《漫漫长夜》极光背后的故事

导读

想知道游戏中极光是怎么实现的吗？

想知道游戏中极光的声音是怎么来的吗？

想知道游戏中的光影变幻是如何实现的吗？

想知道游戏中暴风雪天气是如何实现的吗？

想知道一图的瞭望塔为啥挪了位置吗？

想知道漫漫长夜的创意总监是如何评价《看火人》的游戏画面的吗？

和我一起走进这次访谈吧！

State of the Art: The Long Dark's aurora

《漫漫长夜》新特性：极光

By Philippa Warr on August 14th, 2017 at 7:00 pm.

撰稿人：Philippa Warr，2017年8月14日晚7点

译者按

本文是著名游戏鉴赏组rockpapershotgun在《漫漫长夜》正式发行后不久对游戏制作团队创意总监拉斐尔的访谈记录。Philippa Warr向拉斐尔详细询问了游戏中极光的起源、演变、极光的音效等问题。此外，拉斐尔还在访谈中详细介绍了游戏中的光影、天气、风等系统以及游戏画面的风格化等方面的内容。

【译者注：你可以在Steam上关注rockpapershotgun，或是登陆他们的网站：PC Game Reviews, Previews, Subjectivity |】

全文要点

1. 极光进入游戏主要基于以下几点：

极光是游戏中很多概念的完美载体；

极光只出现在晴朗的夜晚，与游戏中其他天气并不冲突，实现起来比较简单；

极光确实很美，很震撼；

极光为游戏注入了活力和新鲜感，提供了新的游戏机制。

2. 极光的最初设计比较卡通，后来才演变为写实的风格；

3. 游戏中极光的声音源自真实世界中北极光激发的电波信号；

4. 游戏中有八种天气，出现顺序有一定规律，玩家可自行摸索；

5. 暴风雪是雾、风和颗粒物的组合；

6. 雾系统改进后，一图瞭望塔现在所处的位置视野更佳；

7. 游戏的风格化会继续保持，不会追求写实！

The coloured lights flaring across the night sky in the frozen Canadian wilderness were one of the most anticipated elements of Hinterland's survival game, The Long Dark. Since the Kickstarter we've known they would do more than brighten the night, playing a key part in the game's episodic story mode, but now they're in the game I find myself braving the uptick in danger they bring or setting aside a necessary survival task to stand outside and stare up at the skies in delight. So how did the design of the aurora develop. how did the team balance beauty and hostility and DID YOU KNOW that the Aurora Borealis makes a noise in real life that Hinterland incorporated into the game?? Here's creative director Raphael van Lierop to explain more in our latest State of the Art feature!

对《漫漫长夜》（由Hinterland开发的生存游戏，译者注）的玩家们来说，在冰封的加拿大旷野夜空中闪耀的绚烂极光一直是他们最期待的游戏元素之一。Kickstarter众筹时，我们就知道极光绝不仅仅只是照亮夜空，它们将在游戏的剧情模式中扮演重要角色，而现在( 2017.8.1剧情模式发布，译者注 )，极光就在游戏中！在游玩中，我要么是不惧极光带来的危险（根据游戏设定，极光夜的狼不怕火把，译者注）勇往直前，要么是把紧要的生存任务放在一边，站在室外兴奋地仰望着夜空。那么极光到底是怎么设计出来的，游戏开发团队又是如何平衡游戏美感和难度的？你知道吗？现实世界里北极光也是会发出噪音的！而且Hinterland团队把极光的声音也加入游戏了！我们很荣幸的邀请到Hinterland创意总监Raphael van Lierop( 拉斐尔 )对游戏的这一最新特性进行详细说明！

Pip: I know that the aurora is a powerful force in The Long Dark and a key element of the story so I'm wary of spoilers but what can you tell me about the phenomena and its role in the game?

Pip：极光是《漫漫长夜》中一种强大而神秘的能量，是剧情的关键元素。虽然我不想被剧透，但还是想了解一下极光，还有它在游戏中扮演的角色。

Raphael van Lierop: In The Long Dark, a mysterious geomagnetic disaster that takes the form of a brilliant flash of light in the sky renders all technology inert. It's a thematic hook that we explore throughout our setting and game mechanics. The aurora is a visual metaphor for what we have lost, a reminder of the power of nature, and that we are ultimately insignificant in the world. It also teasingly brings some technology to life, with gameplay impacts that we've only started to hint at in Episode Two of Wintermute.

Raphael van Lierop：在《漫漫长夜》里，一场神秘的地磁风暴——夜空中一次耀眼的闪光之后，所有的现代科技失效，这一点是我们认识整个游戏的设定和内在机制的前提。极光是一个视觉上的隐喻——暗示我们失去的东西，同时也暗示着自然的力量——我们终将化为尘土。极光还为游戏中的灾后生活带来一些科技感，《沉寂凛冬》第二章中会有一些线索。

Pip: I'm interested in the aesthetic role of the aurora here-it injects a lot of colour and movement so did you have to balance that out with other elements onscreen being more static or more muted?

Pip：我对极光的在游戏中的起到的美学作用很感兴趣——它为游戏加入了很多色彩和动感，为了达到平衡，你们是不是削减了其他游戏元素的作用？

RvL: The "Majestic Aurora" are brilliant fire across the night sky - a sky that is otherwise typically quite dark, as you would expect in a world without many functioning artificial lights. They are playful and animated and are something of a companion during nighttime travels. They cast light of their own and scintillate with green, blue, purple, and pink hues. They only ever appear with a clear sky, and also tint the window lights when you are in interiors, so that if you wake up at night while the aurora is active you'll feel its presence when inside - even if your shelter doesn't have electric lights or television screens that may flicker ominously.

RvL：灰暗的天空下，"壮美的极光"恰似夜空中明亮的焰火，这种场景充分满足了玩家对一个没有多少人工光源的世界的期待。极光显的可爱俏皮、充满活力，是夜间旅行的伙伴，闪烁着绿色、蓝色、紫色和粉红色的光芒。极光只在晴朗的夜空出现，而且当你在室内时，还会给窗户着色。所以如果你在有极光的夜晚醒来，就算在室内也能感觉到它的存在——即使你住所里没有闪烁着不详光芒的电灯或电视屏幕。

For the player, seeing them in the sky is a sign that new possibilities are open to you, as well as new threats. Since they only appear at night, and only with clear skies, the Aurorae don't really conflict with any other weather elements like clouds or fog. Really, they just bring the night environment to life in a way that is hopefully unexpected and exciting for the player. Like many things in The Long Dark, we try to balance the beauty of the environment against its hostility.

对玩家来说，在夜空中看到极光意味着新的可能性，当然也意味着新的威胁。极光只出现在晴朗的夜空，所以并不会与其他天气元素如云、雾等冲突。极光只是把夜晚以一种不可预测的、令玩家兴奋的方式生动地呈现出来。和《漫漫长夜》里的很多东西一样，我们试图在环境的美感与危险之间寻求平衡。

Pip: I think (unless I've been spectacularly unlucky) the aurorae will only go into the game with the story mode*. I know that a lot of people are really excited about finally seeing them in the wild - some for story reasons, but also just because I think there's a fascination with the phenomenon. I was interested in how you see people's interest in aurorae and at what point you decided to make the lights such a significant element in the game?

Pip：我以为极光只会在剧情模式中出现，真的是这样吗？很多人在野外看到极光后很激动，这当然有和剧情本身有关，但我想更主要的是极光确实太让人着迷了。你们怎么看待玩家对极光的热爱？你们是什么时候决定将极光设定为游戏中的重要元素的？

RvL: The aurora is also present in the Sandbox, though it is rare. We've just re-tuned some of the probabilities in a patch that should be out shortly, to make them a bit more common for players. I'd like to see what we can do to play with the aurora as a type of weather that comes and goes more or less frequently, as a means to ensure the world feels more dynamic. As far as making them a significant element in the game, one of the earliest names for the game that became The Long Dark was "Borealis". People immediately associate the aurora with the Far North, and there have been numerous instances where aurora - which as an atmospheric phenomenon are tied to solar activity and disturbance of the Earth's geomagnetic "shield"- interfered with various electronics systems, so really it was the perfect vehicle for so many of the game's concepts.

RvL：极光也将在沙盒（生存）模式中出现，不过会比较少见。我们刚刚重新调整了一极光出现的概率，使其对玩家来说更为常见，这个补丁即将发布。极光作为一种天气，通过调整它出现频率的大小，可以让游戏世界更加充满活力。至于为啥要让极光成为游戏中的重要元素，其实《漫漫长夜》最早的名字之一是"北极"，人们会迅速将极光和遥远的北方联系起来。极光作为一种大气现象，与太阳活动对地磁"护盾"的干扰有关，已经有许多例子表明极光确实会干扰各种电子系统，所以极光确实是游戏中很多的概念的完美载体。

Pip: The design of the aurora in the game seemed to first appear in screenshots as a stylised curl of light behind Trapper's Homestead. By the time the Wintermute trailer came out it had shifted to being long, bright shafts of light as you might see in real life. It would be great to know how the aurora's design changed over the course of development and how you fixed on its form.

Pip：游戏中极光的设计似乎首先出现在一幅截图中——作为捕兽者之家的背景。到沉寂凛冬的预告片出现的时候，它已经变成了长条状的亮光，就像现实生活中看到的那样。你们在开发过程中是如何改变极光的设计和样式的呢？

RvL: We pretty much went straight from that old "whorl" design, to the more traditional "banners" that you see now. It was important to me that the Aurora had a real presence in the world - not just as an element of the skybox, but something that felt like it had a physical presence. The current design allows it to hang above you as you explore the world, shimmering and moving like a living thing. There's an almost sentient, animalistic sense to how it moves. Like it's watching. Waiting.

RvL：我们几乎是直接从那个旧的"螺旋"式设计，变成现在看到的更传统的"横幅"样式的。我认为关键的一点是：极光在世界上真实存在——不仅仅是作为天空的一个元素，而且似乎具有物理实体。在当前的设计中，玩家探索世界时极光会悬挂在空中，穿过你的身体，一边闪烁一边移动，就像一个活生生的东西。就好像它在看着什么，等待着什么。

As we developed the style, we researched a lot of aurora videos and time-lapses to look at the shapes and colours you typically saw, and then did a lot of iteration on the colours, width, movement, etc. We also researched the sound the aurora makes - it has actually been recorded! So we took that sound and added more to it and came up with what I think is a unique, iconic sound, that is almost musical but has echoes of an almost electronic hum to it.

在开发极光的风格时，我们研究了很多极光的视频和延时摄影，以确定极光的形状和颜色。然后，我们对极光的颜色、宽度、运动等特征进行了大量的迭代。我们还研究了极光的声音——实际上极光的声音早就被录下来了（YouTube上有相关视频，译者注）！所以我们在这个声音的基础上，增加了一些东西，并提出了一种我认为是独特的、标志性的声音——十分悦耳但又带有电子嗡嗡声的回响。

Pip: More generally, The Long Dark uses light and colour brilliantly to express particular types of weather and times of day. Can you tell me a bit about how you figured those systems out?

Pip：更一般地来看，《漫漫长夜》使用光和颜色来表达特定类型的天气和一天中特定的时间。能知道你们是怎么想出这个系统的吗？

RvL: We have a real-time time of day lighting system so the first thing is making all the lighting work for clear weather at various times of day. We paid particular attention to the "shelf" hours around dawn and dusk, because the intention was that for players who wanted to derive all the information from the world (vs. relying on UI), they should be able to be able to get up from Rest, step out of a shelter, and immediately get a relative sense of the time of day. Getting dawn and dusk was important to that.

RvL：我们有一个实时的日照系统，首先要让所有的光照在天气晴朗时、在一天中的不同时段能正常工作。我们着重对黎明和黄昏前后的光线进行了“遮挡”处理，旨在为想要从游戏世界（而不是从用户界面）获取信息的玩家提供服务：当他们起床后走出庇护所，就要能够迅速地大致确定当前的时间——即将迎来的是黎明还是黄昏？这一点对玩家的决策十分重要。

Then at noon the ground shadows are very short, sort of like they would be in real life, so again you can tell a bit about time of day just by looking at the lighting and shadows. We spent a lot of time on this lighting, played with bloom settings, the brightness of the white snow (to create a bit of a glare effect on very clear sunny days), the tint of the lighting, etc. There are a lot of different factors that went into making a clear day look good.

到了中午的时候，地面的阴影变得很短，就像现实生活那样。所以同样的，玩家观察一下周围环境的光影情况就可以知道大致的时间。我们在光照上花了很多时间，调整了光晕的设置，雪的亮度（在极晴朗的晴天创造一点眩光效果），光照的色彩等等。总之，为了让晴天的光线更完美，我们考虑了很多不同的因素。

After that, we have night time, which we express using the starfield and the moon, which - like the sun - gradually crawls across the sky as night progresses. At various times we've played with the darkness of night, to try to recreate that sense you get if you're ever out of the city at night. When I was growing up I lived on a farm out in the countryside, far from light pollution, and I remember standing out at night and seeing a black sky full of stars - and endless blanket of them - and then a kind of darkness that you seldom see anymore. And so I wanted to create that sense of total blackness, darkness so deep that you could hardly see your hand in front of you. But that proved difficult for nighttime navigation (and night is already tricky enough), so we brought back some ambient light to approximate how bright a winter's sky can be when the air is so crisp and cold and you just see this brilliant white moon like a light bulb in the sky, and when your eyes adjust you can make out shadows and a loose definition of some things, and we recreated this sense in the game on clear nights. You can see just enough to get around without a light source (if you're desperate) but not well enough to tell if that shape in the near distance is a tree stump or a wolf.

在之后的晚上，我们用星空和月亮填充夜空，夜里月亮慢慢爬过天空，和白天的太阳一样。我们在夜晚的不同时段调节了黑度，尝试重现没有光污染的旷野夜空。小时候我住在乡间的一个农场，那儿没有光污染，我还记得晚上站在室外，就能看到满是星星的夜空、无尽的星云、和几乎再也看不到的深邃黑暗。所以我想创造出一种彻底的黑暗——暗到伸手不见五指。但后来证明这会大大增加夜间探索的难度（夜晚已经很困难了），所以我们增加了一些环境光线，以便大致模拟冬日晴朗夜空的亮度。呼吸着夜晚清冷空气，你会看到惨白的月亮像一只灯泡挂在夜空。环顾四周，你勉强可以辨认出阴影和其他一些东西，我们在游戏里的晴朗夜晚重现了这种感觉。没有光源时，你刚好能够看到周围的环境（如果你正处于绝望中），但还不足以辨认出近处的某个东西是树桩还是狼。

Our weather and time of day systems are really complex so we spent a lot of time trying to get them right. We have about 8 different kinds of weather and we also interpolate between them using a variety of presets, probability, and game logic to ensure they feel relatively random but also logical. Theoretically, players who have invested a lot of time in the game can start to learn to "read" the weather. It was really important to me that this be the case, because you can do this in real life - you can get a sense that the weather is changing and you can learn to read the sky and wind so that you know if you'll have time to get to your cabin or if you'd better hunker down and start digging the snow shelter.

游戏的天气和时间系统真的很复杂，我们花了很多时间，努力让这套系统正常工作。我们有大约8种不同的天气，同时我们使用各种预设参数、概率和游戏逻辑进行插值，以确保各种天气的出现相对随机而又符合逻辑。理论上，在游戏中投入大量时间的玩家可以"读"懂天气。我个人认为这很重要，因为在现实生活中你也可以做到这一点——你可以感受到天气正在变化，你可以学会判读天空和风的变化，从而知道你是不是有时间到达小屋，还是最好蹲下来搭个雪之小屋。

The blizzard was probably the most fun to create, because we knew we wanted it to feel like an event, like an angry thing that could kill you if you got stuck out in it. And it needed to also be disorienting. So the combination of background fog, the dense particles, the howling wind, and so on - it really works to confuse the player. I still get lost in blizzards in the game.

暴风雪天气可能是我们创造时感觉最有趣的，因为我们希望它像一个事件：一个的狂暴的东西——一旦被困于其中就可以将你杀死，还要能让玩家迷失方向。浓雾作为背景，密集的颗粒物，咆哮的冷风等元素组合而成的暴风雪的确可以使玩家迷惑。我在游戏中也仍然会迷失其中。

The wind is its whole own thing; also a complex system that blends a lot of wind sounds, accounts for speed, gusting, ambiences (so wind sounds different if you are high up in a clearing or down by the coastline with a rocky cliff behind you). Wind deserves its own article. I'm happiest with our most recent iteration on weather colour and lighting which we released in our Faithful Cartographer update, and then the Aurora with Wintermute. I love how some of the cloudy settings introduce a kind of almost "glow" to the ambient lighting and approximate that kind of low winter sun, and the fog distances frame trees in the distance so well.

风是自成一体的复杂系统，混合了大量的风声，要考虑速度，阵风和环境（空旷的高处、背靠石崖的海岸边的风声听起来并不一样）。风值得拥有自己的篇章。我很高兴看到我们最近在天气、色彩和光照方面进行的迭代——一些已经在“忠实制图师”（版本号：v.411T，译者注）中发布，还有就是沉寂凛冬中发布的极光。我尤其喜欢多云环境带来的那种近乎"光晕"的效果，就像冬天底悬的太阳，雾的距离与远处的树搭配的恰到好处（翻译求助！译者注）。

We pushed back all our distant fog as well, so that players can pick out landmarks better. It's one of the reasons we moved the Lookout Tower in Mystery Lake - because by pushing the fog back, you can now stand up there and pick out landmarks you want to navigate to: the dam, the railway, the camp office, the clearing with Unnamed Pond, etc. We also did a lot of colour grading work to make all the various combinations of lighting and sky colour felt more cohesive. I think weather and lighting is one of the most important "characters" in the game. In The Long Dark it's much more than backdrop - weather and time of day have significant gameplay implications for us, so I think of it as one of our purest marriages of art, technology, and player experience.

此外，我们把远处的雾也都推了回去，因而玩家能更好地辨认出地标。这也是我们改变神秘湖瞭望塔位置的原因之一——把雾推远之后，现在玩家站在新的林地瞭望台上，就可以看到几乎所有地标：大坝、铁路、营地办公室、林间空地和无名池塘等。我们还做了大量的颜色平滑工作，以使各种光照和天空的组合更加浑然一体。我认为天气和光照是游戏中最重要的"特性"之一。在《漫漫长夜》中，它们的重要性远远超过画面——天气和时间是玩家游玩时的重要指引，所以我认为它是艺术、技术和玩家体验最纯粹的结合之一。

Pip: The Long Dark manages to communicate a very specific biting cold which I recognise from real life so I often forget the game is actually very stylised in terms of how it looks. I'd be interested to know how the look of The Long Dark came together and whether you experimented with more "realistic" graphics at any point?

Pip：《漫漫长夜》试图向玩家传递一种特殊而刺骨的寒意，就像我们从现实生活中体验到的那样，这种真实的感觉经常让我忘掉一点，那就是《漫漫长夜》从画面上来看实际上是非常风格化的（不是对现实的真实反映，但有对特定的意象有特定的表达方式，有独特的风格，译者注）。我很想知道"《漫漫长夜》"的画面元素是如何搭配在一起的？你们是否在某些时候尝试了更“逼真”的图形？

RvL: We never chased realism in our art style. If anything we've tried to push away from it. You can see that in the last major UI overhaul we did in Faithful Cartographer. As with most UI updates, it wasn't universally loved, but for me the old UI had too many visual elements that clashed with our stylization so what we have in the game now is more cohesive and true to the art direction.

RvL：我们的艺术风格从来不追求现实主义，如果有的话我们会竭力避免。我们在忠实制图师（v.411T版本名，译者注）中对主用户界面进行了最后一次大改，在这次修改中你可以看到这一点。和我们的其他用户界面更新一样，不是所有玩家都喜欢这次更新，但我认为旧的用户界面视觉元素太多，与我们的风格化不一致，所以现在游戏中的东西才更加浑然一体，而且真正反映了我们的艺术方向。

For communicating the sense of cold, we have some effects like the breath you see on screen, which actually provide gameplay feedback - the colder it is outside, the more opaque the breath effect is - but I think audio does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of making you feel cold. That crispness of the footsteps, the sound of cold nylon "crinkling" as you walk along, shivering vocalizations, etc. But in terms of the overall art direction, while we experimented with a variety of styles early in development, the goal has always been to create a beautifully stylized world that would stand on its own and produce iconic screenshots and gameplay videos.

为了向玩家传达那种彻骨的寒意，我们增加了一些游戏效果，比如屏幕上看到的哈气，实际上提供了一种游玩反馈，外面越冷，哈气越浓重。但音效也起到了举足轻重的作用：清脆的脚步声、行走时冻脆的尼龙布料不断皱缩的声音、寒颤声等等，都会让你感觉很冷。在整体的艺术方向上，虽然我们在前期开发阶段尝试了各种风格，但我们的目标一直是创建一个美丽的风格化世界，游戏本身就能生成带有《漫漫长夜》特点的标志性的屏幕截图和游戏视频（翻译求助！译者注）。

Pip: The environments remind me a lot of Firewatch in that they tend to create lots of tempting screenshot opportunities. There are lovely vistas and trees which frame sightlines and so on. How did you balance that curation with keeping the sense of wilderness in there?

Pip：《漫漫长夜》的世界让我想起了《看火人》（一款著名的3D探索解谜RPG游戏，译者注），《看火人》的开发团队往往会创造许多充满吸引力的截图场景。在这款游戏中，美丽的景观和树木充满了玩家的视野。那么你们又是如何在这种策略和保持游戏的旷野感之间保持平衡的？

RvL: Firewatch is a beautiful game. I always feel I have to mention that we launched our sandbox well before them lest people think we copied their art style. I think they did an incredible job with the environment, and I think it helps that for them their player paths were much more clearly defined.

RvL：《看火人》是一款漂亮的游戏。有一点我得提一下，我们在他们之前就推出了我们的沙盒，以免人们认为我们抄袭了他们的艺术风格。他们在游戏场景方面的工作确实棒极了，这一点对他们是有益的：《看火人》的玩家的行动路径会更加明确。

In terms of environment design, we try to use the natural landscape to invite exploration, or discourage it. Sometimes leaving a bit of a clearing between trees is enough to draw the player's eye. Framing an opening with two slightly curved fallen trees can approximate an arch, which feels like something you should walk through. But really the ideal is that the player finds their own way through exploration.

在场景设计方面，我们一直试图利用自然景观来引导或阻止玩家继续探索。有时树木间的一小片空地就足以吸引玩家的眼睛。两颗略弯的倾斜树木构成的通路就像一个拱门，让玩家感觉应该要穿过去。但真正理想状态是玩家通过探索自行发现道路。

I think with our snow covering, every route tends to feel traversable unless it has a very obvious boundary, so it'll be interesting to see how our art style adapts to non-winter settings in the future, and how we need to adapt our world-building process to ensure players can still find their way around with some freedom but also the right kind of breadcrumbing with landmarks - both natural and human-made - so they don't feel perpetually lost. For The Long Dark, gaining a familiarity with the environment such that you can get to where you want to go as efficiently as possible is the kind of mastery needed to keep you alive.

我认为在积雪覆盖下，每条路线往往都可以穿过，除非它有非常明显的边界，所以看看我们的艺术风格将如何适应未来的非冬季设置应该会很有趣。同样的，为了确保玩家在一定的自由度下仍然可以找到正确的路，或是在在地标（自然或人造的）的指引下找到正确的方位，我们将如何调整游戏世界构建的程序也会很有趣。在《漫漫长夜》中熟悉环境，从而尽可能高效地到达你想去的地方，将成为求生的关键技能。

Pip: Thank you for your time!

Pip：感谢！