作者：Joe Svetlik

《割绳子》游戏开发者是俄罗斯兄弟Semyon和Efim，他们在某次媒体采访中透露了游戏发展始末，谈到了该游戏从他们自己都认为“没有人喜欢”的试玩版中演变而来的过程，介绍了这对俄罗斯孪生兄弟始于ZX Spectrum的游戏开发之路，《割绳子》在苹果没有推广的前提下取代《愤怒的小鸟》成为排行榜首位等经历。

2个人和1个降落伞：位列itunes排行榜前10

Semyon Voinov这名《割绳子》的联合开发者现在已成为新晋iTunes应用大亨，掌握着某个一夜间价值涨至百万美元的专属游戏，但他对游艇或黄金跑车的想法似乎并不感兴趣。

此前，他一直同自己的孪生兄弟Efim一起开发游戏，后者现在已是ZeptoLab技术总监。两人都坚持开发完全原创的游戏想法，于是很自然就会关注好友对自己产品的想法。但是在获得成功之前，他们所得到的反馈并没有期望中的那样理想。

Oarachute Ninja(from myfavapps.stratos.me)

Semyon笑称：“《割绳子》的概念来源于我们的首款iOS游戏《Parachute Ninja》。因为《Parachute Ninja》中使用到绳子，所以我们开发了绳子引擎，我们花大量时间改变绳子的样式和摆动方式等。对于这个部分，我们确实极具激情。但是，当我们将成果展现给好友和家人时，他们对控制方式感到困惑。于是，我们得出了自己的结论，即便我们觉得这种机制很棒，但是其他人根本无法感受到其精妙之处。或许是视觉效果的设计还存在欠缺。所以，我们决定在《Parachute Ninja》中将绳子替换成降落伞。”

《Parachute Ninja》发布于2010年2月，游戏获得了成功，免费版本登上iTunes排行榜前10之列，付费版本也位于排行榜的前20名。

问题在于，Semyon和Efim在绳子的物理引擎上花了大量时间，就这样放弃此前付出的精力似乎有些可惜。

“我们不希望就此荒废这个引擎，因为我们之前在这上面花了大量的精力，所以我们开始思考以这个绳子物理引擎为基础制作游戏。此后，我们尝试了多个概念，制作了各种原型，而《割绳子》就是其中最有趣的作品。目前的游戏玩法与原型阶段相差不大。我认为，我们能够在开发早期找到合适的核心游戏玩法，这是相当幸运的。因为某些游戏的玩法直到开发晚期才确定下来，比如《Parachute Ninja》。《割绳子》的开发过程与之不同，我们很早就定下了核心游戏玩法，随后要做的就是添加图像、关卡和音乐。”

游戏开发生涯早期：ZX Spectrum

Semyon说道：“我们的商业游戏开发经验始于Palm OS游戏，但我们真正的游戏开发生涯起点要比那早得多。自获得首台电脑ZX Spectrum时，我们兄弟两个就开始制作游戏。我们研究基础编程语言指导手册，并尝试开始制作游戏。游戏很简单，但开发过程中总是会感受到诸多乐趣。我们在游戏开发上投入的时间要比玩游戏的时间更多。我们制作的首款游戏是射击类游戏，我记得是艘宇宙飞船在屏幕下方飞行，障碍物迎面飞来，你的任务就是尽量避免撞上这些障碍物。”

以此等游戏开发经验为基础，兄弟两人转向针对Palm设备制作游戏，在当时可以算是进军空白市场。“我们上大学的时候，得到了一部早期的Palm OS设备。就技术而言，它确实不算很高端，但在当时可以算是相当时髦的产品。我们觉得，可以针对这个平台做些有趣的东西。”

他们还制作出了许多成功的动画软件，被美国许多大学用来教授创意课程。但是，游戏始终是兄弟两人最喜欢开发的东西，即便当时外界并不看到这个领域。

“我们很小就接触视频游戏。我们的成长伴随着主机的演变和革新，有Spectrum、8位主机和16位主机，我们尽量去尝试各种新技术。并非所有的主机游戏都进入俄罗斯市场，在8位主机时代，市场上充斥着著名游戏的中国克隆版本。我们时常无法分辨自己得到的究竟是原版还是盗版产品。”

但是，他们知道如何创造极具沉迷性的游戏玩法，于是自然就会出现成功之作《割绳子》。但是，他们还需要考虑游戏的其他要素，比如游戏的视觉效果样式和整体游戏结构、合适的场景和将糖果传递给游戏角色的想法，思考这些内容都需要花费一定的时间。

在开发过程中，他们多次努力重拾对游戏的激情。“我们相信自己拥有的是某些有趣的东西，但是在游戏开发过程中，往往对概念的激情会逐渐消退，你变得不那么确定游戏是否真得足够引起玩家的兴趣。随后，当你向其他人展现自己的作品时，发现他们确实喜欢，这会让你重新产生对游戏的激情。”

他甚至多次质疑游戏能否真正吸引人。“我记得自己有时会问Efim，我们专注开发的游戏是否真的适合市场和用户，我也怀疑过该游戏是否有足够的趣味性。弄清楚游戏将来是否能够取得成功或者你手上持有的是否是真正有价值的产品，这确实是件很困难的事情，因为我们在开发过程中专注的是小细节，而不是游戏开发和发布后的长远规划。只有当我们将游戏展现给好友时，当游戏临近测试阶段时，当图像设计完结只需添加音频之类的内容时，我们才深信自己制作出来的确实是很棒的产品。”

尽管这款游戏获得的积极反馈比《Parachute Ninja》更多，但他们依然不确定游戏是否能够获得成功。之所以有这种疑虑，部分原因在于适当的自我怀疑，部分原因在于iOS游戏数量大幅增长。“在游戏轰动市场之前，没有人预测到它可以成为排行榜首位，因为市场中发布的游戏很多，许多游戏甚至完全被忽视。”

800万下载量：取代《愤怒的小鸟》成为排行榜冠军

cut_the_rope(from appzden.com)

《割绳子》发布于2010年10月4日，6日发布iPad版本，随后又发布了免费版本。游戏的下载量迅速飙升，10天内销售量便突破百万，20天后达到200万，11月18日时超过300万，3月份时达到600万。

该游戏甚至一度取代《愤怒的小鸟》，位列付费游戏排行榜首位。免费版本的下载量已超过2500万（游戏邦注：这是截止2011年7月份的数据，本文所涉数据均以当时为准）。

Semyon说道：“我们认为它应当会取得与《Parachute Ninja》相似的成功，这是确定无疑的，但仅仅发布数天便取得如此好的成绩，确实让我们感到惊讶。取代《愤怒的小鸟》确实算是个巨大的成就！”

在《割绳子》进入排行榜前十之前，其推广与苹果并无关联，苹果也没有推荐过这款游戏。这个只有几个员工的莫斯科小型独立工作室采用最古老的推广方式：口碑营销。“令我们感到自豪的是，我们未受到苹果的推荐便取得如此佳绩。在公司开始推广游戏前，《割绳子》便已经位于排行榜前列。玩家向好友和其他人推荐游戏，这是游戏能够取得的最佳营销成果。”

6月末，游戏发布Android版本，但目前还没有该版本具体的下载和销售数据，ZeptoLab总裁Misha Lyalin称：“现在对我们来说最重要的事情是，努力让更多人接触到游戏。我们不希望只传播免费版本，我们在努力说服玩家付费。”

未来：周边产品和运营规划

“最终，我们肯定会寻找出每个渠道的最佳模式，但现在我们还只是刚刚起步。”

如果《愤怒的小鸟》是该游戏需要赶超的对象的话，那么这场旅程才刚刚开始。Semyon确信未来将会有更多的《割绳子》游戏，扩展品牌，努力取得更大的成功。

见识到Rovio针对《愤怒的小鸟》的运营措施，毫无疑问授权商品也将成为ZeptoLabs抢占市场战略的关键组成部分。Lyalin说道：“我们正在考虑推出游戏的授权周边产品。我们看到许多人绘制Om Nom（游戏邦注：《割绳子》中的主角）主题的图片，制作Om Nom主题商品，人们主动推广品牌证明这的确是个值得关注的市场。我们不只规划了主题玩具和钥匙扣，还筹划生产服装和桌游，这些东西很快将面世。”

cut-the-rope-toy(from g4tv.com)

那么，该公司是否还会发布新游戏呢？Semyon对这个问题的回答显得很谨慎，他说道：“我相信将来我们还会有许多很棒的想法。”

他们成功的秘诀是什么呢？他说道：“与自己的兄弟合作有好处也有坏处，但好处更多。其中之一是，你可以直接说明自己对游戏玩法或游戏整体的看法，无需拐弯抹角。我们确实会因某些事情而爆发激烈的讨论，但是随后又会像往常一样合作。”

ZeptoLab仍然保持着较小的规模，只雇佣了4个新员工。Semyon表示，他只希望真正的精英进入工作室，而不是让工作室迅速扩张。但他补充说工作室仍然有雇佣新员工的打算。

付费版游戏让他们获得了310万英镑左右的收益，那么，这两个兄弟怎么花这笔钱呢？“我的生活并没有过多的改变。之前我们只是其他公司的雇员，现在我们有了自己的公司，变得更为自由。我们此前认为可以放下所有的工作出去旅游，因为我们有更多可以自由支配的时间。但事实情况与我们的想法相反！我们需要对公司负责，这给我们很大的压力。如果要说这些金钱带来什么变化的话，那就是我们现在更加努力地工作了！”

游戏邦注：本文发稿于2011年7月8日，所涉时间、事件和数据均以此为准。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Exclusive: How Cut the Rope survived the cutting room floor to become an international hit (and make a pair of Russian twins very rich indeed…)

Joe Svetlik

With over 25 million downloads, and a further seven million for the paid version, Cut the Rope is now a worldwide success story to rival Rovio’s Angry Birds. But did you know the gameplay was actually cut from an earlier game? That’s right, it’s the game that very nearly wasn’t.

We had an exclusive chat with the game’s Russian creators – twin brothers Semyon and Efim – to see how it evolved from a demo that, by their own admission, ‘no one liked’.

Read on to discover how they made it happen – and view an exclusive gallery of never-before-seen early sketches.

Russian twin brothers started developing on a ZX Spectrum

‘Nobody liked it at first – we didn’t even think it was entertaining’

One million sales in under 10 days; 25 million downloads to date

‘We knocked Angry Birds off the top of the charts – without Apple’s help’

Merchandising in the pipeline: ‘Boardgames, apparel… bikinis?!’

TWO MEN AND A PARACHUTE: TOP OF THE iTUNES CHART

Semyon Voinov is sitting in ZeptoLab’s Moscow headquarters. As the co-creator of Cut the Rope, he is one of a new breed of iTunes app tycoons, in charge of a franchise that – almost overnight – became worth millions of dollars. He could easily be talking about mega-yachts or gold-plated supercars, but they don’t appear to interest him. Semyon is here to tell the story of Cut the Rope…

He’d been developing the game with his twin brother Efim, technical director at ZeptoLab. The two had struck upon what they thought a wholly original idea, and naturally were keen to see what their friends thought. But come the big unveiling, they didn’t quite get the reaction they were hoping for.

“Cut the Rope actually grew out of the concept of our first iOS game, Parachute Ninja. To begin with we had ropes in Parachute Ninja, so we developed the rope engine, and we spent a lot of time tweaking the way the ropes look and behave and stuff like that. We were really excited about the way it worked. But when we showed it to our friends and family they were a bit confused with the controls. We came to the conclusion that even though we thought it was super-awesome, no one really got it,” he says with a laugh. “It wasn’t really visual enough. So we decided to drop the rope for this particular game and replace it with a parachute.”

Parachute Ninja was released in February 2010, and was a success, with the free version reaching the top 10 on the iTunes chart, and the paid version top 20.

The thing was, Semyon and Efim had spent a long time working on the ropes’ physics, and thought it’d be a shame to just throw away all that hard work.

“We didn’t want to trash the engine, because we’d spent so much time on it, so we started thinking what kind of game could we base around the rope physics. So we came up with several concepts, we made the prototypes, and this was the one that was the most fun to play. Since that prototype stage, the gameplay hasn’t really changed much. I think we were quite lucky finding the core gameplay quite early on, because with some games, like Parachute Ninja, the gameplay is not finalised until a very late stage of development. Cut the Rope was different, we had the core gameplay much earlier, and then it was just a matter of adding the graphics, levels and music.”

THE EARLY DAYS: THE ZX SPECTRUM AND FOUR SHADES OF GREY

“Developing Palm OS games was the first commercial games experience we had,” Semyon says, “but we started making games long before that. It started when my brother and I got our first computer, the ZX Spectrum. We had this big book, which was a manual of basic programming language, which we used to make our first games. They were quite simple, but it was always fun to develop for. We spent more time developing games than playing them. The first game we made was some kind of shooter, I remember there was a spacecraft at the bottom of the screen, obstacles flying, and your task was just to avoid collisions.”

With this grounding the brothers moved into making games for Palm devices, considered cutting-edge at the time (yes, really). “During our university studies, we got one of the early Palm OS devices. It wasn’t really that advanced in terms of technology, but at that time it was really trendy. It was like a pocket PC, and the screen had four shades of grey. And we were thinking, ‘Wow! We can really do some crazy stuff with this!’”

They also made some successful animation software which went on to be used by American colleges to teach creative courses. But gaming was always close the brothers’ hearts, even if it wasn’t always in the most legitimate forms.

“Video games came into our lives quite early. We followed the evolution of the consoles, the Spectrum, the 8-bit consoles, the 16-bit consoles, so we were trying all the new technology – whatever we could get. Not all of the consoles came out in Russia: at one point, around the time of the 8-bit consoles, the market was flooded with Chinese clones of all the big names. Often we didn’t even know if what we had was a clone or the real thing.”

What they did know, was how to create utterly addictive gameplay – and with Cut the Rope, it came naturally. Yet there were other factors to consider: “There was the visual style and overall game structure, finding the right setting, and the idea of delivering candy to the character – it all took time.”

More than once, their initial enthusiasm waned. “We definitely felt we had something interesting on our hands, but in developing any game, you’re always excited about the concept, then you go through this stage where you’re not quite sure it’s really good enough. Then you show it to someone and they love it and you’re inspired again.”

At times he even questioned whether it was an enticing enough prospect. “I remember saying sometimes to my brother, ‘Are you sure this is the right kind of game? I’m not sure if it’s entertaining enough.’ It’s really hard to know if the game will be successful or not, whether you have something worthy on your hands or not, because during development you don’t have a wider picture, we’re focused on small things. Only when we showed the game to our friends, when it was close to the alpha stage, when the graphics were finalized and there was some audio and stuff like that – only then were we convinced we had something really cool on our hands.”

Though even then, after receiving far more positive feedback than what became Parachute Ninja, they were unsure whether it would be a success. Partly this was down to a healthy amount of self-doubt, partly because of the sheer number of games being released for iOS. “No one really knew until the game hit the market whether it would top the charts, because so many games are released and are never noticed by players, or don’t get the acknowledgement they deserve.”

EIGHT MILLION DOWNLOADS: ANGRY BIRDS GETS KNOCKED OFF ITS PERCH

Cut the Rope was released on October 4th 2010, with an iPad version on the 6th, and free versions for both on the following day. Immediately, it began to be downloaded at a phenomenal rate: within 10 days it had reached one million sales; another 10 days later it’d notched up two million; by November 18th it’d surpassed three million; by March, six million.

Now Semyon estimates seven or maybe even eight million is closer to the mark. It even managed to knock Angry Birds off the number one position in the paid chart. The free version has been downloaded more than 25 million times.

“We thought it should be as successful as Parachute Ninja, we were pretty sure about that, but for it to do so well after just a few days was really surprising,” Semyon says. “Moving Angry Birds from number one was a great achievement. I don’t know if we’ll be able to do it again! It was really a huge achievement.”

Cut the Rope was not promoted by Apple and didn’t feature in any of its adverts until it had already broken the top 10. A small independent studio from Moscow with a handful of staff had done it the old-fashioned way: word of mouth. “One thing we’re really proud about is that it got there without being promoted by Apple. It was already number one or two in the paid chart before they started promoting it. People were telling each other about the game, recommending it to their friends, and that’s the best possible marketing a game could get.”

An Android version was released at the end of June. No statistics were available at time of writing, but Misha Lyalin, chairman of ZeptoLab, tells us, “Right now what’s important to us is we try to get the game into the hands of as many people as possible… we don’t just want to distribute for free, so we try to have people pay or show them adverts.”

THE FUTURE: MERCHANDISING AND MONETISING

“Eventually we’ll figure out the best models for every particular channel… basically we’re just starting.”

If Angry Birds is anything to go by, the journey is only just beginning. Semyon confirms there will be further Cut the Rope titles to expand the brand and build the story of Om Nom, with a major update coming soon featuring new levels that’ll double the amount of content in the original.

Having seen what Rovio has done with Angry Birds, it’s not surprise that merchandise is also a key part of ZeptoLabs’ strategy for world domination. “Merchandising is something we’re in the process of releasing,” Lyalin says. “We see so many people do graffiti of Om Nom, people make bikinis out of Om Nom, you name it… If people do it themselves, I’m sure there’s a market. We’re not limiting it to plush toys and key chains. There will be apparel and board games – those things are coming out in fairly short order.”

But there will also be any fresh titles? Semyon is cagey, “I definitely believe we have some cool ideas.”

So what’s their secret? “Working with your brother has its own advantages and disadvantages,” he says. “But definitely more advantages. One of the great things is that you can always be really straightforward in saying what you think about gameplay or the game overall, you don’t need to be too diplomatic. We can have really hot discussions about things, but we always get on afterwards.” To coin a phrase, ‘You don’t have to be my brother to work here, but it helps’.

ZeptoLab has stayed small, only hiring four new people. Semyon says he wants to make sure he gets the best – and not expand too dramatically. Though he adds they are still hiring.

It’s time for us to go, but there’s one questions we haven’t yet asked. Eight million downloads priced at 59p (minus Apple’s 30%) equals £3.1million. So what have the brother done with all that cash? “My life has not really changed very much. Previously we were just employees, now we have our own company we have more freedom – we thought we’d be able to drop everything and go traveling tomorrow, that we’d have more free time. It turned out to be quite the opposite! We’re responsible for the company, and there are certain expectations now, so it’s put a lot of pressure on us. If anything, we work even harder now.”

Careful what you wish for. (Source: Electricpig)