Reborn Game Pioneer

Chapter 352 Cat Leo's Carnival
Gu Feng's "Cat Leo's Adventure" is like this. When the player dies once and thinks he has seen through the designer's routine, it won't be long before he is tricked again.

Players have been tricked one after another, and come back again and again, from being full of confidence to looking like a trap, this game is a good example of how a persecution paranoia is developed.

Players with relatively average psychological endurance will quit the game after dying a few times or ten times. There are also many players who are really perseverant. Qu Yuan said, "I have a good heart, and even though I died nine times, I still have no regrets." But these players "don't believe in the inadequacy of Yu Zhi, and they still refuse to accept it even if they die a hundred times." Each and every one of them has their IQ tortured by the game and still believes that they have seen through everything, and they will be sure to do it again.

Even if a master of the game like Nie Tian takes action personally, even if he plays with extreme care visible to the naked eye, Gu Feng can always take advantage of him from unexpected angles time and time again.

Sometimes when I encounter a slime coming towards me, I thought I would just jump over it or trample it to death, but it turns out that the slime will also jump when the person jumps. The result of running in both directions is that the person dies, but it is still alive. Look at the whole process of it. The same smiling face, when you first saw it, you laughed at it for being stupid, but now when you look at it again, you always feel that it is laughing at you for being stupid.

Sometimes I see a water pipe and I think there is a pit. I wander there like crazy for a long time, but I find that jumping on it is no big deal. As I walk forward, I encounter a monster coming towards me. I turn around and jump on the water pipe to avoid it. , Unexpectedly, a bead of scissors suddenly burst out of the water pipe at this time, so people died... "I knew there must be a pit here!" You shouted out those words of wisdom that seemed to be endless.

Sometimes when you encounter an NPC, the NPC takes out his sword and stabs you to death on the spot, then jumps over his head again. As soon as you say "hot chicken" in your mouth, the NPC suddenly turns around, attacks you with a sword, and kills you again!

Sometimes you see a pile of gold coins on the ground under a small staircase. Being greedy, you naturally can't control it. But after you pick up the gold coins, you find in despair that the top of your head is blocked by a layer of invisible bricks, which even says " Although some people are alive, they are already dead." You greeted him angrily, but in the end you still had to commit suicide by jumping into a pit in humiliation.

……

After finally dragging your already bruised body to the front of the castle, and seeing that you were about to successfully pass the level, you were overjoyed and ran over, knocked on the door, and the door opened from the inside. You were pushed off the cliff by the door, die!

The second time you jump to the other side of the door and knock on the door, you don’t expect that the damn guy inside will push both doors open at the same time, poop!

After trying various methods to no avail, you reluctantly chose to read the prompts. Before reading the prompts, you need to type a piece of code. The code is very simple. It is a binary string consisting of "0" and "1". It is so simple. Of course, you can't resist the challenge. Your patience has been exhausted by the game, and you press the numbers faster and faster. What you never expected is that this game even has pitfalls in the prompts. You have to finally complete the three lines of numbers. After pressing it, when it comes to the penultimate number, the positions of the "0" and "1" buttons are actually reversed. Seeing the prompt to try again after entering the wrong number, you are dumbfounded and your defense is broken.

After carefully pressing all the characters correctly again, you finally see the prompt. The door... doesn't need to be knocked, it opens with just a click of the mouse... it opens...

When Nie Tian set the flag that he would be given coupons if he died once, he never thought that he could clear the level without dying. But when he finally cleared the level, looking at the number of deaths, 161, the confidence of an expert was already there. Lost in the repeated torture behind the numbers.

10000 points is only 100 yuan, and 161 times is 16100 yuan. Nie Tian fulfilled his promise very unhappily. He was not unhappy because he gave away 6000 yuan for free. To him, this money was even considered as pocket money. If it doesn't work, it's just a gift. It doesn't matter. What makes him unhappy is that he died more than 160 times while playing a side-scrolling game. This is simply a shame!
After the first batch of players tested the waters, more people knew that Gu Feng had created a super cheating game. It was said that game masters and game masters from all walks of life had to die hundreds of times before they could clear the level. For a while, he threatened to personally Let’s see where this game can go. More and more people are coming to challenge it.

For a time, 2.5 Dimension actually set off a wave of Cat Leo trend. The trial videos of major anchors and UP hosts were uploaded. Some people even made a special one where these people were tricked into crying when they played Cat Leo. collection.

As Gu Feng himself said, this game was made casually when he had nothing to do. The game does not charge money or has advertisements, which proves that it was Gu Feng's work on a whim.It's not an official work, and there aren't a lot of experts who really focus on the simple and crude style of painting.

Not only that, even Gu Feng himself did not expect that a teacher from the game department of his alma mater would write a long review for this game. This long review climbed to the highest praise among all the reviews in just one day.

Here's what he wrote—

Let me start by saying that I am an in-service university teacher in the Game Department of Imperial College of Art. In theory, I once taught Gu Feng’s game design basic theory course. Why do I say it is theoretically like this? Because I was there at that time. I saw his name on the first class student roster, but it was a little regretful that I had never seen him in class.

That’s it for the digression, let’s talk about the game Cat Leo.

When I first opened this game, I believe many people, like me, almost thought that they had accidentally opened some rogue software bundled in. Although we often say that the simplicity and simplicity of the painting style will not directly determine whether a game is good or bad. , the exquisite picture has the advantage of exquisiteness, such as "Dancing Line", and the simple painting style also has simple characteristics, such as "Monument Valley", but the painting style of "Cat Leo Adventures" cannot even match the simplicity. Simple is more appropriate to describe it.

Gu Fengcheng doesn't deceive me. It's as simple as a primary school student's graffiti game. It's really his whim.

In this way, I entered the game with the mentality of having fun and watching, but I never thought that I had inadvertently embarked on a road of no return that led to madness and torture.

After playing it as a player for half an hour, I felt that this game was just a fun puzzle game that Gu Feng simply used to prank players. But after playing it for a long time, I lost my identity as a player and thought about it from the perspective of a designer. , I realized that this game is far from as simple and rough as it seems on the surface.

First of all, let’s talk about level design. For game levels, the first words that pop up in everyone’s mind are probably “bad”, “cheap”, “pit”, etc. Yes, even if we have tried to stand on the From a designer's perspective, we can speculate on what methods the other party will use to trick us, but it is still inevitable that we will be tricked again and again.

Therefore, if you think about it carefully, don't these design points that trick people to death one after another reflect the designer's master-level design level?
There was one place that impressed me deeply. I forgot which level it was. There was an apple tree in it. As someone who has persevered through the pits all the way, I would not be naive to think that it was an apple tree when I saw it. It was just an ordinary apple tree, so I tried to use fake movements to induce the apple to fall, but I never expected that the designer had already guessed that I would guess his intention, and the apple actually fell directly. It shot diagonally towards my retreating position.

If you think about it carefully, what attracts players to this game is really different. In other games, the player's fun is exploring, discovering, and listening to the designers tell stories. But here, the player's greatest fun is interacting with the designers. It looks like the players are playing the game in a battle of wits and courage. In fact, the players know that the designer wants to trick them and go to prove that with their own IQ, the designers will definitely not trick them. The result is dog-lead, dissatisfaction, dog-lead, An endless cycle of dissatisfaction...

The game also has great control over the players' emotions. In the game, there are actually many places where the methods of passing levels are extremely bizarre. If you don't read the prompts, most people will definitely scratch their heads and not be able to pass.When the player completes the cheating challenge task and sees the prompt, the player will not feel frustrated and say "Why didn't I think of it", but will smile casually and say "who in the right mind would have thought of this".

Coupled with the large number of interesting achievements in the game, the frustration accumulated by players in repeated deaths will be diluted a lot.

Secondly, let’s look at the game as a whole. At first glance, the type of the game is a side-scrolling adventure game, but the label of the game category clearly says “puzzle solving”. At first, I was wondering about “puzzle solving”. Is the game like this?But then I thought about it carefully and realized that, yes, this is a "puzzle" game.

To analyze whether a game is a puzzle game, we must first know what a puzzle game is.So what are the features of puzzle games?
Designers set puzzles and players use their brains to solve them. Cat Leo has it.

In the form of games, the coordination of the player's brain, eyes, hands and other organs can be exercised, and the logical analysis ability and thinking agility of the player can be properly tested. Cat Leo has it.

Like a movie, there is a script pre-arranged by the designer, which seems to give the player the freedom to operate. In fact, the player can only pass the level smoothly by following the script of the designer. Cat Leo doesn't look like it, but in fact it is completely in line with it. Yes, isn't it?How to pass each level is almost the only solution, and even when you need to see the prompt is completely under the control of the designer. The player seems to be the designer who has overcome the bad taste through unremitting efforts, but in fact it is just After suffering so much, he completed the "clearance" of what he thought was salvation in a way that the designer had arranged long ago. Doesn't it sound a little ironic?

Finally, after talking about this game, I will briefly talk about some of the things I learned from it from the perspective of a designer.

Where is the core fun of the game Cat Leo?It lies in its various anti-routine designs.

I don’t know since when, both players and designers have developed a lot of unspoken rules-like understandings of games. It is true that these understandings can save a lot of innovation costs for designers and learning costs for players, but these If there are too many things, isn’t it a kind of ideological imprisonment?
In reality, it is possible for an apple to fall off the tree by itself, so why not in the game?In reality, apples fall according to the law of universal gravitation. Why does it have to be like this in the game?
Games are based on reality but different from reality. Designers should find a balance point by themselves, not limit their thinking, be brave enough to break through, and be brave in innovation. Only in this way can they create more outstanding works with unconstrained ideas.

Although I don’t know if Gu Feng himself has the intention of using such a game to give some warning to others, but as a designer, he should get some inspiration from it.

Below the long review are comments from a group of players.

"Good guy, how come I can see the resentment in this paragraph? Let me tell you something, did Maple God really miss a semester when he was in college?"

"To be honest, whoever has Maple God's ability would still go to class..."

"It's really scary when you think about it. I was so complacent after I cleared the level, thinking I was so smart. It turns out that we have been clearly arranged by Maple God from the very beginning."

"You are so right. Every time I thought I had seen through everything, but every time Maple God predicted my prediction. I was on the first floor, he was on the second floor, and I was on the third floor. He is on the fourth floor, I am on the thousandth floor, and he is on the thousand and first floor. I can only say that your designer dad will always be your designer dad."

"Hahaha, that Apple thing is so real. It's the first time I go there and I can't kill the food at all. I'm a master of killing it."

"This game, how should I put it, is too simple and it is easy to die, and it is easy to die if you think too much. Where you think it is safe, there must be a pit. Where you think there is a pit, there may not be a pit. When you avoid a pit for the first time Don’t get carried away, because this situation is mostly pits within pits, a series of pits. One pit will make you relax your vigilance, and another pit will make you die in the same place. How crazy you laugh in the first second, and howl in the next second. .”

"Anyway, it's quite strange. It's like someone was pressing me to the ground and rubbing me, but I still had fun playing it. It was so fun."

"I just played it with my sister today, and now she is doubting life, hahaha."

"Look back at Maple God's words. Damn it, the weather is nice. Damn it, I'll give it to you. It's full of malice!"

"By the way, has anyone noticed this? Every game released by Maple God Qiao Mimi in his own rogue has some small pitfalls. "Gemini" spreads dog food and deceives people into tears, "Paper Wedding Dress: Love of Life and Death" 》Scary and deceiving, "Cat Leo's Adventures" is still a fucking cheat!"

What everyone didn't expect was that after seeing the popularity of this game, a bunch of tribute works appeared on the Internet in a short period of time, such as "The Princess Saves the Brave", "The Cheating Adventure", "Let That Slime Go" 》...Just by hearing the name, you know it is not a normal game. It truly lives up to that sentence. There is nothing you can't think of but nothing you can't do.

In addition to personal participation, even Longteng and other major manufacturers have come out to play, Longteng's "This is not the Tower of Babel!" ", Huanyu's "Irregular Jianghu", Wang Wang's "Beauty is Fierce", each of the games made with the starting point of pranking or competing with players for wits and courage has really brought players a carnival of torture and joy.

And through this carnival, many people also realized that in addition to the original intention, other game companies in China can’t make fun games. Once the games are not made for making money, aren’t they quite capable of making one by one?

　Today’s chapter is over. Tomorrow I will start entering the Elder Scrolls.
　　
　
(End of this chapter)