Chapter 876 (1/2)
It's no exaggeration to say that ”plant vs. zombie” as a very special tower defense game, or as one of the most powerful tower defense games, in the last few years, it has been completely popular all over the world. I believe that this game has been popular in every country. It has not only PC client version, but also flash version, Android version, IOS version, which can almost be imagined Platform, has its figure, in general, it can be called a very successful classic game.
Both men and women, old and young, regardless of their education background, have been possessed of the game and poisoned by it. Its game elements and playing mode are very simple, but precisely because of this extreme simplicity, all players can be deeply attracted by this game in the shortest time, which is one of the most immersive single game.
Although smart phones haven't really started yet, the game ”Plants vs. Zombies” doesn't take much effort to play on the PC. players only need a mouse to operate smoothly and easily. ”Plant vs. zombie” this game, no matter the game structure, game elements, screen and technical difficulty, belongs to the super mini game sequence.
Moreover, the most appropriate thing is that the overall development difficulty and product elements of this game are very simple, which are much worse than the present happy farm, but not much different from the earliest happy farm.
Think about it. What's the game of ”Plants vs. Zombies”? It's just dozens of plants, dozens of zombies, several props, several modes and one character.
In fact, such games may not be as complicated as the early happy farm. After all, there are multi-stage elements of nearly 100 kinds of plants in happy farm, such as seed purchase, sowing, growth and harvest. In addition, there are many kinds of props to assist in it, as well as fruit sales system and farm development and decoration system.
Just these game elements, ”happy farm” is much more complicated than ”plant vs. zombie”. What's more, the essence of ”happy farm” is an online social game with friend interaction, which belongs to the online game, while ”plant vs. zombie” is a single machine for self entertainment.
However, Li Mu has to admit that even though ”plant vs. zombie” is very simple and has little technical content, it is far more popular in the world than ”happy farm”.
The overall development difficulty of ”plant vs. zombie” is very small. If Li Mu directly gives the complete game architecture and style setting to a professional and powerful development team, and several artists design together, the game element design draft can be determined in three to five days. The overall development of this kind of small game, a game development team of dozens of people, is under the overall development It won't take a month to come.
In the last life, the development team of ”plant vs. zombie” only had four people, which took three years. But most of the time was spent on repeatedly polishing and improving, most of the time was spent on thinking and trial and error, and the workload of real development was much smaller.
That's the same thing. People who don't know the exit of the maze may not get out in a few hours. If they know the route, they can cross the maze in three minutes. The difference between hours and three minutes is a hundred times!
Dozens of developers may be able to develop such a small game in more than half a month without detours.
For ”Plants vs. Zombies”, Li Mu decided to make it out when he thought about it. So what he is thinking about now is not how to develop it, but how to better integrate it with YY.
There is no doubt that happy farm is the best game to integrate with YY at present. After the end game is completed, it can be launched directly from YY with one click, and the account login is completed, and the whole YY's player network is called in depth. However, the game ”plant vs. zombie” is not a social game, it's a stand-alone game! How can it play a social role?
Li Mu roughly deduces the product logic in his mind. First of all, he should make it clear that he can't make plant vs. zombie a stand-alone game again. In that case, the pulling effect on YY is not great enough. Therefore, this determines the first important idea: plant vs. zombie should be developed into a network version!
Determined that ”plant vs. zombie” must be developed into an online version, Li Mu began to think about how to make ”plant vs. zombie” better use of social contacts like ”happy farm”.
If you want to make use of social contacts, there are only a few ideas: either you can play together directly, or you can compare and play with each other.
If you want to play together, player a and player B can guard a house at the same time, plant plants and block zombies from two perspectives at the same time, but in this way, it becomes a real-time strategic small game, without binding the player with a long-term goal.
After thinking about it, Li Mu thought that it was still important to let everyone play with each other, because only by comparing can competition be formed. Once the players in a game have the idea of chasing each other, then the viscosity of the players will naturally increase.
Therefore, Li Mu has a basic idea in mind: plant vs. zombie. Like happy farm, the long-term upgrade and unlocking system should be adopted to enable players to constantly compare and catch up with their friends, so that they can immerse themselves in the game for a long time. In this way, strict level restrictions should be imposed on the types of plants.So, Li Mu held back in the office for a long time, basically holding out a social version of the game plan of ”Plants vs. Zombies”.
The core rule is: every player of ”Plants vs. Zombies” will have his own villa and a front yard after registration. The front yard has five horizontal channels. Zombies attack the villa from five horizontal channels, and the length of each channel is ten grids, that is to say, a total of 50 plants of various types can be planted, which is the basis;
at the beginning of the game, there are only three kinds of plants available to players, namely, single head sunflower, single head pea shooter and small nut wall;
just after players enter the game, like happy farm, they need to plant sunflower, harvest sunshine and accumulate enough sunshine to plant pea shooter and small nut wall;
zombie attack is no longer based on the breakthrough system, but According to the timing opening system, Li Mu's idea is that players have the chance to start a round of zombie attack and defense every ten minutes. After resisting this round of zombie attack, players can get a certain amount of experience value and gold coins;
experience value is the key for players to upgrade. Only when the level is up, can more plants be unlocked step by step, which is the body of happy farm It's the same department, and Li Mu won't let them upgrade to level n in a day. We must control the rhythm, make it more and more difficult for them to upgrade, and get more and more advanced new plants and props. Only in this way can they keep the rhythm of immersion;
the purpose of gold coins is to buy various props. Li Mu thinks that we should try to have as many game props as possible, so as to stimulate play For example, you can design a variety of [cards], such as [frenzy card] that can increase the shooting speed of aggressive plants, the [enhancement card] that can increase the attack and defense attributes of plants, the [acceleration card] that can increase the sun speed of sunflowers, the [deceleration card] that can slow down the attack speed of zombies, or the [weakening card] that can be used by boss level zombies ]And so on. You can also put cherry bombs into props, rakes, mines, and all of these into props.