Text/Yiguang Flow

In recent years, mainstream games have become more and more complex, and everyone is scrambling to get closer to industrial masterpieces, and works that explore simple and pure fun are becoming more and more rare. Today, Amway's new game "Rabbit and Steel" plays with minimalism.

The release of "Hades 2" on May 7 this year stole almost all the limelight, overshadowing the new works launched on Steam at the same time, and unfortunately "Rabbit and Steel" was released on the 9th two days later, and it was also one of the victims of this wave of craze.

However, within the first week after the release of "Rabbit and Steel", its sales still quickly exceeded 100,000 copies, which can be regarded as a victory against the trend. What's even more commendable is that in the past less than two months, the game's reputation has also maintained a high level of "rave reviews", with a total of more than 4,400 players giving the game a 96% positive rating.

On the one hand, I achieved this result because of the freshness of the game. It deletes a series of contents such as social, running maps, and tasks in the complex system of MMO, leaving only the core combat gameplay of "dungeon boss battle", combined with light meat pigeon and multiplayer online elements, and the experience is very novel.

On the other hand, "Rabbit and Steel" has a very high level of completion. Whether it's the art, music, or gameplay, while fully reflecting its own personality, the details and overall atmosphere have also been polished to a very mature level, and at first glance, it is hard to believe that this is an independent work of an individual developer.

01

The "individuality" that exudes from the bones

What first attracted me to "Rabbit and Steel" was not its gameplay, but the kind of "eye-edge" that made people electrocute at a glance. Its art belongs to the style that can be immediately recognized when placed in a bunch of games. The core elements of the game are a rabbit-eared girl (left in the picture below) and a fairy tale world view (right in the picture below).

The characters of the game are particularly recognizable, and they do not use the popular celluloid drawings of the moment, nor do they have the popular taste of AI paintings, but use the simple configuration and color matching of fairy tale illustrations. For example, the face shape of the character deliberately highlights the elements of the rabbit face, especially the curvature and shadow treatment of the tip of the nose, which is easy to associate with the role positioning of rabbits and rabbit-eared girls on a closer look, and is very different from the more popular rabbit girl characters.

The portrayal of the character as a whole also highlights the three major elements of rabbit, occupation, and personality behavior as much as possible, and weakens the performance of details such as hands and feet. The advantage of this is that it can immediately remind people of each character's corresponding profession and positioning, and quickly form an initial idea of the character's behavior style.

For example, the black-haired epee rabbit is holding a big sword, which is the output of the front row at a glance, the black tone reveals a hard-core style, and the pink bow represents a hint of her playful character; The gray short-haired rabbit covers half of the face, with a skirt with blue edges on a black background, reflecting a capable and cold character; The wizard rabbit's black and gray curly hair, wizard hat, moon wand, and almost pure black coat can also outline a calm and restrained image of a magician.

The design of the characters' movements also continues this minimalist style that highlights the key points. The dancing bunny's circle and poss, the bow and arrow bunny's charged shot, and the knight bunny's spear shake the ground to give people a sense of security. It can be found that these actions that end in a few simple frames, there are almost no superfluous elements, and they are closely presented around the budding of rabbits, the characteristics of different professions, and the behaviors of different personalities.

In the game, players can also choose different colors for each class, so there is always an image that matches the player's vision. For example, below is another version of the Assassin Bunny, which has changed from the pure and cold style revealed by the previous gray, black and blue tricolor to a more charming and gorgeous black, purple and pink style.

Looking at the many setting drawings created by the author for the game characters, it is not difficult to see that the characters of Rabbit and Steel do not need to be very detailed and complex.

Swipe left and right to view

Of course, it's not just the rabbit girl, but the role creation of other races is also a truth.

The setting of the characters avoids the routine of the mainstream two-dimensional character design, and because of the fairy-tale color and simplified details, it presents a purer sense of cuteness. On this basis, the background setting of "Rabbit and Steel" further strengthens the fairy tale color, giving people a sense of picture that is both simple and dreamy.

For example, the plot of the game has a strong call color. This game tells the story of rabbits chasing the moon, establishing the kingdom of the moon, and pursuing the mystery of the loss of the kingdom of the moon.

Swipe left and right to view

The backgrounds of several of the main maps in the game also follow this minimalist background composition and color scheme.

After putting so many pictures, in the final analysis, I still want to talk about the shaping of the "personalized art style" of "Rabbit and Steel".

The game's art materials aren't very elaborate and expensive, but it has a clear plan for what it wants to express: build a fairytale-like world view around the rabbit-eared girl, and simplify the details of the characters on the other, retaining only key features such as professional personality and rabbit ears.

Compared with the trend of mainstream game art pursuing refinement, elements overflowing the picture, and increasing exaggeration, this kind of art style that is concise and clear, refreshing and beautiful, and reveals a trace of emotion, really fascinated me at a glance.

02

Simplify, simplify, or simplify

Not only the art, but also the gameplay design of Rabbit and Steel also contains a minimalist beauty.

The elements used in the game's combat scenes are very simple, with only different color blocks and geometric shapes, and in most cases, only a black background. The core gameplay of the game is also very simple, which is a continuous, similar to the boss battle in the MMO dungeon: that is, judging the attack mechanism of the boss, and then avoiding the attack at the same time, skillfully use your skills, consider the CD, and then output as much as possible.

In Rabbit & Steel, each character has 4 active skills, which are 1 primary attack, 2 secondary attacks, 3 special attacks, and 4 defense skills.

In general, all skills have their own CD, and the first three skills share a global CD. Among them, the skills of some professions need to take into account the mutual matching and trigger mechanism, for example, the dancer's 1 skill will charge 2 skills, 2 skills will charge 1 skill, and when 1 and 2 skills are released, there is a probability to refresh the CD of 3 skills. Defense skills provide invincibility and eliminate nearby barrages.

During the level, you can also get some random props to provide passive effects, such as increasing damage, adding debuffs, endurance, changing the trigger mechanism, etc. In addition, players can also enter the shop to strengthen their four skills, or buy potions, experience, etc., to strengthen their combat power.

That's pretty much everything you need to play in the game, so it's very simple.

All that's left is to familiarize yourself with the mechanics of the boss, test the player's proficiency and adaptability, and when multiplayer cooperates, it tests the cooperation between teammates. There are many types of mechanisms for boss battles, but in general, they are all barrage attacks, and you only need to find the corresponding method to crack them. For example, a simple barrage can be cracked by looking at the gap and avoiding the bomb.

There are also block-and-move type attacks. Players need to move in advance according to the early warning pattern of the boss attack, so as to avoid the attack barrage. This type of attack involves a lot of warning graphics, such as restricting players to only be in a certain area, restricting players not to be too close to each other, and restricting an area to launch barrage rings.

In addition to blocking the move, there is also a forced move attack, using knockback, teleportation, rotation attack and other mechanisms to force the player to keep moving, and at the same time, it can also be matched with the restriction of the seal move, such as not getting too close, etc.

This is followed by a multi-amplification attack. This type of attack will be marked with numbers, and the number corresponds to the number of segments of the attack range expansion, and the corresponding distance must be judged, and the area that can be avoided must be found and dodged in advance.

Finally, there are multiple changes of tricks after the time stop. The boss will freeze the player for a period of time, during which the player will show different types of attack warnings, and then after the time stop and resume, the player must memorize the tricks, and quickly find the solution, and quickly cooperate with teammates.

In the game, the attack mechanism of each boss is different, and in most cases, the first encounter with a new mechanism will make people a little unprepared, and when encountering a fancy boss barrage, it will even make people scratch their heads and unable to deal with it. For example, you need to move separately, but your teammates keep sticking to each other, causing you to get injured after the effect is triggered.

This kind of experience of making people scramble and being pitted by teammates can be said to be the more persuasive aspect of "Rabbit and Steel", but it is also the biggest source of happiness in the multiplayer gameplay of this game.

Overall, the gameplay of "Rabbit and Steel" is like a minimalist "FF14" continuous BOSS RUSH dungeon. Whether it's a single-player level and a skilled coping mechanism, or multiple people cooperating with each other to play through the level, it's easy to think of the fun of playing in MMO, so this game is also referred to as Bunny 14 by players.

And this kind of dungeon simulator with no socialization, no running map, no task, only the next boss to fight, is unexpectedly quite novel and interesting.

03

Don't ignore the charm of doing subtraction

After playing around with friends in Rabbit and Steel over the weekend, watching the game's praise and sales, I inevitably had an idea: adding is not necessarily the optimal solution.

Nowadays, a mobile game can make tens of gigabytes of capacity, but the fun it brings to players is not hundreds of times more than when it was hundreds of megabytes before. And many games are bigger, but the essence has not changed much, it is still the set of gacha simulators, and at the same time, the game accumulates too much content but exposes more shortcomings in production capacity, risk control, and creation, once it is not handled in place, it will cause dissatisfaction among players.

Instead of that, it's better to get back to the essence of the game and do something that makes players have fun and have fun.

If you want to choose this direction, then you must give up the things that have been added and piled up in the past, and in this regard, "Rabbit and Steel" has initially found the trick, and from the huge system of MMO, it intercepts a very pure copy of the boss battle gameplay.

The art style chosen by the developer mino_dev is also a plus point, with a very high affinity character, which lowers the entry threshold for this set of gameplay, otherwise whether the game can attract attention is still a matter of two words.

And the music level of "Rabbit and Steel" is also remarkable, not to mention how classic it is, but it is complete and of excellent quality. For example, the theme song of each big level is closely related to the background setting of the level, the sense of rhythm and melody are excellent, and the bright voice of the theme song "Emerald Lakeside" also makes the image of Bunny jump on the page.

Of course, creation doesn't happen overnight. The current level of completion of "Rabbit and Steel" is inseparable from the accumulation of mino_dev's previous work "Maiden And Spell", both of which have the same art style and expressive barrage gameplay, which are the cornerstones of "Rabbit and Steel".

Girls and Magic

Now, "Rabbit and Steel" and its author mino_dev have gradually emerged from niche fields, relying on the creativity of drastic subtraction of MMOs, and have achieved a small success. So in the huge system of MMO, can only boss battles stand on their own? In other mainstream gameplay and tracks, are there opportunities for similar "subtraction"?

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