Game Designer is not much different from a psycho. How we made a CMAN game
/ start
Friday night, end of work day. You are in the office. What will you do?
- Go home to sleep
- Go to the bar with friends
- Go on a date
- Check why the light is on in the room
')
My name is Andrey Morevsky, I am an architect in Dodo and the person who chose to “Check why the lights are on in the meeting room”. Then I still did not know how this story will end.
I unceremoniously went into the negotiation room and learned that they were discussing the creation of a game. Hmm ... it could not interest. First, what game? We are developing an information system for a network of pizzerias. Secondly, well, who among us has not dreamed of making a game? I do not know about you, but personally I have dreamed about this all my life. Therefore, I defiantly broke into the conversation. That's what I found out. The guys decided to make their own game in order to attract more people to our stand at the upcoming conference. And not just a game, but a competitive game, since we wanted to organize a competition and give cool prizes for the best score.
All this was pure dementia and courage. None of us have ever made games. Zero experience, zero examination. Instead of ordering the development from professionals, we decided to do everything ourselves, in our free time. The reasons are obvious - to get a fan out of creating the game yourself, and not outsource the pleasure to the side.
Three months remained before the conference, and so far we have nothing but desire. Word for word, and now I’ll work out with the team what is interesting can be done during this period. We choose a genre - we go through arcades, platformers, simulators, strategies, but we reject everything. Increasingly, memories of warm lamp quests from the 90s, Space Rangers, oh, slip through ... And if you really fulfill your dream, then to the fullest. We will not just make the game, but revive the old-school text quest genre. We will do an old school text quest! There are cheers, someone is glad that we have chosen the simplest genre, and therefore we played down the game quickly and easily, everyone agrees ... Ha-ha! How wrong were we then!
But we were wrong that day more than once. It seemed to us that it would be fun to make a game in the form of a telegram-bot. All conference participants are sitting in a telegram chat, which means we provide a low entry threshold. And most importantly - do not mess with UI, since we are limited by the format of the messenger. Oh ... It would be better for us to go back and not make this mistake ...
OK. But what will this quest be about? Of course, we will choose our native element - the adventures of a programmer who went to gemba and became a courier at a pizzeria for one day. After all, all our developers pass the test of gemboy in order to plunge into the business and better understand how the information system is used in production.
So, the courier will deliver orders to the fictional city and earn money. Money will become his account, and the account will become that very competitive element. But making money is not so easy - the time for delivery is limited. And on the way, the courier will get into the most incredible situations that will “eat up” valuable time and thus prevent him from earning more. You can get out of situations by your own wit, as well as skillfully using the characteristics of your character - strength, dexterity and charisma. Immediately make a reservation that we did not want to do the classic traveling salesman problem, because we did not see this fan for our players. If the game is the need to find the optimal route, then only as a lightweight addition to the gameplay.
We drew the first version of the map on the board, having estimated which locations you can meet in any city - new buildings, old center, business quarter, hostel, elite settlement ... The typical situations that may occur there smoothly flowed out of the locations themselves. In new buildings, chaos in the area - Gopnik trying to squeeze the bag from the courier. In the old town there is a warm lamp history - grandmother calls for tea and treats you with pizza. In the hostel waiting for the evil vahtersha and pranksters, students who have nothing to do. Immediately, we made a paper prototype - cut cards with stories, took the dice and played the game that was just invented. It became clear - there is something in it. From the office came out at midnight, full of enthusiasm and excitement. Ahead were the whole weekend to do more.
For two days I did not leave the house. During this time I managed to create a working prototype of the game and test the hypotheses put forward during the brainstorming session. For example, we wanted events to occur in random order and each time add up to a new unique story. We also wanted the courier's characteristics to directly influence the outcome of the events and as the game progressed, the requirements for the characteristics grew, which means the player had to somehow pump the character.
The prototype crashed the boat creative about the life of our abilities. The random order of events most often led to an unintelligible story. And the characteristics of the courier, even if there were only three, could not be balanced. A couple of weeks we spent on brainstorming, trying to realize our ideas, but we were at an impasse ... There was not enough knowledge and experience to pull the game we had invented.
Taking on the role of a game designer, I started reading articles about game mechanics, balance, script art, collecting other people's ideas, generating my own - and combining all this into gameplay. Remember the last episode of the "Black Mirror". I became the very obsessed guy who was trying to create something really worthwhile. But I couldn’t find the common logic, the plot line, find the integral gameplay. People came, gave some advice and left. But whatever I tried, it turned out junk. A good game is a synergy of plot, atmosphere, dynamics. This is the way in darkness through mistakes and illumination, in search of the sources of the cherished fan. I embarked on this path, but I have not yet seen the light at the end of the tunnel.
It all happened at two in the morning. I sat on the balcony, drank coffee, smoked and thought about the quest. For some reason, we have convinced ourselves that the fixed order of events in each game is “stupid”, dull, unrepeatable. But what if it is not? And what can be done to make it wrong? The insight came suddenly, as if from nowhere. An old film “Groundhog Day” has come to mind, where the hero lives the same sequence of events for several days in a row. And only his actions affect what exactly will turn out for him each of them. The task of the hero was to find the correct sequence of actions to win in this fight with the marmot.
Groundhog Day was the central idea of ​​the game. Events must occur in the same order, at the same time, with the same characters. Only the courier can live this day in different ways, depending on their actions. It was a revelation that put everything in its place. All the stories in the game must be connected, each correctly completed quest leads the hero further. The player explores the world, and the more experience he has, the more correct decisions he makes.
It would seem that unrelated stories formed in several quest lines, the passage of which gives a significant increase to the score. In each story you can get the item, which is useful in the future. To go through such chains, you will have to think carefully and optimize the route.
For example, our hero delivers pizza to an elite village and finds out that a private party is taking place there (where you can probably make good money). Of course, the event will not let him. But if in new buildings he will help a woman who was attacked by gopnik, then in gratitude he will receive an invitation to a party where "there are not enough real men." However, it is not so easy to defeat hooligans - you will have to pass a test of strength and dexterity, and at the same time the charisma can seriously suffer. But if you, on the way to the new buildings, did not disregard the voting boy and helped to solve his problems, then you will receive brass knuckles as a gift, which in turn will easily and quickly solve your problems with hooligans. Whew ... like everything. Although not. You have to guess how to disguise yourself to go to a party, because even with an invitation to an ordinary courier, the entrance is closed there.
The player will have to make difficult moral decisions. On the first task you will find yourself in an ambiguous situation. Children alone at home and they have no money. What to do? Wait for the mother, who allegedly is about to come and lose time, risking not having time to deliver the following orders? Or leave, leaving children without pizza, and themselves without money? Or maybe give a pizza, having pleased the kids, but again left without money? What would you choose?
By the way, the issue with the characteristics, too, was solved simply. The mechanic with the throw of the dice against the characteristics of the character was the best fit for the chosen gameplay. Yes, it is unloved by many random. But by pumping the characteristics, we increase the chance of a successful throw and thereby control this random. At the same time, there is always the likelihood of an unexpected outcome, which makes the gameplay not so predictable.
It is a well-known fact that in the development of a game, content creation takes 80% of the time, and only 20% - writing code. We strongly felt this fact. In order to have time to write all the scripts invented, I threw the cry and found in the company of volunteer authors who helped to work out the game’s characters in detail. Together, we wrote 56 stories with a bunch of branches and scenarios. Work on one story took at least six hours. Total got 300 pages of text. Just think - this is a whole book!
Each volunteer wrote the story that is closer to him. For example, our manager Sergey from Lyubertsy took up scenarios with Gopnik. A scrum master Dasha wrote stories that occur at the conference. I took upon myself such characters as the unfriendly and tedious downshifter from the village of Gadyukino, an evil watchman in a hostel and the like. This approach has been extremely successful. The characters turned out bright, convex, alive (for example, “the most beautiful IT-girl Margarita” seems so real that I repeat once again - dear, I do not know any Margarita, I did not write this script).
What could possibly go wrong? I'm sure you guessed it. Since the texts were written by different people, all the stories turned out in a different style and did not fit in with each other. I had to work a bit out of plan — sit down and bring all 300 pages of text into a single style.
In parallel, the development of telegram-bot was conducted. When the programmers brought the first working version, we eagerly downloaded the scripts there and ... realized that this was a failure! Our highly artistic, rich in images, dialogues and descriptions of texts are completely unreadable on the phone screen. I had to scroll through several screens to read one small step of the quest. It quickly tired. Incredibly ... We wrote texts for a month and did not think to check how they look on the target platform!
I switched to round-the-clock mode again. Again I had to rewrite everything ... This time, in order to halve and adapt the text to the screen of the phone. The text must remain information for the player - where he is, what is happening and what he will be for it. I also wanted to preserve the verbal charm: humor, epithets, puns, jokes. Perhaps, for me it was the most difficult and painful stage of work.
The first alpha test once again turned the game into a pumpkin. The game had 9 rounds, in each it was possible to take 3 orders, but the first players could not stand and half of the game and ran under different pretexts. And all this two weeks before the hour X!
A couple of days ago it seemed to me impossible to cut our beautiful scripts in half, but only now I felt the true meaning of the word "impossible." On long, sleepless nights, I balanced 9 rounds, scattering stories and objects so that they fit the plot lines according to certain rules - some chains can be run in parallel, and some mutually exclude each other. Now I just did not understand how to reduce the game without forming logical holes. I had to spend another couple of nights on the balcony to put the game first at seven, then at five, and then at four rounds. I have vague memories of those times, and I sincerely do not remember how miraculously I did it. As a result, half of the created content was cut out and 30 out of 56 stories remained. But the game only won from discarding content. Everything that was not cool enough was ruthlessly destroyed, and only the best remained.
Guess what happened after the re-alpha test? That's right - I was asked to cut the game a little more. But by this time my hand was iron, and my heart was cold, and I quickly got rid of the extra round. Now there are only three rounds left in the game and she has found her “diamond” look. Already in this form, the game came out on beta test, and later on production.
Let me remind you that we chose a telegram bot, because we thought that making it easier is simple. It was a fatal mistake.
The key element of our interface was buttons. Using the buttons, the player chooses what to do next in one or another situation. But due to the specifics of the platform, these buttons are constantly trying to disappear. Or because of the network lags, the buttons came to the client after the message to which they belonged. This means that the person has already seen a new step of the quest and buttons related to the old step.
How we struggled with this is a completely separate and incredible history of crutches and tricks that our developers will tell in another article. Just annotating her here.
Polishing the game lasted until the last minute. Even at night before the conference, we ruled bugs and changed scripts. And exactly on the day and time of the opening of the conference we presented our real old school tube quest. We performed a little miracle. CMAN has been released.
1100 people took part in the conference, 300 of them passed the game at least once, and dozens spent more than 50 sessions in the game. A lot of people came to our booth, hung out with us at the after-party and thanked for the game.
All reviews were positive. I liked the game. Therefore, after a couple of months, we decided to release CMAN into the “big” world. And on this occasion they prepared a new, expanded and improved version of the game. In this version you are waiting for:
Play the game can and should be . Now the marathon is taking place, we have prepared prizes for the top ten players with a maximum rating of 7:59 pm on April 7. Each player from 10th to 4th place will receive a HUBSAN H001 NANO Q4 SE mini-quadrocopter as a gift.
Friday night, end of work day. You are in the office. What will you do?
- Go home to sleep
- Go to the bar with friends
- Go on a date
- Check why the light is on in the room
')
My name is Andrey Morevsky, I am an architect in Dodo and the person who chose to “Check why the lights are on in the meeting room”. Then I still did not know how this story will end.
First player get ready
I unceremoniously went into the negotiation room and learned that they were discussing the creation of a game. Hmm ... it could not interest. First, what game? We are developing an information system for a network of pizzerias. Secondly, well, who among us has not dreamed of making a game? I do not know about you, but personally I have dreamed about this all my life. Therefore, I defiantly broke into the conversation. That's what I found out. The guys decided to make their own game in order to attract more people to our stand at the upcoming conference. And not just a game, but a competitive game, since we wanted to organize a competition and give cool prizes for the best score.
All this was pure dementia and courage. None of us have ever made games. Zero experience, zero examination. Instead of ordering the development from professionals, we decided to do everything ourselves, in our free time. The reasons are obvious - to get a fan out of creating the game yourself, and not outsource the pleasure to the side.
Three months remained before the conference, and so far we have nothing but desire. Word for word, and now I’ll work out with the team what is interesting can be done during this period. We choose a genre - we go through arcades, platformers, simulators, strategies, but we reject everything. Increasingly, memories of warm lamp quests from the 90s, Space Rangers, oh, slip through ... And if you really fulfill your dream, then to the fullest. We will not just make the game, but revive the old-school text quest genre. We will do an old school text quest! There are cheers, someone is glad that we have chosen the simplest genre, and therefore we played down the game quickly and easily, everyone agrees ... Ha-ha! How wrong were we then!
But we were wrong that day more than once. It seemed to us that it would be fun to make a game in the form of a telegram-bot. All conference participants are sitting in a telegram chat, which means we provide a low entry threshold. And most importantly - do not mess with UI, since we are limited by the format of the messenger. Oh ... It would be better for us to go back and not make this mistake ...
OK. But what will this quest be about? Of course, we will choose our native element - the adventures of a programmer who went to gemba and became a courier at a pizzeria for one day. After all, all our developers pass the test of gemboy in order to plunge into the business and better understand how the information system is used in production.
So, the courier will deliver orders to the fictional city and earn money. Money will become his account, and the account will become that very competitive element. But making money is not so easy - the time for delivery is limited. And on the way, the courier will get into the most incredible situations that will “eat up” valuable time and thus prevent him from earning more. You can get out of situations by your own wit, as well as skillfully using the characteristics of your character - strength, dexterity and charisma. Immediately make a reservation that we did not want to do the classic traveling salesman problem, because we did not see this fan for our players. If the game is the need to find the optimal route, then only as a lightweight addition to the gameplay.
We drew the first version of the map on the board, having estimated which locations you can meet in any city - new buildings, old center, business quarter, hostel, elite settlement ... The typical situations that may occur there smoothly flowed out of the locations themselves. In new buildings, chaos in the area - Gopnik trying to squeeze the bag from the courier. In the old town there is a warm lamp history - grandmother calls for tea and treats you with pizza. In the hostel waiting for the evil vahtersha and pranksters, students who have nothing to do. Immediately, we made a paper prototype - cut cards with stories, took the dice and played the game that was just invented. It became clear - there is something in it. From the office came out at midnight, full of enthusiasm and excitement. Ahead were the whole weekend to do more.
Black mirror
For two days I did not leave the house. During this time I managed to create a working prototype of the game and test the hypotheses put forward during the brainstorming session. For example, we wanted events to occur in random order and each time add up to a new unique story. We also wanted the courier's characteristics to directly influence the outcome of the events and as the game progressed, the requirements for the characteristics grew, which means the player had to somehow pump the character.
The prototype crashed the boat creative about the life of our abilities. The random order of events most often led to an unintelligible story. And the characteristics of the courier, even if there were only three, could not be balanced. A couple of weeks we spent on brainstorming, trying to realize our ideas, but we were at an impasse ... There was not enough knowledge and experience to pull the game we had invented.
Taking on the role of a game designer, I started reading articles about game mechanics, balance, script art, collecting other people's ideas, generating my own - and combining all this into gameplay. Remember the last episode of the "Black Mirror". I became the very obsessed guy who was trying to create something really worthwhile. But I couldn’t find the common logic, the plot line, find the integral gameplay. People came, gave some advice and left. But whatever I tried, it turned out junk. A good game is a synergy of plot, atmosphere, dynamics. This is the way in darkness through mistakes and illumination, in search of the sources of the cherished fan. I embarked on this path, but I have not yet seen the light at the end of the tunnel.
It all happened at two in the morning. I sat on the balcony, drank coffee, smoked and thought about the quest. For some reason, we have convinced ourselves that the fixed order of events in each game is “stupid”, dull, unrepeatable. But what if it is not? And what can be done to make it wrong? The insight came suddenly, as if from nowhere. An old film “Groundhog Day” has come to mind, where the hero lives the same sequence of events for several days in a row. And only his actions affect what exactly will turn out for him each of them. The task of the hero was to find the correct sequence of actions to win in this fight with the marmot.
Groundhog Day was the central idea of ​​the game. Events must occur in the same order, at the same time, with the same characters. Only the courier can live this day in different ways, depending on their actions. It was a revelation that put everything in its place. All the stories in the game must be connected, each correctly completed quest leads the hero further. The player explores the world, and the more experience he has, the more correct decisions he makes.
It would seem that unrelated stories formed in several quest lines, the passage of which gives a significant increase to the score. In each story you can get the item, which is useful in the future. To go through such chains, you will have to think carefully and optimize the route.
For example, our hero delivers pizza to an elite village and finds out that a private party is taking place there (where you can probably make good money). Of course, the event will not let him. But if in new buildings he will help a woman who was attacked by gopnik, then in gratitude he will receive an invitation to a party where "there are not enough real men." However, it is not so easy to defeat hooligans - you will have to pass a test of strength and dexterity, and at the same time the charisma can seriously suffer. But if you, on the way to the new buildings, did not disregard the voting boy and helped to solve his problems, then you will receive brass knuckles as a gift, which in turn will easily and quickly solve your problems with hooligans. Whew ... like everything. Although not. You have to guess how to disguise yourself to go to a party, because even with an invitation to an ordinary courier, the entrance is closed there.
The player will have to make difficult moral decisions. On the first task you will find yourself in an ambiguous situation. Children alone at home and they have no money. What to do? Wait for the mother, who allegedly is about to come and lose time, risking not having time to deliver the following orders? Or leave, leaving children without pizza, and themselves without money? Or maybe give a pizza, having pleased the kids, but again left without money? What would you choose?
By the way, the issue with the characteristics, too, was solved simply. The mechanic with the throw of the dice against the characteristics of the character was the best fit for the chosen gameplay. Yes, it is unloved by many random. But by pumping the characteristics, we increase the chance of a successful throw and thereby control this random. At the same time, there is always the likelihood of an unexpected outcome, which makes the gameplay not so predictable.
Many editors, many styles, one platform
It is a well-known fact that in the development of a game, content creation takes 80% of the time, and only 20% - writing code. We strongly felt this fact. In order to have time to write all the scripts invented, I threw the cry and found in the company of volunteer authors who helped to work out the game’s characters in detail. Together, we wrote 56 stories with a bunch of branches and scenarios. Work on one story took at least six hours. Total got 300 pages of text. Just think - this is a whole book!
Each volunteer wrote the story that is closer to him. For example, our manager Sergey from Lyubertsy took up scenarios with Gopnik. A scrum master Dasha wrote stories that occur at the conference. I took upon myself such characters as the unfriendly and tedious downshifter from the village of Gadyukino, an evil watchman in a hostel and the like. This approach has been extremely successful. The characters turned out bright, convex, alive (for example, “the most beautiful IT-girl Margarita” seems so real that I repeat once again - dear, I do not know any Margarita, I did not write this script).
What could possibly go wrong? I'm sure you guessed it. Since the texts were written by different people, all the stories turned out in a different style and did not fit in with each other. I had to work a bit out of plan — sit down and bring all 300 pages of text into a single style.
In parallel, the development of telegram-bot was conducted. When the programmers brought the first working version, we eagerly downloaded the scripts there and ... realized that this was a failure! Our highly artistic, rich in images, dialogues and descriptions of texts are completely unreadable on the phone screen. I had to scroll through several screens to read one small step of the quest. It quickly tired. Incredibly ... We wrote texts for a month and did not think to check how they look on the target platform!
I switched to round-the-clock mode again. Again I had to rewrite everything ... This time, in order to halve and adapt the text to the screen of the phone. The text must remain information for the player - where he is, what is happening and what he will be for it. I also wanted to preserve the verbal charm: humor, epithets, puns, jokes. Perhaps, for me it was the most difficult and painful stage of work.
Users are merciless. Even test
The first alpha test once again turned the game into a pumpkin. The game had 9 rounds, in each it was possible to take 3 orders, but the first players could not stand and half of the game and ran under different pretexts. And all this two weeks before the hour X!
A couple of days ago it seemed to me impossible to cut our beautiful scripts in half, but only now I felt the true meaning of the word "impossible." On long, sleepless nights, I balanced 9 rounds, scattering stories and objects so that they fit the plot lines according to certain rules - some chains can be run in parallel, and some mutually exclude each other. Now I just did not understand how to reduce the game without forming logical holes. I had to spend another couple of nights on the balcony to put the game first at seven, then at five, and then at four rounds. I have vague memories of those times, and I sincerely do not remember how miraculously I did it. As a result, half of the created content was cut out and 30 out of 56 stories remained. But the game only won from discarding content. Everything that was not cool enough was ruthlessly destroyed, and only the best remained.
Guess what happened after the re-alpha test? That's right - I was asked to cut the game a little more. But by this time my hand was iron, and my heart was cold, and I quickly got rid of the extra round. Now there are only three rounds left in the game and she has found her “diamond” look. Already in this form, the game came out on beta test, and later on production.
Telegram - an unfriendly quest environment
Let me remind you that we chose a telegram bot, because we thought that making it easier is simple. It was a fatal mistake.
The key element of our interface was buttons. Using the buttons, the player chooses what to do next in one or another situation. But due to the specifics of the platform, these buttons are constantly trying to disappear. Or because of the network lags, the buttons came to the client after the message to which they belonged. This means that the person has already seen a new step of the quest and buttons related to the old step.
How we struggled with this is a completely separate and incredible history of crutches and tricks that our developers will tell in another article. Just annotating her here.
Instead of captions
Polishing the game lasted until the last minute. Even at night before the conference, we ruled bugs and changed scripts. And exactly on the day and time of the opening of the conference we presented our real old school tube quest. We performed a little miracle. CMAN has been released.
1100 people took part in the conference, 300 of them passed the game at least once, and dozens spent more than 50 sessions in the game. A lot of people came to our booth, hung out with us at the after-party and thanked for the game.
All reviews were positive. I liked the game. Therefore, after a couple of months, we decided to release CMAN into the “big” world. And on this occasion they prepared a new, expanded and improved version of the game. In this version you are waiting for:
- PvP sword fights with real players;
- Ultra-mega-hardcore boss on the roof of the business center, which will tear you to shreds or open access to the game +.
- New items. A smart card that opens all the doors in the city. Flashing light, guaranteeing the right of VIP-travel on any roads. Medallion of fate, whose purpose is covered with the darkness of mystery.
- New adventures in the hostel.
- And finally - a unique opportunity to "annoy" other players, forcing them to answer the questions you have invented to complete the quest.
Play the game can and should be . Now the marathon is taking place, we have prepared prizes for the top ten players with a maximum rating of 7:59 pm on April 7. Each player from 10th to 4th place will receive a HUBSAN H001 NANO Q4 SE mini-quadrocopter as a gift.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/446218/
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