This article is from WeChat official account:Touch Music (ID: chuappgame)< span class = "text-remarks">, author: WANG Yi-like, the original title: “for two years, interactive video What happened to Shu touch music”, the title figure comes from: B station
You wake up from bed, the wind and rain outside the window are like gloom, and the calendar on the wall says October 25, 2019. Suddenly, a scary figure wearing a gold armor and a mask flashes in front of you, and it is fleeting. Maybe you haven’t woken up yet? You shook your head, trying to get rid of the drowsiness in your mind. Why not open the doors and windows for a few breaths of fresh air, you push the door open while thinking, only to find that there seems to be something more not far from the door.
A closer look revealed that a sign was erected there at some point. You are a little surprised, a little puzzled, and you come closer, and you can see the words above clearly: “Don’t look back!”
Will you look back?
Would you believe the tips of the sign?
Who is he?
This is the interactive video “You Are TrappedHow to escape this day on October 25, 2019? ”At the beginning. This work is produced by Up master GoldenEggs, and uses the multi-branch feature of interactive video to allow the protagonist to reciprocate in three loops following the audience’s choice, achieving an effect similar to the title ring of the plot in “Horror Cruise”.
“You Are Trapped on October 25, 2019” won the first place in the 2019 Station B Interactive Video Game Development Contest, with a cumulative total of more than 8 million views.
In principle, an interactive video is a collection of multiple videos. Selecting a branch is to click a hyperlink to link to the next video. In this regard, it is no different from a general video collection on a video website. The biggest difference between interactive video and regular video is that the audience can make a choice at the bifurcation point given in the plot, so as to complete a story line according to their own hearts through a series of choices.
Touch Music discussed the origin and development of interactive video in July 2019. Now that nearly two years have passed, it may be time to look back and see what changes have taken place in the interactive videos on the video website in the past two years, what progress has been made, and what remains the same.
Qi Men Qiao Path
First of all, at station B where users are actively creating, the type of interactive video deviates from earlier estimates.
Station B is generally considered to be a UGC-type platform. The content of this type of platform is mainly produced by amateurs. It is characterized by large volume but low upper limit and limited production level. In the first month or two when the interactive video production tool was launched, the interactive video content of station B did show this characteristic, mainly with a large number of interactive tests and interactive ghosts with limited time duration and limited content. At that time, there were also many reports and analyses, which will be the future development trend of interactive video at station B.
But people did not expect that since the second half of 2019, many Up masters have explored a new way, which is to use game materials to build scenes, bypass the technical difficulty and high cost of live shooting, and produce longer plots. , More refined interactive video, greatly reducing the threshold.
B actually put a lot of effort on the interactive video. In the second half of 2019, Station B held the “Interactive Video Awards” event. The scale of this event was very large, and many well-known Up masters from various districts participated. Since there are no restrictions on the types, there are many types of participating videos, including film and television editing, animation, games, ghosts, etc., and so on. The final winner was Up’s “Detective Nintengo”‘s “Pokémon can also be caught at station B!” “, an interactive video game to collect Pokémon by selecting branchesplay.
Of course you can’t catch Pokémon at Station B! “In “Pokémon” like the genuine “Pokémon”, you can catch Pokémon through turn-based battles, but your choice will indeed make the story unfold in some magical way
It is worth noting that because of the winning “Station B, you can also catch Pokémon!” “Is an interactive video game, which seems to have inspired the operators of station B and other interested Up hosts to see the potential of interactive video in games. Subsequently, the next event “Interactive Video Game Development Contest” borrowed the title of the game and included all submitted manuscripts in the game area, and the rewards were also quite generous.
After the framework was limited to “games”, the Up hosts who participated in the activities showed more divergent and active thinking.
Real people are not easy to shoot, animations are not easy to do, and scenes are not easy to find. These problems in interactive video production have been solved in unexpected ways-many Up masters use the sandbox game “Minecraft” to build scenes, The recording process not only bypasses the difficulties of animation production, but also makes use of the powerful expressive power of dynamic pictures. The winning work “You Are Trapped on October 25, 2019” used such a technique and achieved expressiveness far superior to the conventional practice of interactive puzzle games-text with static pictures.
The idea of ”using games as games” has undoubtedly inspired many Up masters. Strictly speaking, the master of Up is not using “Minecraft” to make games, but uses it to conveniently produce material, and then weaves the recorded material into an interactive video by the interactive video tool provided by station B. Compared with the earlier practices of directly recording the game process and adapting it into interactive video, the legal risk is relatively low.
In the interactive video game development competition in the second half of 2019, we can still see many similar works, such as “The King of Yellow Clothes” that simulates the Cthulhu running group. In the subsequent popular interactive room escape videos, many directly borrowed scenes from “Minecraft” as material.
The author of “The King of Yellow Clothes” used “Minecraft” to set up a fairly large-scale urban scene as a background with rich details
The time is a little bit later. In 2020, another type of interactive video games based on games will become popular at Station B. Most of them use games such as “Werewolf”, “Among Us” and “Reverse Referee” to record game screens, allowing players to act as one of the players and make various choices to advance the game. This kind of interactive video game experience is similar to a game of “Werewolf” or “Among Us”, with multiple choices and multiple interactions, and even gives people a PvP experience.
However, the issue of production cost objectively still exists. For example, it only takes one or two days to make a live video of “Among Us” with a better program effect, but it takes one interactive video to make two issues of “Among Us, to help Xiaohong win!” Up for 4 days and 14 days. Moreover, on the contrary, the 14-day, richer second bomb played less, only half of the first bomb. The continuously updated “Reversed Werewolf Killing” did not significantly decrease in quality, and the playback volume gradually dropped from about 500,000 in the first issue last year to 105,000 in the latest issue.
In the interactive video “Among Us, come and help Xiaohong win!” In “, you can advance the game by choosing where to go and who to vote for
Two sides of the coin
Many observations and analyses agree that in terms of expressiveness, interactive videos have a high upper limit and great potential, but to achieve this effect, a lot of resources are often required. Even if it is made based on a sandbox game, it is more time-consuming and labor-intensive than making a live video of the same length.
However, it now appears that most of these analyses can notice the affinity between interactive videos and games, but they still underestimate the potential of interactive videos in terms of gamification.
Indeed, from the perspective of video production, it is too difficult and costly to make interactive videos well. But if we notice the similarity between interactive video and games, especially AVG games, from another perspective, we will find that from the perspective of game development, the production of interactive video games is much simpler than general game development. .
Of course, this is based on the premise that from 2019, domestic video websites such as Tencent Video, iQiyi, and Station B have begun to provide interactive video production tools. These tools greatly simplify the production and upload process of interactive videos. Producers only need to edit the material fragments separately, and then use the story editor provided by the website to arrange the order, add links, and an interactive video is finished.
The production level of the single product “Iron Heart Game” at station B in 2020 is very high, with CG, special effects, dubbing, soundtrack, and multiple branches. Complete, change the underlying code and even be released as AVG
In addition, the Up hosts of Station B also used interactive video tools to achieve the effects of card drawing, tower defense, RPG, scene puzzle solving and many other game types. When this tool first came out, no one could have imagined that its simple architecture could achieve such rich effects.
Drawing cards is actually easier to understand. After all, as long as you continuously provide random options according to the story line, it is easy to control the probability of a player who is first exposed to the video drawing a specific card. towerThis kind of reasoning game is the same. If you have a VIP member of Mango TV, you can get additional key clues when watching, and you can get the exclusive option of “interrogation of prisoners”.
The “Star Detective: Suspect One” at the beginning of 2019 is no different from the H5 web game. The audience can directly click on the location of the item on the screen to pop up Clue tips
To be honest, this is the first time I have seen a reasoning game where you can get stronger by filling up your money. This is the illegitimate child born when the game characteristics of interactive video are combined with the operation of the video website.
outstanding
If you want to talk about interactive videos after 2019, then you must not bypass the main “Mud” at station B. In the Up host of station B, which is mainly engaged in interactive video, the number of fans, the number of views and the word of mouth can hardly be compared with that of Damumu. Since Da Mu Mu has not disclosed his actual identity, we don’t know the gender of this Up master and whether it is a team operation, so we will use “he” as the name for the time being.
Damumu started to submit interactive videos at station B in September 2019. For the first two months, the video will be based on interactive tests, such as “testing which anime character you are”, “how long can you stay in the zombies besieged city” and so on. After attracting a certain popularity through interactive testing, Da Mu Mu began to upload larger and more complex suspenseful videos.
With the “Frozen Snow Village Murder Case” as the boundary, the works after the mud mud can be experienced as a suspense and mystery AVG. “The Frozen Village Murder” uses the very classic “Blizzard Village” model: a group of people gathered in an isolated environment by chance, and then the murder occurred, and the detective needed to find the true culprit among a limited number of people. . This is a very Agatha Christie-style development. The reversal at the end also pays tribute to Agatha’s famous work “Roger’s Mystery”, that is, the characters controlled by the audience are also involved in the murder.
However, the reversal in this video is far-fetched, and it may violate the taboo of “the detective cannot be a criminal” in the mystery novel. After that, this “final reversal” became a fixed performance of a series of suspense interactive videos followed by mud mud, but the processing method was more proficient. A series of suspenseful videos such as “Wolf and Sheep”, “Paradise Island Incident”, “Tom Incident” and other suspenseful videos have soared his reputation. The dense story line, the unexpected development of the plot, and the strong suspenseful atmosphere are the common characteristics of the muddy interactive video. In addition, he is also very good at using characters that are well-known to the audience, such as Talking Tom, Big Big Wolf, SpongeBob SquarePants, etc., as important characters in the video to catch people’s attention.
Da Mu Mu has defined his video as an interactive puzzle game
Mudfoil generally does not use particularly complicated animations, and rarely does special dubbing for supporting actors. His video is the most common and simplest form in AVG: some static pictures, some special effects, but the composition is not too complicated, there is no particularly exquisite vertical drawing, and it is not clear whether it is self-dubbing or software production. The narration, as well as the appropriate soundtrack, mainly rely on text and player choices to advance the plot.
There is no special zone for interactive video at station B. If there is a special zone, the muddy mud with stable updates, quality and quantity will almost show a unique state. In a sense, the mud mud video represents the most popular type and subject of interactive video at station B-suspense puzzle solving interactive video, or AVG suspense puzzle solving.
Bright tool
As far as game development is concerned, the interactive video production tools provided by video websites are too rudimentary to achieve many interactive functions, up to the level of the famous Flash web page AVG “Miller Mountain Villa”. But then again, unless it is a massively multiplayer game, the interactive form of web games is generally not too complicated, enough for excellent individual producers to express what they want to express.
In fact, for some talented developers, the simplicity of the development tools does not affect the expressiveness of the game. The best example of this is the many classic games made with RPG Maker, such as the earlier ” “Go to the Moon” series, or “Fireworks” that attracted much attention some time ago. In many cases, the limitations of tools will activate the developer’s thinking, making people think about how to make full use of the limited conditions for expression.
However, we should not overestimate the impact of production tools on video content. At station B, whether there is a story or not, the most popular type of interactive video has always been suspense reasoning. This type represents the highest level of interactive video at station B. On video sites such as Tencent Video and iQiyi, suspense reasoning is still the most commonly used theme in its self-made interactive dramas, in addition to the love formation of the main protagonist of the strategy.
Imagine, if you want to make an interactive video, you know very well that under the production conditions of existing tools, the content continuity of the video will inevitably be affected by the pop-up options from time to time, thereby affecting the perception of the plot. At present, the interactive functions that can be achieved with the production tools provided by the website are quite limited. There is no way to make the audience truly become a “player” who inputs instructions to manipulate characters throughout the process, or to make the interactive experience smoother, which determines that it cannot be like “Detroit”. “Becoming a Human” tells a longer and more complicated story.
“Detroit: Become Human” such a delicate and smooth interaction requires more powerful development tools to achieve
So, it’s not difficult to understand that the most common and best-made interactive videos on video sites are often based on suspense reasoning and love development. Only these two themes can be produced under the existing production conditions. Provide sufficient interactive experience, and will not be affected by the incoherent and non-smooth narrative rhythm.
So, is there any interactive video with longer process, fuller plot, more detailed and rich interaction, at least the size of a shorter TV series? Yes, but they are probably difficult to appear on video sites, and more directly in the form of gamesDevelopment and sales, such as “The Invisible Guardian”.
Of course, up to now, the time for video sites to launch interactive videos is still very short, only two years, and the potential of existing production tools is far from being fully exploited. We can still expect creators to bring us more diverse story themes, newer interactive methods, or to bypass insurmountable restrictions in various wonderful ways, just like the B station Up master in the interactive video game development competition That’s it.
For example, can we make the transition of interactive video options smoother without interrupting the video frequently? Or, can we deeply integrate it with the TRPG, which also pays more attention to selection, so as to use interactive videos to restore the real TRPG experience, instead of the common AVG that wears the outerwear of running groups? Or, can we combine interactive video with many pioneering and experimental modern dramas to expand the boundary between form and content…
Even with the current production tool conditions, the content possibilities of interactive videos on video sites are already broad enough. Just looking forward, if video sites can continue to optimize existing production tools and provide more diverse interactive functions, then, one day, even individual creators may achieve “Detroit: Becoming Human” effects on video sites.
After all, if a worker wants to do well, he must first sharpen his tools.
This article is from WeChat official account:Touch Music (ID: chuappgame)< span class = "text-remarks">, author: WANG Yi-like