Almighty Video Game Designer - Chapter 497

Chapter 497: Design concept for super Mali Odyssey

Translator: 549690339
Chen Mo and Zhou Jiangping discussed the design.

The rest was still fine, but the main issue was the core components.

In Chen Mo’s previous life, many parts of the Switch were made for integration and power consumption, and couldn’t be bought on the market. Chen Mo had to redo these parts.

Moreover, in his previous life, many technologies required patents, such as the motion sensing technology. If he really had to buy everything, it would indeed be a huge expense.

Regarding this, Chen Mo and Zhou Jiangping had also discussed some general countermeasures. Since the technology in this world was more advanced and not exactly the same as in Chen Mo’s previous world, many of the designs had their own alternative.

Including the HD vibration and motion sensor components, which had a greater impact on the game’s design, Zhou Jiangping tried his best to ensure that there were corresponding alternatives, and that it would not affect the feel of the Switch.

In fact, by relying on some of the black technology in the parallel world, he might even be able to surpass them to some extent.

Moreover, the body of the Switch could also be made thinner and the frame smaller. These were also improvements. With the technological level of the parallel world, these improvements were not difficult to make.

Of course, the design still needed to be improved, which would take a long time. Chen Mo wasn’t sure how far it could go before the actual prototype was made.

……

After returning to the experience store, Chen Mo started working on the design concept for super Mali Odyssey.

To Chen Mo, this game was far more difficult than all the other games he’d made before, the most difficult part being the graphics, the actions, and the level design.

“Super Mali Odyssey” was a box court game. The way to clear each major obstacle in the game was very simple. As long as one collected enough moons, activated the Odyssey, and headed to the next map, they would be done.

Therefore, passing the levels was not the most important task for the players. The most important thing was to find clues and obtain the moon.

In “super Mali Odyssey,” the moons were hidden in a natural way, and the density was very high. A small map could be embedded with nearly 100 moons. This made the players find the joy of hiding in Odyssey far more than in other sandbox games. Even the seed of Zelda’s yahaha was slightly inferior.

At the same time, these levels must also give the players some difficulty challenges, allowing the players to use a variety of ways to clear the levels, not just a linear path, so that the players could fully display their own wisdom.

Super Mali Odyssey was the game with the best level design in the world.

Many of the scenes in “super Mali Odyssey” were based on reality. For example, new New York City corresponded to New York, and the desert country was based on Mexico.

The game’s setting wasn’t decided from the start. In Chen Mo’s previous life, the developers of super Mali Odyssey first designed a core gameplay for the level, then thought about how to incorporate the setting into it.

For example, if the designer wanted to design a scene that would make Mali move slowly, they would naturally think of the desert. They didn’t want to use the pyramids in Egypt, which were already rotten to the core, so the Mexico desert became a natural choice.

Mali himself had very strong abilities, such as throwing hats, jumping, etc., So many players ‘ways of clearing the game were not exactly the same as the game’s design at the beginning. Many interesting ways of playing were explored by the players themselves.

At the same time, super Mali Odyssey made the collection gameplay the ultimate.

There were gold coins, purple coins, and the moon in the Odyssey. Each element had a different function, and the difficulty of obtaining them varied.

Take gold coins as an example. In the olden days, gold coins had practical significance, such as buying items and buying clues. Therefore, the act of eating gold coins itself motivated players to take action.

Compared to the moon and the special currency, players could eat all the gold coins placed in the challenge without any pressure. It was like a dessert after the challenge, allowing players to get the sweetness of a stage victory.

However, this benefit wasn’t something that could be forced onto the players. The players had to take it.

There were also some challenges where there was no price to pay even if one failed. Gold coins were the dessert of the challenge. It could motivate players and not make them feel that the challenge was too easy.

Moreover, in the process of some ‘unorthodox’ playing methods and operations, players could only use basic running and jumping to complete the quest, or they could use special techniques to achieve results that basic operations could not achieve. These actions would reduce the time needed to clear the challenge, and it was also a good motivation for the players.

Super Mali Odyssey’s resurrection point design was also very elaborate. In the game, once the challenge failed, the player would have to return to the starting point, and the resurrection point was the starting point of the journey. The longer the resurrection point was designed, the stronger the frustration the player would feel when they failed.

Through the design of these resurrection points, they could control the emotions of the players and adjust the difficulty of the game.

In the process of players obtaining the moon, there were many rewards, both bright and dark.

On the surface, players could get the moon when they reached the end point, but in fact, there were many levels that had another moon hidden.

In most of the stages in super Mali Odyssey, there was more than one moon hidden, and the second moon was placed in a very careful location. After the players found it, they did not cry out that it was a scam, but were excited and happy as if they had found a treasure.

For super Mali Odyssey, only by collecting everything could one pass the game. The main plot of this game was designed to let everyone enjoy the game. In other words, its main plot was only equivalent to a teaching script, and the real start of the game would only be after the main plot was completed.

The main plot of the Odyssey was actually just a simple, normal difficulty challenge. The real challenge that allowed the players to experience all the mechanisms of the game was the all-collection.

It could be said that only completing the main plot would allow one to experience less than 20% of the game’s content. The rest of the content, in terms of quality and difficulty, would not be worse than this 20% of the game’s content. It might even be better.

In some games, collecting all the elements was actually forcibly increasing the game time, so that the players could run more maps.

The maps of these games were densely packed with collection points. Running over to touch them and looking at the pictures would be the end. If the number was appropriate, it would be interesting, but once the number exceeded a certain number, it would make people feel like they were doing a mission, boring and meaningless.

For the Odyssey, collecting was the main course of the game, and it was done very well. The difficulty gradient of the different moons was very different. Some could be seen at a glance, some had to be searched for, and some had to go through very difficult and continuous challenges before they could be obtained.

The easy collection could guarantee that even beginner players could easily clear the game without losing the challenge, while the difficult collection was the real core of the game.

It was still quite difficult for Chen Mo to replicate all of this perfectly.