作者：Aaron San Filippo

在本系列中，我将采访著名的游戏开发者，从中为读者们收集成功的经验，希望对读者们有所启发。

在第一部分，我采访了独立游戏开发者Adam Saltsman。他的工作令人瞩目，不仅因为他多产，更因为他的许多游戏都吸引了大量玩家，产生巨大影响。《屋顶狂奔》给他带来第一次的成功，这款flash游戏后来又移植到手机平台。在过去的18个月，他已经制作了一款名为《Hunger Games：Girl on fire》的游戏，一款名为《Capsule》的游戏，以及一款美国男性护理品牌Old-Spice的广告游戏，以及发布了iOS版的《Hundreds》（游戏邦注：这款游戏成为苹果应用店商中的“编辑精选游戏”，IGF也提到它）。根据常识，游戏开发的成功与好运气有关——但是，当某人有样一连串的成功时，我们应该看看他的好运气真的这么多吗？

《屋顶狂奔》的设计

《屋顶狂奔》的发行让你成为万众瞩目的焦点。当你开始做这款游戏时，你对它的总体目标是什么？你认为这个游戏的最终成品接近你当初的设想吗？

是的，我的目标只是做出一款我认为真正有趣的游戏。也许在我这一生中，这是唯一一款比我当初的设想还要简单、优秀的作品。

游戏的开始部分尤其精致：有独特的动画，漂亮的鸟儿飞在空中，主角匆忙地跳出窗户等等。你认为游戏让玩家产生的第一印象有多重要？

我的想法是这样的：你的游戏好或不好，玩家就在那里。特别是如果这款游戏便宜或免费，玩家可能不会看得太久。他们可能不知道你是谁，所以他们玩这款游戏的时间可能不会超过5秒。这就糟了，因为我认为大多数有趣的游戏，值得玩的游戏和玩家之间存在一种双向沟通——游戏要求玩家付出时间和信任，而玩家要求游戏提供乐趣或意义等。所以因为当人们玩我的游戏时，我不可能跳出来说“嗨，我是Adam，我在这款游戏上付出了很多，希望你们喜欢它；请你们一定要坚持玩到第二章，那是游戏的精华部分……”我认为必须靠游戏说话，让游戏的乐趣和魅力表达我的想法。我给玩家一些东西，让玩家们潜意识地决定“好吧，这游戏蛮酷的，我就再玩玩吧”。总的说来，如果说我的设计方法有什么准确的词能形容，那就是“慷慨”。

听说了你的难度调整方法，我感到好奇。你有没有“玩家能生存的平均时间”或类似衡量标准？你认为什么时候才是“刚刚好”？

对我而言，游戏更接近艺术，更不是技术（但我指的不是那种幻想式的艺术，而是技术感不太强的艺术）。回顾过去，我认为有些技术有助于制作某种场景或某种变体等等，但是……我的方法更像是这样的：

1、把不同的场景弄混，直到我觉得够好了。

2、把游戏发给最心直口快的朋友，改到他们和我自己觉得好为止。

3、把游戏发给我妈，改到她和我自己觉得好为止。

两点提醒：我非常看重“妈妈测试”，我认为这种方法很有价值，它是易用性测试的简化版。世界上到处都有玩家妈妈（比如我妻子），但在我的“妈妈测试”中，我妈妈玩游戏确实是超级烂的——她对游戏没有兴趣，也不了解任何与游戏有关的东西。所以无论是什么人，看他们玩，看他们体验游戏时会产生什么“怪异”的设想，做决定时也要考虑到他们的想法，特别是在游戏的引入部分。这是第一个提醒。

第二个提醒是，我说的“把不同场景弄混”是指不断尝试不同的东西，因为我做过许多游戏，我有经验和直觉，所以我在做决定时仍然是有特定目标的。

最后，如果你不能把第一条做好，比如，如果你在做一款动作游戏，如果游戏不让你这个制作者玩得手心冒汗，我想，这通常意味着你仍然没有领悟第一条的精神……

有时候我觉得就游戏吸引玩家而言，开发者们似乎把游戏的某些方面当作理所当然的。你认为你完全知道《屋顶狂奔》如此吸引玩家的原因吗？

我的理论很多，但我不愿意提出任何一点。但我不妨指出无害的一点，也就是可靠的情境（正常的角色在正常的场景中），跟“少界面”一样重要（这对我来说是件大事），看起来很酷很有趣……但是，我敢说在这方面我还有很多不理解的地方，努力理解它应该是我人生当中非常振奋的事。所以我就是这么做的。

《Hundreds》的发行策略和PR

祝贺《Hundreds》发行成功。这款游戏倍受关注和好评，设计方面确实出类拔萃。我可以提问的方面太多了——但最吸引我的是这个项目的PR和发行策略。你建立了网站，用来发布预告片。预告片里放出游戏的核心机制，但没有泄露太多游戏的实际玩法，巧妙又有神秘感；观看者的反应基本上是：“看起来很棒”。所以，回顾这款游戏的开发，你认为就让人产生兴趣和吸引苹果的关注这方面，这种做法在多大程度上促进了成功？

我希望可以给这个网站的作用打分，但我想那是不可能的……个人认为，网站帮助很大。我们已经让苹果注意到我们了，我们在去年三月就跟他们谈《Hundreds》了。那个网站给游戏带来网络人气，如果没有它，游戏可能不会这么火。网站为我们提供了向目标受众展示游戏的平台，让玩家期待我们的游戏。很难说网站给成功加了多少分，但确实很多。

在发行策略上，你们还有其他举动吗？哪些你觉得有帮助？

我认为，除了网站，Greg（另一位合作人）在广告、预告片、图标等等方面的工作都为游戏加分不少。Greg和我几乎沉迷于我们二人的合作，我们步调一致，交流顺畅。还是那句话，我不知道该打多少分，但我觉得这些工作确实让苹果看到我们对游戏的认真态度，让玩家觉得我们确实在用心做游戏，值得他们关注或关心吧。

关于“简略”

《屋顶狂奔》的与众不同在于它只给玩家一个控制按钮（跳），没有关卡，确实让玩家获得游戏的核心体验。我觉得《Hundreds》很有趣，部分是因为没有指南，传统的感觉，大部分机制是让玩家自己去发现而不是告诉玩家。没有“暂停”按钮或“重新开始”按钮（我认为我能一直玩到30关才发现没有这个按钮！）。有时候，要删去游戏中的某些东西反而比添加还困难。对于《Minimalism》，你认为这也是你下意识努力的目标吗？

是的。

是的，看出来了。在项目开发过程中，你是否发现自己一边想着“又白忙了，我们做过头了”，一边把很多东西去掉？

是的，你的话基本上概括了《Hundreds》的几个月的开发过程。

关于“随机性”

你曾提到《超级马里奥》是你的灵感来源之一。我觉得有趣是因为那款游戏的特点是具有确定性，但我注意到你-几乎所有的游戏都在设计师意图和随机元素之间取和微妙的平衡。在《屋顶狂奔》中，你知道你将遇到的建筑和障碍的类型，但没有办法记住特征。这种随机性似乎让玩家对游戏不禁产生一种“再玩一次”的冲动。在《Hundreds》中，各个关卡产生看似随机的物品布置，但在特定的关卡中，物品本身是一样的。

所以，随机性吸引你的是什么，对此你有没有制定出最佳实践方案或指导理论，如何使用和控制随机性？

简单地说，我至少喜欢随机性的两个方面。第一，从纯实用性的角度说，设计非随机性的关卡太累人了，并且效果不总是理想的。一旦问题解决了，就没什么可玩性了。解决问题通常比设计问题来得快，所以对于一个制作手机游戏的小团队，我认为正常的内容制作有时候不太有效，一些程序方面的工作反而很有帮助。

第二，随机性使测试我自己的设计时变得更有趣。许多游戏都有随机性，当使用得当时，会让你的精神处于一种危机管理模式。在现实生活中，这种精神状态确实很有压力，但在游戏中，多少会让人感到愉快和有趣。许多动作游戏有数值设计，但可能在战斗或一些比较混乱的地方采用了随机性，以便让玩家进入危机管理模式。

我说的“危机管理模式”是指为了以最好的方式处理意料之外的事件而调整自己的行为。调整可能性空间的拓朴学，充分利用接下来将出现的事物，就像玩《俄罗斯方块》时，总是保证有地方放方块。我喜欢的很多游戏都有这种特征。

关于营销游戏和“独立开发者的声望”

回想当初你以2.99美元在应用商店中发行《屋顶狂奔》时，那时应用市场处于不稳定的时期，许多人尝试0.99美元或免费应用。因为你逆流而上，以这种价格出售游戏并成功了，所以很多媒体报道了你的做法。数年之后，免费模式占领了手机市场，但你们又反其道而行，仍然发行付费游戏——再一次，好像又成功了。

你是否想过也许你应该让游戏的前几个关卡或者其他内容免费，让玩家购买剩下的部分？可以告诉我你的定价策略吗？

当然可以。最初我们打算采用“付费模式”，但之后我们放弃了，因为我们没有PR计划，并且《Hundreds》的截图看起来也没有那么令人兴奋，但游戏的试玩版真的很不错。在很大程度上，试玩版做得好且找到目标玩家是游戏成功的关键。最终尽管我们认为付费模式只会让我们不得不与大公司大集团竞争，但是当然，我很难说那到底是好还是不好。

奇怪的是，经过一系列变化，尽管不要“免费模式”已经够奇怪了，可是我们居然靠它从激烈的竞争中胜出。真是不可思议。

对于质疑这个策略的人，你的意思是这种方式只适合已经有些名气的开发者，或曾经有过成功的开发者？

我想分成两部分回答：

1、“名气”或过去获得的成就帮助很大。让苹果注意到你，这些可能帮助最大。一旦你的游戏被苹果重点推荐了，我认为名气和过去的成功就没有意义了，因为现在你的游戏已经成为一个大应用商店的大明星了。但达到这个目的的办法有很多。《屋顶狂奔》没有被推荐过，它的成功与苹果没有关系。但因为它是靠自己获得成功的，所以我们才能以此作为筹码，联系上苹果。我认为最重要的是想办法突出自己，让玩家对你的游戏感兴趣——办法有很多。

2、然而，另外一个问题是，即使你认为“只要成名了”就够让你给游戏标价2.99美元，但这恰恰暗示了如果你没有“成名”，你本可以靠标价0.99美元或免费成功的……不过我认为现在情况不一定是这样了。免费游戏和0.99美元的游戏更容易靠口碑成功，这倒是真理。但因为竞争实在太激烈了，无论是时间、注意力还是用户……即使是那么低（或免费）的价格，也很难让人口口相传你的游戏。有人最近发布了一款免费游戏，被苹果重点推荐了，但安装率比我们的付费游戏还低。免费游戏即使安装率很高，也不能保证转化成经济上的成功（看《Gasketball》、《Punch Quest》等）。虽然也有例外（《Spaceteam》和可能《Letterpress》），但“免费”不是保证成功的万灵药。

当然，过去的成功和让别人关注你的工作绝对有助于商业成功。我肯定这在任何行业都是一样的。但是，最实在最有意义的事仍是考虑如何创造成绩记录……我认为首先要制作出好游戏，然后尽量找到目标受众。你不必要求自己一开始就“成名”，毕竟这需要很长的时间……我在2006年放弃全职工作，全心做自己的游戏，那时没有人关心我在做什么。这种默默无闻的状态一直持续到2010年。我想自己是很幸运的，能在正确的时间做正确的事。花6、7年甚至更久的时间从默默无闻到一跃成名，这是很正常的。正是这个过程才让人们真正关注你。

关于项目远景

我认为，玩家们会觉得好游戏的开发者对游戏树立了长远目标，从头到尾都对游戏很有信心。

但对于我自己的项目，我发现我总要经历一个所谓的“中间焦虑期”——你在原型阶段过度兴奋，一天到晚玩游戏原型，这样的状态会持续数周或数月，然后你开始怀疑游戏能不能成功。回顾《Hundreds》的开发经过，似乎你们也遇到了类似的情况，也开始考虑是在游戏中放一些主题性更强的东西如河豚而不是抽象的泡泡。你认为这种不确定的心情在游戏开发中算是正常的吗？当你们开始产生这种情绪时，你们是怎么克服的？

是的，制作《Hundreds》的鱼泡泡应该是游戏的第二个青春期，哈哈，因为在那之前，这游戏一直让我感到很憋脚，差不多就是在2012年2月份吧。游戏的核心部分几乎是完满了，但似乎还缺了点什么，那才是真正让我们觉得受挫和害怕的地方——如此接近理想，但又总是差一点点。那就是《Hundreds》的“中间焦虑期”。当我们正在考虑如何营销游戏、如何向玩家展示游戏时，鱼泡泡这个想法冒出来了。我认为撑过第一个焦虑期要靠我们自己的信心，而撑过第二个焦虑期应该靠游戏自己，而我们则负责在不妥协制作目标的前提下解决PR问题。

关于如何撑过这些焦虑期，我希望自己能拿出一些确切的建议。第一个是坚强，最终你会相信自己有办法解决问题，在此之前，你需要时间和资源，你要允许自己放缓进度。对于《Hundreds》，我们的办法就是简化简化再简化。这产生了非常多积极的效果，让我们能更快制作原型，更快淘汰不好的设计。我想如果要说得更实在一点，那就是——产生想法，简化想法，尝试想法，淘汰想法，坚持实验直到找到你的理想目标。另外，思想要开阔，勇于接纳新事物。

关于目标

在品质方面，你似乎为自己和自己的项目树立了某个标准？看你的作品，不会有人说“这里好是好，但你还应该再花点时间完善一下。”让我感到惊讶的是，尽管你们的《Hundreds》从一开始就有相当优秀的原型，但你们还是不断重制、修改，为了让这款2D iOS游戏达到完美，你们耗费了两年。

我想，我的作品绝对是有改进的地方——有很多东西我应该多花几个月再做做，特别是2010年到2011年那段时期的作品。

另外，我们刚开始做《Hundreds》时，我们以为只需要4个月呢。哈哈。

这好像跟一般的独立开发策略不同。独立游戏开发者往往害怕承担风险，而选择制作“变化最小的产品”或轻易不做改动，除非玩家反馈要求——这是常识。所以，你们对此的态度是什么？当你说“好了，这款游戏已经可以了”时，你有没有什么权威的衡量标准？

首先，我要说制定优先标准和收集反馈是相当好的办法——但也不是没有缺陷的，至少现在这个办法更适合PC，而对于iOS还比较困难。

至于什么时候说“这款游戏已经可以了”，标准有很多。游戏应该达到什么程度，我们自己心里面是有底的。但我们还要考虑到自己的资金。我们要充分利用自己的资源，优先考虑会影响游戏的东西，特别是能吸引新玩家的东西和最忠实的玩家关注的东西，如果达不到这两个目的，那我们就不会优先考虑。所以我认为我们制定的优先标准是非常高的，毕竟现在iOS游戏的品质这么好了，人们对iOS游戏不会像对硬核Windows游戏那么宽容了。

我很好奇你怎么得到游戏的客观反馈的——你是不是有很多朋友能给你提供重要的意见，还是说你基本上是靠直觉？

我完全不肯定我们能得到游戏的客观反馈！但我们确实有可信任的朋友、家人，他们虽然没有像我们的目标玩家那样玩那么多游戏，但我们可以看他们玩游戏。在这个过程中，我们会靠直觉、会猜想，也会受到启发。我认为当你只是一个小开发工作室时，你能做的就是让别人玩游戏，看着他们玩，不要跟他们说话，一边做笔记一边思考玩家此时的感受是什么，你希望他们体验到什么。当你测试得足够长时间后（一周或一个月），你就可以修正从中发现的问题了。

关于合作

再次回顾《Hundreds》，似乎你只找Greg Wohlwend合作，因为他于数年前在网上发布了《Hundreds》的早期版本。我看到有些成功的游戏如《Sword》、《Sworcery》和《Super Crate Box》，也是那些通常不在一个屋檐下工作的人的合作成果，或者具有传统的“游戏生意”关系。你认为这种方式，也就是每款游戏都只找合适的人合作，这是一种良好的游戏开发模式吗？

我找不到更好的方式了。我认为小工作室的优势之一就是，灵活变通。当然也有很多风险，但是，小工作室往往能够专注于创新的想法，而这些想法往往非常有价值。

根据你的经验，这种模式的挑战是什么？

最困难的就是，确保所有人能靠做游戏丰衣足食。还有其他困难（交流、积极性等），但我认为只要和对的人合作，这些问题都不是问题。不过丰衣足食仍然是问题。

关于行业、商业模式和未来

游戏行业现在呈现各种发展趋势：传统的游戏机已经衰弱了，手机游戏对AAA游戏构成很大的威胁，独立游戏正在努力闯出自己的一片天地。看到像《Hundreds》这样专注于品质又仍然能高居排行榜的游戏，真是令人欣慰——你认为小开发者能够在移动领域生存下来吗？

我认为可以的——部分是因为我不太同意你所说的发展趋势。我看到的是，玩电子游戏的人绝对是爆发式地增多；以前不玩游戏的人，现在很多都开始玩了。所以硬核玩家、游戏机玩家、手机玩家、网页玩家都很多。让我比较担心（也受激励）的是，独立游戏的整体质量都提高了，类型更丰富了。我认为这不是意味着竞争激烈了；在过去，你只要能做出一半有趣的游戏，媒体就会大肆报道，玩家就会大量关注，甚至游戏销量都会很好，而现在，因为游戏品质拔高了标准，对于期望实现商业或财政目标的项目，我觉得搞营销和PR的压力很大，毕竟我对于“只要游戏够好就能成功”的想法没有多大信心了。

在你之前写的文章中，你分析了手机游戏越来越倾向免费模式以及微交易，认为其中的某些举措无异于“敲诈”，引起了激烈争论。但是现在，免费模式已经对行业产生巨大影响，主机和PC游戏都转向免费模式，并且越来越多玩家要求游戏免费——你对这种演变有何看法？

坦白说，我认为有些游戏已经解决这个问题了，并且做得相当好。《英雄联盟》就是一例。我觉得ShellRazer做得不错。免费模式的成功只是暂时的，关于它的浪费时间、坑钱和赌博等会引来很多麻烦，但我确实认为它不会长久。“玩”这类“游戏”的人会长大，会去做其他事。免费模式现在的流行虽然永远不会消失，但我不认为它是理想的、永久的。

也许我应该换一种问法：在5年以内，你认为游戏的理想定位应该是什么？

听起来可能有些势利，但我真正期待的是，看到那些“已经长大的”电子游戏玩家变得更挑剔更有思想。我想是因为我在自己身上看到了这种成长，我知道像我这样的人会越来越老，想得越来越深刻，但仍然希望有新的体验。我希望玩家们能形成和我父亲一样的心态——“讨厌游戏”的同时又打心眼里意识到游戏的伟大。我父亲的看法并不像同于以前人们对游戏的看法。

三个词

好吧，这是最后一个问题，能用三个词形容你自己和你的工作吗？这三个词必须是对你的成功至关重要的。

Adam:哈哈，好吧。这三个词是：计划、多学科和冒险。（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）

Lessons From a Master: Adam Saltsman

by Aaron San Filippo

In this series, I interview notable fellow game developers, in hope that we can glean lessons from their success.

For part 1, I talk with independent developer Adam Saltsman. Adam’s career is notable, not only for how prolific he’s been, but for how many of his projects have risen above the noise and connected with large audiences. Canabalt could be considered his first major success, gaining notoriety as a flash game and then making its way to mobile platforms. And just in the last 18 months, he’s created a movie tie-in for ‘The Hunger Games’, an installation game called ‘Capsule,’ an episodic advert-game for Old-Spice, and shipped ‘Hundreds’ for IOS, garnering an ‘Editor’s Choice’ feature from Apple and an honorable mention from the IGF. Common knowledge says that a game development success involves a lot of luck – but when someone has a string of success like this, it’s worth looking a little closer.

Note: original posted on Flippfly.com

On Canabalt Design

So – Canabalt kind of launched you into the spotlight. What were your overall goals for the game when you started it? Would you say the finished product is pretty close to what you imagined when you started?

Adam: It did… my goal was really just to make a one button game that I thought was really fun. For maybe once in my whole life, the finished product was both simpler and better than what I imagined it would be when I started it.

The intro feels particularly polished: there are unique animations, beautifully animated birds flying away as your hero tumbles out of the window etc. How important do you think that first impression is in a game?

Adam: I guess the way I think of it is like this: somebody out there has decided to spend some time with your game. Especially if its a cheap or free game, they might not be checking it out for very long. They might not know who you are, so they might not have a good reason to play the game for more than 5 seconds. This can be bad because I think most interesting games, game that are worth playing, are a two-way street – they need their players to give their time and their trust in exchange for hopefully something really fun or meaningful or whatever. So since I’m not there when people play my game to say “hi I’m adam I worked really hard on this I hope you like it – make sure you stick around for chapter 2, that’s when it gets good”… I guess I feel like the game needs to say that for me, if only indirectly, by being interesting and/or mysterious right away. That’s me giving something to the player, in hopes that they will sort of subconsciously decide “ok that was cool, I’ll give you more of my time, what else you got”. My blanket, not-at-all-standard term for this approach is “generous” design.

I’m curious to hear about your methodology for tuning the difficulty. Did you think in terms of “average time someone will survive” or some kind of metric like that? How do you know when it’s “just right”?

Canabalt

Adam: For me it is definitely much more of an art than a science (though I don’t mean art in a fancy sense, necessarily, more just in a not-science sense). In retrospect I think there is some science I could use to defend certain settings or certain variables or whatever, but… I guess in general I think the basic approach I use is something like this:

mess around with different settings until it feels really good to me

send it to brutally honest friends, and get it feeling good for them AND me

send it to my mom, get it feeling good for her AND me

Two caveats – I am totally sensitive to and appreciative of the argument that “mom testing” is kind of a diminutive or derogatory way of referring to accessibility testing, and the world is full of gamer moms (like my wife!), but in this case MY mom specifically is super bad at games – she has no point of reference or game grammar or anything. So whoever it is in your life, watch them play, see what “weird” assumptions they carry to the experience, use that to make an informed decision about especially the introductory experience in the game. That’s the first caveat.

The second is that when I say “mess around with different settings” I sort of mean just flipping switches and trying stuff, and I sort of mean like very targeted, specific changes based on intuition and experience from making lots of games.

Finally if you can’t get #1 really right, like… for example, if you’re making an action game, if the game doesn’t make YOU, the creator, get sweaty palms, or whatever, usually that’s a sign that it’s still not quite there, I guess…

Sometimes I feel like developers take aspects of their games for granted, in terms of what actually makes them tick. Overall – do you feel like you totally understand what makes Canabalt so appealing to players?

Adam: I have a lot of theories but I’m very reluctant to point out any one thing. I think there are some things about it that don’t HURT – it’s about a somewhat relatable scenario (normal-ish dude in normal-ish setting), it is in some important ways “interface-less” (this is a big deal to me, anyways), it’s cool-looking and fun right away… I bet there is a lot I still don’t properly understand about it, though, and trying to understand it kind of wrecked a year of my life or more, haha. So I’m done with that!

On Hundreds, Launch Strategies and PR

Congrats on the stellar launch of Hundreds. It’s gotten a lot of attention and high praise, and it really seems to stand out in terms of design. There are a lot of things I could ask about – but one thing that really impressed me about the project, was your guys’ PR and launch strategy. You setup this website, playhundreds.com, and it sort of served as a teaser. I mean, it laid out the core mechanic of the game, but it also has this artful feel to it and a sense of mystery, and basically says: “Hey, this app is going to look fantastic” without giving away too much about the actual gameplay.

So looking back – how important do you think that was to your success, in terms of getting people interested and catching Apple’s attention?

Adam: I wish I could attach some kind of number to it or something, but I think that’s impossible… personally I feel that it helped a lot. We already had Apple’s attention, we’ve been talking about Hundreds with them since last March. But the site I think helped get a bit of online buzz going that we wouldn’t have had otherwise. I think it helped explain some stuff. Mostly I think it helped us establish this kind of cohesive “whole” of our approach to presenting this game to whom we perceived to be our audience. I think it helped set people’s expectations for what we were building and in a weird way why? It’s really hard to quantify it but yeah, I think it helped a lot.

Hundreds

What else did you do in terms of launch strategy, that you feel really helped?

Adam: I think, beyond the website, Greg’s work on our banners, trailers, icon, everything, really added up to this kind of beautiful almost package or box for the game. Greg and I worked together, almost obsessively, on the wording and language we used everywhere too, trying to strike the right tone and communicate the right ideas. And again I really have no way of quantifying this but I think it helped Apple feel like we were taking this game pretty seriously, and I think it helped our audience sort of get that we were really committed to this game and that it … somehow deserved that attention or degree of… care.

On Minimalism

So Canabalt was kind of different because it just gives you one button to play (jump) and didn’t have “levels” to choose from, or really much going on outside of that single core experience. And Hundreds is interesting to me, I think in part because of what’s not here. There’s no tutorial, in the traditional sense, and most of the mechanics are discovered, rather than taught. There’s no ‘pause’ button, or “restart level” button (I think I was at level 30 or so before I realized this!) Sometimes not putting something in a game is actually harder than including it.

Would you say this minimalism something that you strive for and consciously make a goal of?

Adam: Yes.

Hah, I see what you did there

Do you ever find yourself in the middle of a project and just thinking “awe crap, we went and cluttered things up too much” and end up ripping out a bunch of stuff?

Adam: Yes, that adequately sums up a few months of Hundreds development haha.

On Randomness

You’ve named Super Mario Bros as one of your inspirations. To me it’s interesting because that game was so deterministic, and I’ve noticed that most of your games are kind of a delicate balance between designer intent, and random elements. With Canabalt, you learn what types of buildings and obstacles you’ll encounter, but there’s no way to memorize the patterns. This randomness seems to help drive that “just one more try” feel of the game.

And in Hundreds, each level generates seemingly random placement of objects, but the objects themselves are the same every time for a given level.

So – what’s the appeal of randomness to you, and have you formulated any kind of best practices or guiding theories about randomness, and how to use and control it?

Adam: At least on the surface there are two things I love about randomness. First, just purely practically speaking, designing non-random levels can be a huge pain, and the payoff isn’t always that great. Once the puzzle or whatever is solved, that’s it. And usually it’s a lot faster to solve a puzzle than it is to design it, so for a small team making mobile games, I think that normal content creation sometimes doesn’t make a ton of sense. Some procedural aspects can help a lot there.

“randomness, when used correctly, gets you in this … crisis management state of mind. This can be really stressful in real life, but it is kind of exhilarating and fun in games.”
Second, randomness makes testing my own designs a lot more fun. That’s sort of a greedy expression of what I think is some kind of underlying truth, though, that is shared across many many games, which is that randomness, when used correctly, gets you in this … crisis management state of mind. This can be really stressful in real life, but it is kind of exhilarating and fun in games. This comes out in a lot of action games that might be really statically designed, but maybe during combat or something things get chaotic enough that players go into this crisis management mode.

What I mean by “crisis management mode” is this whole like block or space of gameplay that is about sort of pruning or tuning your behavior in order to best cope with unanticipated events – sort of … grooming the topology of the possibility space to try and make the most of whatever is coming down the pipe, like making sure there is always a flat place to put a square in Tetris. This is a thing that a lot of my favorite games do, that I like a lot.

On Selling Games, and “Indie Fame”

Back when you released Canabalt at $2.99 on the app store, the app market was kind of at an uncertain point and a lot of people were experimenting with $0.99 and free apps, and you made some news because you released at this premium price and had sucess with it despite the “race to the bottom” trend. Then several years later, F2P has basically taken over mobile, but you guys kind of just go for it again, and released at a premium price – and once again it seems to be working.

Was there ever a point where you thought maybe you’d release the game for free with a few levels or something, and make people buy the rest piece-meal? Talk me through your pricing strategy.

Adam: Yes completely. Initially we were thinking we would be “premium” (a hilarious name for something that costs a dollar), but then we started freaking out because we didn’t have a PR plan, and Hundreds screenshots don’t really look that exciting, and the game was demoing really well to broad audiences. In a lot of ways, a game that demoes well and that hits a wide demographic is a prime candidate for some kind of IAP approach. Ultimately though we felt like it would just put us back in competition with forces and organizations that are just too big for us to handle. It’s hard for me to say for sure if that’s actually true or not, of course.

In a weird, almost dark turn of events, NOT being “freemium” is apparently weird enough that we were able to use it as another way to stand out from the crowd. How bizarre is that.

What would you say to people who would argue that this strategy can only work for people with some kind of fame, or past history of success?

Adam: I want to divide this into two arguments:

1 – “fame” (haha!) or (more likely) a bit of a track record absolutely help a TON. they probably help MOST with getting Apple to feature you. Once that happens, I think it makes these factors moot, as now you are featured, and just hugely visible in a huge store. But there are lots of ways to get featured. Canabalt was NOT featured, and we had no relationship with Apple. But because it was a modest success on its own terms, we were able to develop both a relationship with Apple and some semblance of a track record. All these things start somewhere! I think it’s all about finding a way to stand out and get people to get interested in what you’re making. There are a lot of ways to do this.

2 – HOWEVER. There is another problem here, which is even if you assume that “just” being “famous” is enough to let you price things at 2.99 or whatever the argument is, to me that implies that if you are NOT “famous” that you could have success at $0.99 or free… which I think is just not true anymore. Free games and $0.99 games ARE a lower friction environment for word of mouth sales, I think that is still totally true. But there is SO much competition in that space for time and mindshare and “users”… that I think it can be difficult to get people to spread the word about your game, even at that low (or non-existent) price. A friend recently released a FREE game that was featured somewhat by Apple, but installed way less than our paid game. And even for free games that are installed a lot, there is absolutely no guarantee that that will translate into financial success (see Gasketball, Punch Quest, etc). There are counter-examples (SPACETEAM and maybe LETTERPRESS) but “free” is not some magic bullet for success.

“It just takes a long time… I quit my day job in 2006. Nobody gave a crap about anything I made until almost 2010, and I think I got lucky by being in the right place at the right time, I think it is normal for this process to take 6 or 7 years or more, this process of making something people really care about..”

Adam: So, yeah, not surprisingly, having a track record and an audience interested in your work sure doesn’t hurt anything commercially I’m sure that’s popping monocles everywhere. The practical or interesting thing to do, though, is to think about how to go about developing a following, developing a track record… and I think that starts with both making great games that push a boundary or two, and doing your best to tell anyone who will listen about the cool thing you just made. And you CAN do that without being “famous”. It just takes a long time… I quit my day job in 2006. Nobody gave a crap about anything I made until almost 2010, and I think I got lucky by being in the right place at the right time, I think it is normal for this process to take 6 or 7 years or more, this process of making something people really care about.

On Having a Project Vision

For me, it’s always tempting as a player to look at some beautifully realized game and to imagine that the developer had some kind of driving vision for the game and that they just confidently made it all happen start to finish.

But often I find with my own projects as a developer – there’s this period I call “the awkward middle” where you’ve gotten over the euphoria of the prototype phase, and you’ve been playing the game day-in and day-out for weeks or months, and you kind of start to question whether it’s really a winner. Watching a video postmortem for Hundreds, it kind of sounded like you guys ran into a bit of that, and actually started thinking about whether you should put a more marketable theme on it like Blowfish instead of these abstract bubbles. Is this kind of unsure feeling something that you’re finding to be normal in game development? How do you power through it when it happens?

Adam: Oh jeez… yea, the FishPop phase of Hundreds was kind of a second puberty, haha. So Hundreds was MOST awkward for me way before that, basically like during February of 2012, maybe, where the deep down guts of the game were almost right but not quite, and it was really frustrating and scary, to be so close to the thing we liked, but just … missing a piece. That was the real “awkward middle” for Hundreds. FishPop came up when we were trying to figure out how to market Hundreds, how to present it to our audience, and out of a real concern that we wouldn’t solve that problem. But I think getting through that first awkward phase ultimately gave us the confidence we needed in the game itself to ride out the second awkward phase, and keep hacking at our PR problem instead of compromising the game.

I wish I had any real specific straightforward advice for powering through those awkward times… that first one was tough. Ultimately you just have to kind of believe that you will work it out eventually, and you need the time and resources to be able to delay the game until you DO work it out. The way we worked it out on Hundreds, eventually, was to just simplify simplify simplify. This had a bunch of positive effects, mostly of being able to prototype faster, and throw out bad ideas faster. I guess if I have any concrete advice its that – think up ideas, simplify them, try them, throw them out, keep doing that til you find what you were looking for. Have an open mind.

On Aiming High, Being Objective

It would appear that you set a certain bar for yourself with your projects, in terms of quality. There’s not much in your portfolio page where someone would look at it and say “Well this is pretty good but maybe he should’ve spent a few more months on it.” And I was kind of surprised to learn that with Hundreds, even though you guys had this pretty good prototype as a starting point, you iterated and tuned it and spent something like 2 Man-years on this 2D IOS game just making sure it was perfect.

Adam: So I mean my portfolio page is definitely a curated thing – there is a lot of stuff that… I should have spent a few more months on… a lot of stuff from the 2010-2011 “era” – for example, almost everything here http://adamatomic.com/prototypes/

Also, when we started Hundreds, we THOUGHT it would take like 4 months, haha.

It seems like that’s kind of different than the typical indie strategy, where a lot of us are really kind of risk-averse, or the common knowledge is that you should make a “minimum viable product” and stick it out there, and then tune it with player feedback. So what’s your mindset there? Do you have some kind of canonical measure where you say “Ok, I think this game’s ready”?

Adam: I guess this is kind of a two parter. One, I think pushing an MVP out and gathering feedback is a super awesome approach – it has its own obstacles and pitfalls and stuff, but I think at least right now that approach is better suited to PC. I think it’s hard to do that on iOS.

As far as knowing when it’s ready… I guess it’s a mix of things. Certainly we have a kind of internal list of “we want this game to have this much stuff in it.” But we also have our bank accounts. And we really just try to make the most of these things, and try to prioritize what stuff will really make a difference in the game, especially to first time players, and what stuff will really make a difference to the most dedicated players, and then anything that isn’t in either of those circles just gets pushed down the list. So I guess we sort of do build MVPs on iOS, it’s just the initial bar is set pretty high, since the polish and production quality in that environment is so high now, and users are just not as forgiving as like hardcore Windows gamers.

I’m really curious about how you get objective feedback on your games as well – do you have a trusted circle of friends whose voices you consider to be vital – or do you mostly go with intuition or some other method?

Adam: I am not at all certain that we get objective feedback on our games! But we do have friends that we trust, and family members who are maybe less exposed to games than most of our main audience, and we can watch them play. There is a lot of intuition/guessing/heuristics going on too. I think when you’re a small shop really the best thing you can do is just get people to play the game, whoever they are, and watch them, don’t talk to them, take notes, and think about the experience they’re having, and what experience you want them to be having, and when you have given yourself enough editorial distance (sometimes takes a week, sometimes a month!) from the game areas they were testing, go in and fix that stuff and make it right.

On Collaborating

Watching your postmortem for Hundreds, it seems like you kind of just connected with Greg Wohlwend organically after he released an early version of Hundreds on the web a couple years back. And I’m seeing that some other successful games like Sword and Sworcery and Super Crate Box are these collaborations between people who often don’t sit under the same roof, or set out to have a traditional “game business” together. Do you see this method, where you basically find the perfect team of people to make each game, as a good pattern to follow for game development?

Adam: I can’t think of anything better to do. I think one of the great things about being a small studio is having the agility to do this sort of thing. There are a lot of risks that come with it too, but being able to react or commit when serendipity actually bothers to show up is invaluable.

“I think one of the great things about being a small studio is having the agility to do this sort of thing. There are a lot of risks that come with it too, but being able to react or commit when serendipity actually bothers to show up is invaluable.”

What are the challenges of this model, in your experience?

Adam: It seems like the hardest thing is just making sure that everybody can eat food and pay bills while you make the game. There are other challenges (communication, sometimes motivation, etc) but I think with the right people, those problems have a tendency to manage themselves. The former problem does not.

On The Industry, Business Models and The Future

So the “game industry” as a whole is kind of going in a bunch of directions right now. Traditional consoles have declined, mobile has taken a big bite out of “AAA” and indies are kind of trying to find their way in all of it. It’s encouraging to see something like Hundreds with a focus on quality that can still top the charts – but do you see mobile as a place small developers will be able to survive going forward in general?

Adam: I think so – partly because I sort of disagree with the characterization above. What I see happening is the video-game-playing audience absolutely exploding; TONS of people are playing games right now that never played games before. So there are a lot of hardcore gamers and consoles, there are a lot of crazy mobile phones, there are a lot of web browsers, there’s just so much stuff. The main thing that I see happening lately that worries (and inspires) me is the overall quality and diversity of indie games going way up. That’s not to say that there is competition, I don’t believe that is true… but to me, it feels like it used to be that as long as you made something that was even halfway interesting, that was enough to get a lot of press and a lot of attention and a lot of sales even. But lately the quality bar feels really high, and for projects with commercial or financial aspirations I feel a lot of pressure to spend a lot of time on marketing and PR (or the indie version of those things) because I am not really confident that just making a cool game is going to be enough.

You wrote awhile ago about the trend in mobile games towards the F2P model and Micro-transactions, comparing some of the practices to “extortion,” and it caused quite a stir. But now that F2P is kind of taking the industry by storm, and consoles and PC games are moving that direction and more and more players are demanding free games – how do you see this resolving?

Adam: I was talking about this with friends today, and honestly I think some games are already resolving this, and pretty well. League of Legends is doing a pretty good job. I think ShellRazer is doing a pretty good job. I think the success of just timesink moneyholes and slot machines and other bullshit is causing a big fuss, but I do still think it is unsustainable. I think the people who “play” these “games” will graduate and move on to other activities. The current popular approach to F2P will probably never really go away, but I don’t think it will be the premier or optimal approach for much longer.

Maybe to ask it another way: what would be the ideal for you, in terms of where games are at as a whole, in say, 5 years?

Adam: The thing I’m really looking forward to is, probably this sounds snobbish, but whatever – I’m looking forward to an even pickier, ever more literate audience of video game players who are “grown up” – I guess because I see this in myself, and I know people like me are getting older and getting crankier but still wanting new experiences and new activities and new mysteries. I am looking forward to people like my dad who “hates video games” sort of really deeply subconsciously realizing that video games are great, he just didn’t like what people were doing with them before.

Three Words

Alright, this last one is a bit ridiculous, but here goes: Please pick 3 words describing yourself and your career, that you feel have been most important to your success.

Adam: haha ugh, um, ok: planning, multidisciplinary, risks (source:gamasutra)