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Edmund McMillen分享推出游戏合集的初衷

发布时间:2013-01-04 09:51:33 Tags:,,

作者:Dant Rambo

独立领域已相当健全。随着Steam、Desura以及PSN与XBLA(小型平台)这些平台的崛起,游戏制作者已获得一定程度的独立自主权。在许多方面,Edmund McMillen可以自由操纵该领域,推动其朝着全新方向发展。

你可能仅知道McMillen开发了《超级食肉男孩》与《The Binding of Isaac》这两款佳作,但那只是冰山一角。最近,他打算将其它作品收录在《The Basement Collection》中,并加入某些附加内容与绝密信息。

为了了解这个具有丰富内容的集合包,我们在Edmund的圣克鲁斯住宅对其进行了访谈,以下是其中的第一部分。

basement(from gamezebo)

basement(from gamezebo)

是什么原因促使你制作《The Basement Collection》?

原因很多,当然,这些游戏的出色本质以及玩家对它们的喜爱也是重点,我想要打破“我的作品仅有《超级食肉男孩》一款”的观念。因为这会令我觉得自己毫无成就感,而事实是我已经有8年的制作经验。许多人只知道我开发了《超级食肉男孩》或《Issac》。我想打破这种定势思维。

我认为这是一种错觉。尤其在传播媒介广为盛行的美国地区,人们容易误以为基本上只需运气便可成功。

据说《The Basement Collection》中涵盖大量附加内容,是什么激发你制作出如此多的额外内容?

我是收藏品爱好者。我曾买过《Mario History》,但其内容令我十分失望。它仅仅是个半成品。毕竟,马里奥的悠久历史怎是只言片语可以说清。

在《The Basement Collection》上,我会着重注意自己在乎的方面,我极其看重素材。这有点像我着手处理所有事项的方法。我仅根据自己的意愿行事,我会公平地定价。《The Binding of Isaac》售价为5美元,因为它比游戏集合包具有更多全新体验模式,因此,我决定给后者定价4美元。

最初你曾经为了是否改变游戏的某些方面左右为难过吗?

其实,有某些方面是我打算调整并完善的。比如在制作《Aether》时,Tyler希望完善物理机制。由于我们仅在该作中投入14天的时间,因此我们实际需耗费更多优化时间。Tyler不喜欢自己为该作制作的音乐,因为它仅是某个调的重复,因此他希望邀请Danny Barnowsky加入。当时,我们求助了Laura Shigihara(游戏邦注:她曾为《植物大战僵尸》编曲)。她为此制作了一个完整的原声音乐。而且令人惊讶的是,这个原声音乐改变了游戏的整体氛围。

我十分喜爱《Aether》,你是如何决定将其收录在《Collection》中?

多亏众多绝密法宝,我们已经彻底更新《Aether》的画面。如果仅在脑中思考,你不会发现其中的不同,但如果细细查看各个方面,在重新对比后你会发现两者存在明显差异。另一款游戏会给人焕然一新之感。而且,你会发现现在的小触手怪物拥有自己的肢体。同时我们还改善控制方式;那样所有事物将更具动感。此外,我们还在太空上添加更多小外星人与飞行物,以及具有互动性的物品。

Aether(from gamezebo)

Aether(from gamezebo)

回顾游戏调整的整个历程,你觉得自己有所收获吗?或者是否对你的未来游戏制作产生影响?

回顾这些作品,尤其是2006年制作的《Triachnid》,有许多方面值得我们深入探究。我发现,在该领域投入越长时间,我越会扪心自问,为何我要这样做?我压根不清楚自己做了什么。这仅仅是不断试验,你应深入研究。《Triachnid》中的飞行物引起我的思考,总会有另一个我想要修复这个问题,但却无法达到自己的预想效果。

《Triachnid》中的内容并没有进行多大调整,但我们会删除那些恼人元素(比如广告与品牌)。现在我们获得的都是具有高分辨率的全屏游戏。利用Adobe Air技术,你可以利用鼠标左右键操控游戏,因此你现在可以在《Triachnid》中使用这种按钮方式,借此,游戏玩法将趋向简单。

玩家还能从《Collection》中获得哪些内容?

比如我们已经改善《Meat Boy》的操控方式,并添加大量附加内容,而《Spewer》中则增添了一个全新章节……

老实讲,我还未玩过《Spewer》。

它十分出色。我认为它是该游戏集合包中第三款佳作。其实,这是一款基于物理现象的平台游戏。利用不同药物,你会拥有不同呕吐能力。最初你会有规律地吐出粘液,之后游戏会驱动你敲击周围物体,而你必须回收这些粘液,此外,不同药物会赋予你不同的呕吐能力。

你是在什么时候制作这款游戏?

是在《超级食肉男孩》之前,我制作了《AVGM》、《Spewer》、《Time FCUK》,之后才是《超级食肉男孩》。而最后一款Flash游戏是该合集中的突出之作。紧接着是我与Tommy合作的首款游戏《Grey Matter》。它十分精致。如同反射击题材游戏。玩法类似子弹射击,但玩家扮演的是子弹一角,因此你应处理好所有方面。此外,Danny Barnowsky为其作曲,且效果十分醒目。

grey matter(from gamezebo)

grey matter(from gamezebo)

能否透露下该合集中的附加内容?

除了游戏,还包括大量绝密信息。比如评论、关于《Time FCUK》的疑问与解答。

我曾经向Jamie Swirsky(《Indie Game: The Movie》导演)提到这个合集,并询问能否借用一间剪辑室用于录制该合集的一段音频。他答道:“我们有你谈论《AVGM》、《Coil》、《Triachnid》与《Aether》的视频。”我又问道能否给个备份。他回复道:“没问题,给我一天时间。”第二天,他向我发送了这份视频。他将其修改得与电影如出一辙。那是长达15分钟的《Indie Game: The Movie》电影,而且他们从未打算将其用于特殊版本中。因为这基本上是个垃圾。

因此,我围绕自己对所有游戏的见解,开发了草稿样本。而后我草拟了角色,并创建出游戏原型,因此我在一开始便拥有自己的原型。

你是否曾预计过该合集一经推出后,便会引发一股纹身与追风热潮?看到青少年身上刺有自己设计的纹身会不会很奇怪?

有点吧。但这又相当有趣,我还记得当我急需钱的时候,我会带着自己的写生集到纹身场所,问道:“可以买下它吗?”他们希望我可以定时提交作品,但最终因为我太过懒惰,便停止这项举动。

在收入方面,我们听说《The Basement Collection》的部分收入会分配给与你合作的程序员,当真如此?

是的,其中66%的收入将归他们所有。我自己有钱,所以这不会构成太大问题,有时我会对自己的职业选择感到迷茫,我们从游戏中取得的收益微乎其微。基本上,它刚刚匹配我们投入的数个月努力,而早期作品更是分文无收。与我一道制作《AVGM》的Tyler将会从中获得更大比例,因为他为《The Basement Collection》的方方面面投入大量精力。接着,我会把余下资产分给负责重塑游戏的其他三位程序员。Florian无需大笔收入;因为他已经从《Binding of Isaac》中获得50%的收益。总之,这是回馈那些帮助我取得当前成绩的所有人们的最棒方式。(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

Edmund McMillen Interview, Part 1: The Basement Collection

by Dant Rambo

The indie scene is in a healthy place. With the rise of platforms like Steam, Desura – and to a lesser extent PSN and XBLA – creators have acquired a level of autonomy unlike anything in the traditional publishing space. In many ways, Edmund McMillen has taken that freedom and run with it, pushing the medium in directions we’ve never seen before.

You may know McMillen best for Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, but those are just the tip of what is a fairly prolific iceberg. He’ll be compiling much of his other work in The Basement Collection, an upcoming release that’s bursting at the seams with extras and hidden goodies.

To learn more about the content-rich release (and so many other topics), we met up with Edmund at his Santa Cruz residence and had a lengthy conversation. This is the first in a series of five posts, and we’ll be rolling out a new one each day this week.  Click here for easy access to each segment of the interview once posted.

What prompted the creation of The Basement Collection?

A lot of this was… of course these games are cool in their own right – people like them and everything –  but I wanted to kind of destroy the illusion of “I made Super Meat Boy, and that was it.” It looks like I just came out of nowhere, when really, I’d been making games for eight years. A lot of people just know me for Meat Boy or Isaac. And I wanted to just kill that.

I think that’s a bad illusion to have. Especially in the US, with TV and everything, it kind of pushes that illusion that people “just succeed.” They just win the lottery, basically.

The Basement Collection is said to be loaded with plenty of extras.  What motivated you to create so much bonus content?

I’m a fan of collections. I got the Mario History one, and I was so disappointed. [It comes with] the most half-assed book. You’d think after all these years they’d have so much more than this.

[With The Basement Collection], I think going overboard with the stuff that I did consciously go overboard on is because I’m a fan of stuff, and this is what I would want. That’s kind of how I go about everything. I just do it the way I would really want it, and I price it the way I feel is fair. I paid $5 for The Binding of Isaac, and that’s a much more new substantial experience than the collection, so the collection makes sense to me that it’s $4.

Were you at first kind of torn about whether or not you wanted to change anything in the games?

There were certain things I wanted to change and improve. Like with Aether, Tyler [Glaiel] was like ‘I need to improve the physics’. We only spent 14 days on Aether, so we actually spent about that much just polishing it back up. He hated the music that he made for Aether, because it was sort of repetitive, so he was like “can we get Danny [Barnowsky] to do something?” And then I asked Laura Shigihara. She did the music for Plants vs. Zombies. She did a full soundtrack [for Aether in The Basement Collection]. It’s weird how the soundtracks kind of change the feel of the game.

Aether is the game I’m most excited to see, as far as how it turns out in the Collection.

It’s got a bunch of extra secrets, and the graphics have been completely updated. Like, you wouldn’t think [so] because in your mind this is what it looked like, but if you put them side-by-side, I re-contrasted everything so it’s dramatically different. The other one looks really washed. And you can see the little tentacles have physics on them now. And the controls have been completely improved; there’s more of a flow to how everything feels. And there are a ton more little aliens and stuff flying around in space and stuff to interact with.

With going back and tweaking this stuff, do you feel like you’ve learned something? Maybe something that will influence your future games?

Going back to these games – especially Triachnid –  I made this in 2006, and a lot of it is cringe-worthy. The older I go on these things, the more it’s like “why did I do that? I didn’t know what I was doing. It’s all me experimenting with things. You’ve got to learn. The flies [in Triachnid] are attracted to his head, and there’s a part of me that’s like “I wanna fix that!”, but then it doesn’t show growth as much as I would like to show.

Triachnid didn’t get any content changes, but all of the games – like all of the ads and branding for anything that would be annoying on the Internet –  is of course gone. And everything is hi-res and as full screen as we can get it.  In Adobe Air you can do mouse support with both sides of the mouse, so [in Triachnid] you can actually grab things with this button now [the other one], which makes things a lot easier.

What else can players expect to see in the Collection?

Meat Boy is here with improved controls and a bunch of bonus content, and then Spewer is here with a whole new chapter…

Being 100% honest, I haven’t actually played Spewer yet.

It’s good. I’d say it’s the third best game in here. It’s actually a physics-based platformer. You get different pills and they give you different puke abilities. You start out with regular puke, and it can propel you and knock things around, and you have to re-eat it, and you get different pills and the pills change your puke.

When did you make this?

This was one of the last ones before Super Meat Boy, so I did AVGM, Spewer, Time FCUK, and then Super Meat Boy. The best games in the pack were the ones I did at the very end of my flash development career.

And then there’s Grey Matter. it’s one of the first games that Tommy and I ever made [together]. It’s pretty good. It’s like an anti-shooter. It plays like a bullet hell shooter, except you are a bullet, so like you have to just run into everything. And Danny [Barnowsky] did the music, so it’s really @#$%ing good.

Can you shed a little light on what we can expect in terms of bonus content?

Aside from all the games, there are the secrets, which are pretty substantial.  [There are] commentaries, there’s a Q&A for Time FCUK, I did one for Aether … there’s so much more.

I told [Indie Game: The Movie director] Jamie Swirsky  about the collection and I asked “do you have any cutting room floor stuff of me talking about anything in the collection?” and he’s like “we’ve got you talking about AVGM, we’ve got you talking about Coil, we’ve got you talking about Triachnid and Aether.” So I asked, “Can you just give me the scraps?” and he’s like “alright, give me a day.” The next day he sends me this. He @#$%ing polished it up as good as the movie.  So there’s over 15 minutes of never-before-seen Indie Game: The Movie footage which they aren’t even going to use in the special edition. They were never going to use it because it’s just scraps, basically.

So there’s all that stuff, and then there’s all this, where I have actual dev sketches that I had laying around from I think all the games. And then I have character design sketches. And then I have prototypes, so there are prototypes from day one.

Are you predicting a crazy amount of tattoos and fan art to come out as soon as this is out? Would it be weird to see tattoos of things you drew as a teenager?

That would be weird. It’s pretty funny because a lot of my sketchbooks I remember when I needed money I brought them to tattoo places and said “could you buy this off of me?” and they wanted to have me bring it in a certain way and I ended up just being too lazy and not doing it.

Speaking of money, we’ve heard that some of the income from The Basement Collection is going to programmers and such you worked with?

Yeah 66% is going to the programmers. I’ve got money, so it’s not a huge deal, and sometimes I feel a bit bad about the fact that I did all this stuff that started my career… we made very little money from these games when they came out. We made enough to make the months we spent on the game worth it, basically – and the earlier games made nothing. Tyler, who did AVGM with me, he’s going to get a substantial cut because he also did all this [The Basement Collection]. He put it all together. And then I’ll split the rest with three of the other programmers that redid all of the stuff for the other games. Florian doesn’t need a cut; he’s getting 50% of the Binding of Isaac, so he’s fine. But yeah, it was a cool way to give back to all of the people who helped me get where I am now.(source:gamezebo)


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