Watch Gas Hero from Creativity & Rhythm

Today, I spent three hours reading “Creativity and Rhythm” by Hideo Yoshizawa, a famous Japanese game planner. This is a book that has had a profound impact on Gas Hero producer Johnny, and it introduces a lot of the thinking framework and methodology for game planning to form ideas and rhythms.

As I read it, I reflected on what these frameworks would be on Gas Hero, and combined with my observations and realizations in the past six months, I took some notes.

• Core Idea [Theme / Concept / System (Means + Path)]

The starting point of a game is often an idea, but in fact, there are very few ideas that can become the core idea, and often there are not enough cores to support a complete game and derive more supporting ideas (all used to strengthen the core idea). Of course, creativity doesn’t have to be completely new, it’s usually the result of combining existing elements in a new way.

The original origins of Gas Hero, I’ve never asked Johnny exactly what it is, maybe he doesn’t even know it himself (this is sold for a future podcast). I’m often curious about the creative process of game planning, and I ask the game planner himself from all angles if he has thought of the complex theoretical support of xyz in the creative process.

He told me honestly that wasn’t the case. The process of really getting to the core idea is more like a spider’s web, weaving here and there for a while, and finally reaching a center. And in this process, the game planner will constantly ask himself a lot of questions and then try to answer them. This process of slowly reaching the core from chaos is more like artistic creation than rational combing. A lot of the time the logical thinking in the AMA is actually summed up after the fact (laughs).

Then, when I don’t have the right answer for the time being, I’ll try to sort it out according to my understanding and use Mr. Yoshizawa’s framework.

Johnny was deeply influenced by Cairo. There was once a game in Cairo that he forgot the name of, and I didn’t ask GPT about it, but the core presentation in it is that there are a bunch of settlements, and there can be interaction between the settlements. He thinks it’s a good social attempt, but unfortunately because the interaction there is too one-dimensional (my understanding is mainly cooperation), the pace is not good (too slow, easy to get bored), and the sense of socialization does not continue.

But the inspiration itself was actually the initial inspiration that built the core idea of Gas Hero, which determined that the theme of the game was: social. This step is probably similar to the inspiration of the “Shogi” gameplay in the book to “Drill Boy”.

So how do you build a social network that can be sustained?

People live every day by doing all kinds of behaviors under the rules of society and giving meaning to their existence. So in other words, as long as the assumption that “humans are social animals” is true, games may be able to construct a good social field if they can abstract the interactions in human society.

Therefore, I boldly deduce that the concept of the Gas Hero game, i.e., “what should players let them play here?”, is to “construct a virtual human society in which everyone can continue to interact with each other”.

But this abstract sentence (“constructing a virtual human society”) is easy to say, but in fact, the core of such a complex system of human society is to screen the means and paths that can better serve the core concept of the game, and leave the core rules, so as to leave the essence of human interaction as much as possible and remove the noise.

The focus of this concept is not on “virtual human society”, but on “continuous dynamic interaction”. On this basis, let’s get to the bottom of the question, what is it that causes human sociality?

There may not be a right answer to this question. In A Brief History of Mankind, Yuval Harari says that since time immemorial, Homo sapiens have been the only people who have the ability to tell stories and imagine people, and have been able to mobilize Homo sapiens on a large scale by “creating hope” to mobilize Homo sapiens far beyond the number of their own tribe (at that time, the tribe numbered at most about 150 people) for unified action.

So we find an important ancillary concept that underpins the core concept – hope. A lot of mileage advancement in Gas Hero is accompanied by different types of hopes, some small surprises, some big goals. I always like to joke with everyone, saying that “regret is the driving force of human progress”, and only with regret can there be hope. Only when new hopes are constantly generated will the player be motivated to continue to interact with each other.

Another important auxiliary concept is bonding. What is a bond?In the same settlement, you have to work together to improve to complete a goal, and this cycle is almost a PvP champion, and next time I come back, I will definitely win that opponent is also a bond. It may sound similar to “Hope”, but it’s all about the relationship between people in the game setting as they progress through the game, whether it’s the joy of working together to complete a guild challenge, or it could be two rivals who respect each other and want to see each other again in the next PvP.

There may be some other ancillary concepts, but I won’t expand on them here (after all, I’m not a round!!worm in the belly of the game planner), and I want to leave some easter eggs from the planner himself to tell you about in the podcast.

After clarifying the core and auxiliary concepts of the game as a whole, all that remains is to continuously screen the means and paths that can better present these concepts as a whole. Some are additions, some are subtractions.

Gas hero’s tree-like world structure is addition: it’s a more complex setup than a simple, flat world, but with this three-dimensional design, the concept of “hope” unfolds very well, and auto-battle is subtraction, which is used to eliminate the player’s energy investment in the operation as much as possible, and leave more experience points on human interaction (sharing every unboxing and baby’s lucky/black face experience, assigning their respective combat missions).

All of these big and small hopes, the generation of topics and behaviors between people, are generated around various in-game assets. Because of the very low attrition of circulation on the blockchain, the interaction possibilities between people and people within Gas Hero have become extremely rich.

It is worth noting that since Gas Hero presents a virtual society, it is inevitable to consider various problems faced by human society in the process of considering paths and means, the core of which is economic inflation, bubble and even stagflation. Personally, I think the most amazing thing about the solution given by the game planner in the work is the integration of the solution and the overall structure of the game: from ordinary citizens to the fate of the elders of the world, they are all tied together through the corresponding incentive structure, sharing hope and bonding with each other.

*Rhythm

One of the things I’ve always found funny is that the game’s game curators wanted the game’s pace to be “five minutes a day” and “relaxing”. That’s why I’m convinced that Cairo’s game, which includes settlements and neighbors, may have been the original inspiration for Gas Hero, because Cairo’s game is the kind of game that’s always ready to pick up and put down, and it’s warm and cozy.

In fact, the experience of Gas Hero is that it is true that you can’t click a few times a day in the game (the “five minutes a day” achievement is achieved?), and whether it is “relaxing” is debatable 😂, but it is definitely “addictive”.

The energy consumption is indeed gone, but do you think you still have to look at the combination of heroes in the white paper, discuss the strategy with others, and remind the people in the same settlement to hurry up and play resources so as not to fall behind, and you have to see if the auction house has anything worth buying at this stage, and should you use it for yourself or go to the secondary market for arbitrage? The fact that it can be influenced by many external factors also brings an extra rich curve to the game experience.

The core of the realization of these experiences lies in the game planning to make it clear to everyone what to do every day in a campaign cycle. On the first and second days, the auction house was robbed, on the third day, the settlement boss challenged the settlement chief, and on the fourth day, the first batch of babies were born… For players who want to become an official or develop a PvP challenge, the pace is quite tight. Therefore, when the macro melody is compact and orderly, the operation is as simple as possible, and many of the “tired” player experiences in daily life can be removed. The auction house brings every six hours of excitement, and in the daily rhythm, giving birth, opening boxes, reforging weapons, upgrading pets, etc., are all smaller fluctuations in the pace of the experience. The larger the time frame, the more certain the rhythmic passages, and the daily rhythmic changes are quite unpredictable. The overall presentation is like Bach’s three creative works, the overall regularity, and the details can always break the dull surprise.

In the words of the game planner himself: “A product has different experiences, and each experience has its own different rhythm, and the rhythm of so many different experiences is superimposed, just like the taste of Fourier transformation, and how these different rhythms are combined, how the peaks and troughs are superimposed, the more coupled experiences are generated and richer, and the more layers of experience will be.” ”

• Core Creativity x Rhythm = Comfortable

After the explanation of the above two parts, in fact, this part does not need to be repeated. After reading the book, I told the game planner that you like to use the word “comfortable” very much, probably because of the influence of Hideo Yoshizawa.

But I’d also like to add a little bit to the part where I feel comfortable with Gas Hero, and that’s the beauty of symmetry.

The number of days a hero’s life corresponds to their quality level.

Both the energy regeneration time and the auction house are once every six hours.

Upgrade the GMT burn ratio of breeding and auction houses.

The income structure of the balance between the power line and the glory line is located at both ends of the balance of the wealth arbitrage line.

Gas Hero’s game ultimately presents an extremely complex form, but the coupling of simple rules is the skeleton of complex presentation. In his book, Mr. Yoshizawa also puts forward the idea of “doing as much work as possible with as few parameters as possible.” Simple rules are good if they allow for all kinds of complex behaviors through permutations and combinations. Conversely, overly complex rules can limit the creativity of how players can behave in the game.

After watching “Creativity and Rhythm”, I asked myself what makes people comfortable in Gas Hero?

There are many answers that can be provided, but I might say: it is an experience in which players unlock a new world that is different from real life, an experience that is unknown, exciting, and anything is possible.