The first public account of "Game Design Theory" was released
introduction
The game analyzed this time is "Double Point Hospital", a simulation business game with a good reputation and sales. I will use the framework to analyze the characteristics of the level and disassemble it around the six-layer structure of the game I talked about before.
"Two-Point Hospital" disassembled
The level framework is shown above, and then disassemble the level design of this game. Levels are designed to influence player behavior and create a gaming experience. Let's take a look at what gaming experience it creates and how it influences player behavior.
The core experience of Double Point Hospital is to run a "nonsensical" style hospital and treat bizarre diseases in bizarre ways.
And deal with various events in the process, and frequently get positive feedback that helps to achieve goals.
Experience the loop
An experience loop is an experience obtained during a game's behavior loop.
The big behavior cycle of "Double Point Hospital" is reception->diagnosis-> treatment-> charges, and a patient needs to go through these four steps from the beginning of entering the hospital, most of the behavior is carried out around these four steps, and most of the level design is also carried out for these four steps.
I said before that my game mechanics design steps borrowed from Xu Rongzhe's seven steps of storytelling, and then I thought that I couldn't directly move to design the game, so I made some adjustments and left only five steps.
Next, the experience loop will be disassembled in detail.
- Goals and changes in them
Initial goal: just entering the game, the theme and gameplay of the game will allow players to form an inherent purpose of "operating a hospital to make money", players need to master the basic money-making process, that is, play and understand the game.
Medium-term goal: Master the gameplay, unlock all rooms and diseases, and know that hiring good employees is the ultimate goal at this stage.
Later goals: Eventually start researching various extreme gameplay, or make more money, or recruit the best employees, or build beautiful hospitals.
The goal of the game must be switchable, otherwise it will definitely be intolerant to play after a long time, and a good game is played to understand is the beginning.
- hinder
Obstacles are the limitations of the mechanics on the player.
"Two-Point Hospital" has several restrictions that have a great impact on behavior: space restrictions, time restrictions, funding restrictions, various index restrictions, assembly line efficiency restrictions, and item restrictions.
Limitations such as "obstruction" are always there and do not occasionally appear and disappear occasionally. But it is generally not too difficult, and a simple treatment can be a long time without paying attention.
Some obstacles will increase or weaken little by little as the game progresses, some deliberately, and some will happen naturally, which is a very important part of the game experience.
For example, as the land is unlocked, the space limitation is less and less felt; The efficiency of the assembly line is that with the increase of patients, the processing speed of some departments is becoming more and more unable to keep up, and it feels more and more obvious.
This is not an exhaustive list, but an example of a complete chain of behavior will be given later.
- Step up your game
"Effort" is what the player needs to do.
Under the normal "reception->diagnosis->treatment-> charge" cycle, players need to build a reception desk so that patients can enter. Rebuilding the general practice clinic, preliminary diagnosis. Reconstruct various diagnostic and treatment rooms, recruit employees to complete the functions of each room, and finally charge a fee.
During this period, there are also various emergencies and tasks, which need to be dealt with one by one, all of which are things that players need to do.
In business simulation games, the things that players can do can be roughly divided into two categories: decision-making and operation.
Players have a clear purpose when doing these two types of things, most of the time they are solving short-term problems, and getting positive feedback every time they solve them correctly, which is the key to the fun of this type of game.
Because there are so many things that can be done, I won't give them all here.
- accidentally
Accidents are the key to the fun of the game, and games that fully meet expectations are bound to be boring.
The accidents of "Double Point Hospital" become richer and richer as the level progresses.
In the beginning, it was just staff challenges, solving patient problems, VIP visits, etc.; Scene characteristics such as volcanoes and lightning were added later; Later, the plague was added, which required the player to operate the vaccine.
However, the design of the plague is not very good, and it can be ignored directly in the later stage, which has no impact on the progress of the game. The value of K coins also collapsed, resulting in no motivation to do employee challenges in the later stage.
Different accidents require players to do different strategies to mitigate the problems caused by accidents. For example, volcanoes and lightning need to recruit more handymen. Although it is not well designed, this design idea is no problem and worth learning.
- finale
The ending is to reach the ultimate goal of a game or to achieve the perfect state of various statistics. Long-term games generally have a variety of goals for different players to pursue.
The ultimate goal of "Double Point Hospital" is roughly as follows: all rooms are full, all staff attributes are perfect, and the hospital is built beautifully.
As for achievements and career goals, the relative stimulation is not so strong, and most of the process can be completed incidentally.
- example
Briefly describe the complete behavioral loop of "Two Point Hospital".
Establish reception desks and recruit assistants to receive patients; Then it is necessary to set up a general practice and recruit doctors for the initial diagnosis; The doctor's diagnosis rate is not high, and it will be sent to other diagnosis rooms, and other doctors or nurses need to be recruited; If the diagnosis rate is high to a certain extent, it will be sent for treatment, and the corresponding treatment room needs to be established.
This is the big logic.
There will be various events in the middle, players need to deal with it in time, otherwise there will be negative effects, even serious negative effects.
The initial goal of "Double Point Hospital" is to complete the hospital's star mission and get a certain reward, and it has basically been hanging on the task bar in the early stage, and players will continue to pay attention.
There are also two temporary goals in the process of this goal:
VIP inspection of the hospital is to reward honor and K coins, it is easy to complete in the middle and late stages, and the reward is also unattractive due to the collapse of the value, but there is still a certain completion value in the early stage.
Employee challenges are tasks that employees occasionally post, such as training 3 employees, hygienic reaching 70, a specific room at level 4, etc., and reward money or K coins after completion, which is of little value in the middle and later stages.
The design methods of the above two tasks have reference value, but in fact, due to numerical problems, the middle and later stages of the tasks have no value and need to be improved.
In order to achieve this goal, there will be some "obstacles": indicator constraints, space constraints, and so on.
In order to keep all the indicators in good condition, players need to do some "effort". Build rooms, research technology, unlock items, design layouts, and more.
It's boring to work hard to reach your goals, so design for something "unexpected": unexpected events.
Emergencies are the key design of this game to create tension, and the impact of emergencies is not large at first, and it will gradually be amplified if it is not dealt with for a long time.
For example, volcanic eruptions will make the temperature too high, and the machine will be damaged or even burned if it is not treated for a long time; Patients will vomit when their hygiene is poor, and vomiting too much will make other patients vomit, and the whole picture becomes very touching, and the happiness of employees and patients rapidly decreases, resulting in employees resigning.
This design approach that has been increasingly influenced is worth considering.
After "obstacles" and "accidents" are solved through "efforts", the initial goal is achieved. At this point, it has been roughly understood, and the initial goal has shifted to the medium-term goal - to recruit the best employees.
On this basis, players will study advanced gameplay to enter the next behavior loop and get a new experience loop.
For example, study the construction layout, build nurses' rooms together, and improve operational efficiency; or study room settings, turn off the diagnostic function of psychiatric rooms, and improve treatment efficiency; Wait a minute.
After that, the whole game is played and begins to pursue the post-production goal.
This article is not to explain the gameplay of "Double Point Hospital", but to illustrate the steps and logic of level design, and the details of the gameplay will not be too much, and will be explained in detail in the next article.
Multi-dimensional disassembly
The previous article listed several classification dimensions, and this article used them to position "Double Point Hospital" and see if it can be enlightened.
- Level node relationships
The node relationship between the levels is a network level, each hospital is independent of each other, and the other hospitals are still in time while playing in one hospital. Only when new rooms, diseases, and skills are unlocked in the early stage, there is an indirect relationship between the levels.
The advantage of this node relationship is that it is convenient to iterate new content, and it can also reuse previous levels to increase the game's durability. That's why the game is so playable, with new content unlocked and you have to go back to play it again.
The node relationship within a single level of "Two-Point Hospital" is also a mesh level, and each small area needs to be unlocked for money, and then it can be built on it. After unlocking the new area, you may also need to reorganize the old area.
The characteristic of mesh levels is repetition, new nodes unlock new content, and you need to go back to the old area to do something. Not only business simulation games, Hollow Knight is a similar behavior loop.
This enables a way to unlock advancing content layer by layer, while highly reusing content to save development costs. At the same time, it can be seen that the level node relationship has nothing to do with the game type.
- Number of participants
The main content of "Double Point Hospital" is a single-player game. Although it adds friend gameplay, the weight is not high, so I will ignore it for the time being.
- Inter-player relationships
The cooperative gameplay of Double Point Hospital is completely cooperative, and the challenge gameplay is completely competitive.
It turns out that the core mechanics of the game do not affect the relationship between players who design different players in the upper gameplay.
- Immediacy Requirements
A new level classification standard has been added to distinguish between real-time and non-real-time games. The immediacy requirement is whether players need to interact online at the same time.
"Two-Point Hospital" is non-instantaneous. Similarly, Clash of Clan.
In many cases, non-immediate design is limited by the external environment. Games that need to be online at the same time will certainly have a better experience, but the matching is difficult, followed by the platform is not necessarily suitable, mobile games or handheld phones may not always have the Internet.
- Game type
From the designer's point of view, strictly speaking, the game genre is a game experience, which cannot be regarded as a classification standard for games.
It's just that for a long time everyone has formed a mind-set, most of the time you can classify a game into a certain genre, indicating that the characteristics of the game type are more obvious, and analyze it as a classification dimension.
"Double Point Hospital" is a business simulation game, his core experience is to simulate running a hospital group, and get the business fun of operation in the process.
This kind of fun is not necessarily limited to business simulation games, and can even be obtained in games such as "Fantasy Westward Journey", but it cannot be said that "Fantasy Westward Journey" is a simulation management game.
Several other dimensions, such as the relationship between level nodes and the number of participants, cannot be "both yes and are", so the game type does not conform to the MECE principle and cannot be used as a classification standard strictly speaking.
Level composition
Let's break down "Two-Point Hospital" in a little more detail to see how it ensures that the experience circulation maintains flow. Due to the large amount of content, all the details of the game will not be listed.
- route
From the process of playing, it can be experienced that the difficulty of getting started and understanding the whole game is low, indicating that the designer's positioning of the game is like this.
The scene of Double Point Hospital also reflects this, with a smaller area, unlike some management games where the player is free to play the construction route. Routes are the connecting roads between the various unlocked areas and have less impact on the game experience.
The location of the area has an impact on the length of the route, but the player cannot change it, so it has no effect.
- region
The area has a slightly greater impact on the game experience, and because the designers don't want to make it too complicated, there are not many rooms that can be built in an area, so it is easy to plan, and it is much simpler than simulation management games such as "Roller Coaster Tycoon".
The characteristics of each area are exactly the same, only the size and proximity are somewhat different. The impact on the strategy is relatively small, players need to pay attention to building lounges and toilets in individual areas, and planning to prevent patients from gathering too much, resulting in a concentrated negative outbreak in the event of an epidemic or poor hygiene.
It can be seen that the designers do not want to make the difficulty of the game reflected in the "planning and utilization of space" that is not directly targeted, which may be the pain point of most light users of simulation management, and weakening this difficulty can make it easier for most players to get started.
- Worldview
When I say worldview, I mean visual and textual design that creates a sense of substitution.
The overall worldview of "Double Point Hospital" is nonsensical and funny, and the packaging of diseases and treatment methods is very interesting.
For example, "hidden head disease" requires a "head pulling room" to treat, where the patient is tied to a machine, rotated a few times and then pulled out the head.
The whole world view has a good sense of substitution, in addition to diseases and treatment methods, the appearance and action of NPCs are also more cleverly designed, which can make players feel novel when they first see it.
The dialogue broadcast in the game is equally interesting: "Please don't die in the hallway", "The health supervisor is coming, please pretend to be healthy", and so on.
The nonsensical style packaging makes the whole game process easier and also matches the difficulty positioning of the game.
- Scene art
The art style of "Double Point Hospital" is a bit of a cartoon version of tilt-shift photography, and this visual effect is still very fresh.
The scene layout is decent, because it is not a game that focuses on art, and it does not require much effort.
3D games, you can freely control the angle of the camera, all make the whole game more immersive.
- Music sound effects
Also decent, the plot of "Double Point Hospital" is not heavy, so there is no need for music to set the atmosphere.
- mechanism
As a simulation management game, in order to ensure the game experience, its mechanism is very complex, mainly reflected in the many details, which is also the design focus and difficulty of the gameplay to the game.
Because its mechanics are so complex, I'm going to write a separate article detailing the level mechanics of Double Point Hospital.
I won't list the gameplay and the various nouns as "disassembly", that doesn't make sense, I'll explain how it ensures the experience loop, and listen to the next breakdown.
summary
Based on the previous level design, this article disassembles the classic simulation management game "Double Point Hospital", which is experimental in nature, and sees if the level design framework can be applied to most games.
This article is not yet complete, because the mechanics of this game are much more complicated than they seem, and there are many details that need to be described to explain why the levels of this game are fun, so I will write a detailed description in a single article.
But at present, the benefits of multi-dimensional disassembly of levels can also be seen, which may disassemble a reusable "structure" or "design method" from a certain angle, somewhat similar to the concept of modularity, which can be reused or used as a reference when designing other games.