including the pre-study of vehicle materials, the pre-study of physical systems, the pre-research of some algorithms for PBR and other lighting, which are inseparable from the support of NetEase's technical and artistic teams.
In addition, we also need to understand and get close to the user as much as possible. This is thanks to NetEase's research team, who have organized dozens of user surveys and street visits with the product to help us understand users, narrow user distances, understand user demands, and test our DEMO or products.
And as planners, what we're going to do is gain insight into and analyze the underlying experience of racing. How do you dive deeper and analyze the underlying experience? I think this can be divided into three steps: the first step, we plan to play the game from the player's point of view, to have an in-depth experience of racing and racing games. The second step, that is, as planners, we must disassemble and sort out the rules of our experience from the perspective of planning. Finally, from the perspective of user-oriented, we can find the player's demand scenario.
The first step in research is to figure out what we're going to do, the second step is to do what we do, the mechanism behind it, and finally why we're doing it. Below I will illustrate our process with the "drift" behavior common in racing games.
The first step is to familiarize ourselves with the drift experience. When it comes to racing drift, our feeling is that pulling the handbrake, hitting the direction, the car is over, this level of familiarity is not enough. First, we have to combine a large number of games with frame-by-frame viewing of real-world video, and secondly, thousands of game experiences to understand this fast movement process. Of course, the best thing to do is to try it myself, so I went to take a drift driver's license and went to the field to learn how to drift, set the circle, control the throttle, and so on. Not only myself, but since the project was established, our project team will choose automotive-related projects. For example, going to the go-kart stadium to race, going to the real car experience hall to test drive or watch the car show, etc., this is also a valuable opportunity to cultivate the interest of the team and familiarize yourself with the experience.
After full experience and understanding, we have some combing of the essential rules of drift, which is essentially the movement of the front of the car and the direction of the speed is inconsistent, this core variable is the angle between the front direction and the speed direction, we call him the drift angle, the front direction represents the driver's steering intention, is he going to go left or right? Does he want to expand the drift angle or reduce the drift angle? The direction and size of the speed represent the hysteresis feedback of the physical system.
At the same time, after disassembling, we can also have a better understanding of the steps of drift. The first is the drifting stage, the front direction of the car is rapidly rotating, and the direction of the speed changes little or simply does not change, the size of the speed will be rapidly reduced, and the drift angle will expand at a relatively fast speed. The second is the stable fixed circle stage, the front and speed of the car are basically in the same direction, the drift angle remains basically unchanged, and the speed is attenuated at a relatively low rate. Finally, there is the rewinding stage of the front of the car, the reduction of the drift angle, and the increase of the speed.
Therefore, drift can be divided into three stages: starting and drifting, fixing circles and retreating drift. What's the use of disassembling to that level? In this way, we can better discover some of the player's needs for drift skills, which is the next step for us to design for the user. For example, in some gentle bends where the road is wider, the player may need to turn at a faster speed and at a smaller drift angle. Reflected in the variables we disassembled earlier, it means that the drift angle stabilizes at a smaller angle during the fixed-circle phase, allowing the drift to be faster.
Based on this appeal, we designed the inertia drift technique, in the whole process of cornering, the drift attitude of the vehicle is relatively small, and the speed is relatively fast, which is an operation method that adheres to the slow bending and cornering. For example, in some occasions where the road is relatively narrow and the curve is very urgent, the player needs to quickly turn the front of the car and quickly decelerate to complete the corner and avoid collision, that is to say, in the drift stage, the drift angle is expanded faster than the normal drift, so that the speed is also faster attenuated, which has the skill of brake drift in the game.
For example, if the player gets up early, or drifts to the middle and finds that there are obstacles or other vehicles in front of him, at this time, he needs to do some emergency avoidance actions, and he needs to adjust the drift route. Then we can temporarily stop the rotation of the front and speed of the car during the fixed circle stage of the drift, which is the technique of straight line drift in the game, and avoid the collision of the inner bend by stepping on the brakes during the drift.
The in-depth experience coupled with the meticulous disassembly, we observed the existence of more needs of the players mentioned earlier, so as to give players a better feel and basic experience framework through this multi-link and multi-level skill design.
Of course, the whole process is not an easy task, in order to meet our design expectations, we iterated back and forth on 4 versions of racing physics, from the most common commercial physics engine, to the increasing involvement of scripts to completely rewrite the entire physical environment, the program students also invested a lot, and we planned to polish the basic experience together.
Overtaking: How products innovate
Let's talk about the overtaking session. Although as mentioned earlier, we can learn from the art performance and basic experience and catch up quickly, the racing game is a very mature category that has developed for more than 40 years, and the core experience is actually quite solidified. Then we, as a new product of an old track, must have some innovation to attract players, that is to say, innovation is quite necessary for us. This is like the domestic car industry, although it can actively learn car-making technology from abroad, such as the introduction of joint ventures, etc., but it is more necessary to keenly grasp the opportunity of overtaking in curves like electric vehicles, in order to achieve anti-overtaking.
Fortunately, if we look at racing games from the familiar online/mobile game perspective, we can find some innovative entry points. We've tried a lot, and I'm here to share three innovative ideas that I find useful.
The first point is to introduce the experience of multiplayer cooperative confrontation. We have observed that with the networking of games, mainstream game categories have found multiplayer cooperative confrontation gameplay that is strongly integrated with networking mechanisms. For example, shooters have found tactical competitive modes, and action games have found MOBA modes, which are characterized by both confrontation and cooperation between players. However, the multiplayer experience of racing games basically exists only on the confrontational side, always a single-player kernel game, and players do not need each other. Then when we play racing, we will feel that running faster than me is hanging up, running slower than me is not very good, and neither of them wants to play together.
Based on such pain points, we have some thinking, and found that in the real racing race, because the conditions of a team's drivers and cars are different, there will actually be a division of labor between teams, such as some drivers to protect our teammates through the wake, or through the card slot to hinder each other's overtaking route.
In addition, in games such as MMOs, it is often through the method of class design to establish mutual needs between players, such as tanks, DPS and healing, and classes need each other, and they need to team up to be able to play dungeons. So in "Ace Racing" we also tried to design vehicle positioning, so that different positioning vehicles work together and perform their duties, they have a race position suitable for rushing to the first place, there are interference positions that can hinder the opponent's vehicles, and there are auxiliary positions that can provide buffs for the whole team of vehicles.
What about the introduction of vehicle positioning? After we introduced vehicle positioning in the test, the retention of the entire test increased by about 10%. This 10% is an absolute value not a relative value, and it can be seen from the data in the current game that the player's vehicle selection is basically a three-point trend, that is, playing racing, playing interference, playing auxiliary, and their number of players is generally equivalent. This changes the traditional racing experience of only competition without cooperation, and from the feedback of players, it can also be seen that the introduction of more vehicle positioning has increased the possibilities of the game.
Second, lowering the threshold gives players easier goals to achieve. From the perspective of a mobile game, racing gameplay is an easy to frustrated and difficult to play. What we do is a mobile game, which is ultimately a way to lower the threshold of entertainment, and it is the pursuit of more people to feel the fun of the game.
However, in the racing game, because everyone is staring at the finish line, there will be many people who can't run to the finish line and are disliked, disliked by teammates or themselves, so we often use "one person is happy, five people are frustrated" to describe the experience of this racing game, or to use the popular words of the moment, it is "very strongly rolled up". So even if we push the team mode in the game, in such a play environment, the player will not necessarily play, and our thinking about this is too strong to not run to the end of the frustration. Can we give players an easier goal to achieve?
We think of the story of Tian Ji's horse racing, Tian Ji and Qi Wang did not put all the horses in one race to run, but divided into three catches and fights. Inspired by this story, we designed a counterpoint-win system, a 3V3 duel in which our first and the other side's first match, our second and the other side's second, our third and the other side's third, we do not look at the absolute ranking nor see if he completes the game.
Why does matching win or loss lower the threshold for getting started? Because in this format, even if I am the slowest one in our team, I only need to win the slowest one on the other side, which provides a very full contribution to the team. Obviously, this format provides a more attainable goal for players of different levels, and also allows players with certain levels to play together, which encourages team racing even more.
From the data point of view, before the introduction of match-to-match wins, the proportion of team matches was about 32%, and after the first introduction in the test, this proportion immediately increased to 60%. With the launch of the game, this percentage increased to 86% after players learned more about the rules of the event. So even looking at the entire racing category, the gameplay of Ace Racing is still unique, we are a team racing game.
The third point is about the depth of gameplay, that is, the part that is difficult to master. Racing games are a speed-first category, and his pursuit is relatively single, that is, only the pursuit of fast. But on the one hand, the faster the speed, the easier it is to collide, and the blind pursuit of speed will eventually bring about such a bad experience as bumper cars. On the other hand, when the player only wants to play the fastest car, it will lead to the homogenization of the vehicles in the game is more serious, and many vehicles will become useless scrap cars, so in this case, the depth of the game is relatively insufficient.
Our thinking about this is that in the earliest combat games, in fact, there is only one dimension of attack power, but through the expansion of countless works, settings such as moves, martial arts, magic and so on are introduced, and the depth of battle is expanded little by little. So could we improve the racing game in a similar way, such as adding skills to the vehicle?
This idea sounds crazy, can you find some reference support in real life? Actually, there is. We find a lot of works about vehicles, films and television, and the impressive often shows that vehicles use some incredible moves, stunts, and reversals in the process of the game, such as drainage ditch bends in "Head Text D", whirlwind storm tornado in "Four Wheel Drive Brothers", hook claw weapons and rocket cars in "Fast and Furious", etc. On the one hand, these things break through the audience's imagination and make the game more ornamental. On the other hand, it makes the race itself more suspenseful, and after having the design basis and realistic endorsement, we boldly designed a vehicle move for each car, and there are currently more than 50 vehicle moves in our game.
The introduction of racing moves, on the one hand, allows us to achieve a progressive threshold for getting started, for example, some vehicles that can avoid collisions will be easier to get started. It can turn the negative feedback brought by the collision into a positive feedback when zooming in, that is, it will jump forward briefly when the vehicle collides, which allows the player to run with great confidence when facing unfamiliar maps. Other big moves, such as changing the steering radius of the vehicle, put forward higher operational requirements for the player's track line control.
On the other hand, we also revitalized the player's demand for multiple vehicles, some big moves are suitable for some specific tracks, some big moves have a restrained relationship, and some big moves are very challenging to the player's release timing, which makes more vehicles in our game come in handy. So in terms of effect, the introduction of this vehicle move is fresh and intuitive, and it also strengthens the playability and depth of the game, which also has obvious appeal to users.
The vehicles in Ace Racing are more similar to a hero or a character, each with his own stunts, and can be combined with different lineups to get a rich game experience, which is also a unique game feature that distinguishes it from all other racing games.
On the road: go steady and far, and make the road wide
With a solid foundational experience and innovative elements, we can drive on the road. Racing games are relatively long-lived, can operate for a long time, and we also hope that Ace Racing can go steady and farther, and make the road wider and wider, so in this part I want to talk about some of the things we are already doing or want to do.
1. Make your own car
First, we are seriously trying to design vehicles, at the beginning of the project we are mainly doing foreign licensed cars, but doing what we find that if the game is full of licensed vehicles, then the player remembers the car itself, not our game. What's more important is that we find that there are a lot of players who like the style and design of the vehicle very, very much, and they can't find a license or they are not real vehicles at all, such as some sci-fi, concept, retro, etc., so we start to try to design original vehicles ourselves.
In the game, we refer to these vehicles that do not exist in reality as fantasy camp vehicles. So how are these vehicles designed? Our students in charge of vehicle design, there are graduate students graduated from well-known automotive design colleges at home and abroad, there are also people who have done real vehicle design in the depot, they will use the design language and tools of the automobile industry to do our fantasy vehicles, the output of vehicles and skins are also very popular with players, fantasy vehicles occupy a considerable part of the proportion of our vehicles, probably and the real vehicle is the proportion of five or five. The coexistence of real vehicles and fantasy vehicles allows us to meet the preferences of more players, and also makes the vehicle style in the game more colorful and colorful.
2. Tell our story
Second, "Ace Racing" is NetEase's first self-developed racing game, and it is also one of the few self-developed racing games in China. We want to tell our own stories more than foreign racing works. We have ushered in the era of vigorous development of the automobile industry and overtaking in curves, our domestic cars are rising, our new energy vehicles are leading the world, and we also want to record this historic moment through games. "Ace Racing" has been cooperating with many domestic car manufacturers, including Wuling, BYD, Lynk & Co, Xiaopeng, etc., we can not only experience the most domestic vehicles in the game, but also experience "Ace Racing" through the steering wheel and foot pedals in the intelligent central control platform of some new energy vehicles.
That's true of racing, and it's the same with the track. We can see that in recent years, the country has made very brilliant achievements in road and bridge infrastructure, such as the world's tallest bridge in the picture - Guizhou Beipanjiang Bridge, there is the Tianmen Mountain 99 bends known as the most dangerous winding mountain highway, there is the historically significant Xinjiang Duku Highway, the 318 Sichuan-Tibet Line, which is known as the most American road, and the beautiful Alishan in Taiwan Province, etc., all of which are reflected in the scene of "Ace Racing".
epilogue
Finally, since the launch of the project for more than half a year, the number of our players has exceeded 30 million. This number is still growing, and we sincerely thank every player for their support. 80% of these 30 million riders are the first to contact NetEase Games, so it can also be said that "Ace Racing" has brought an incremental market to the company. More than half a year of online operation is both tense and exciting, and the whole team has been given an opportunity to grow rapidly.
In 2022, we will not only work hard to introduce better content and gameplay to players, but also expand overseas. We are confident of achieving better results on this track. Okay, that's all I've shared. Thank you.
N.GAME is an annual industry exchange event organized by NetEase Interactive Entertainment Learning and Development, which has been successfully held for seven sessions so far. The theme of this year's year is "The Future is Now", inviting 20 heavy guests at home and abroad, university scholars to gather together to share industry research and development experience, cutting-edge research results and future development trends.