作者：Ben Serviss

让我们想象：你的独立工作室的最新游戏“Dream Game”获得了惊人的好成绩！当越来越多赞美不断涌现出来，销量也不断攀升时，你的整个脑袋将充满骄傲感与怀疑。亲爱的，不要怀疑，你在过去几年里所倾入心血而创造出来的游戏项目的确取得了巨大的成功。

让我们快进到取得成功后的10年。发行商召集了一次有关“Dream Game 9”的概念会议—-尽管“Dream Game 7”于两周前刚刚上架，更别提你们手上还有面向掌上电脑的“Dream Game Party”以及面向手机的“Dream Game Tactics XL”的预定计划，而你也一直努力避开“Dream Game CCG”。在会议上你一直琢磨着：“如果能够开始一些全新内容，我一定不会再致力于同一款游戏中！”

这种情况何时才会发生呢？到底是出现什么情况才让你想尽办法去摆脱这同一个游戏系列？

在任何创意型流行产业中，管理风险都是一大关键任务。大多数情况下，最安全的项目往往都是最有可能获得成功；如果游戏理念一直围绕着游戏系列，那么那些一直伴随着这系列游戏的人便会开始感到乏味，不管是创意总监，线性开发者，QA测试者，甚至是用户。

幸运的是还有很多技巧能够帮助我们应对开发者所面对的障碍，大致可以为分为3种主要策略：寻找新玩家，探索新灵感，以及游戏授权。

寻找新玩家

当团队致力于某个项目很长一段时间，我们便很容易因此而忽视了最初的想法，或很难带着同样的热情往前走。幸运的是，有一种秘密武器能够帮助我们解决这种情况，并且有可能也是你曾经尝试过的方法：游戏测试。

playtesting（from gamasutra）

游戏测试的乐趣。

将游戏呈现在新玩家面前能让你在了解了玩家对游戏的看法时找到灵感，特别是当你之前一直闭关创造时。如果你能够为测试者组织有趣的游戏测试，他们将以满满的热情回应你，并感染开发团队中的其他成员。

探索新灵感

招聘新成员并迎来新理念将非常有帮助，但同时你也不该低估自己的能力。如果你遇到了开发者障碍，你便需要花时间搞清楚一些问题。你是否陷入千篇一律的内容中？你是否对当前的项目感到厌倦，即使在几个月前你对此充满了期待？如果你的回答是肯定的，那就有必要去寻找新灵感了。

面对这种情况的一种有效方法便是寻找新活动和体验，最好是能超出你的舒适区。待在一个完全陌生且不具有预先设置好的理念（游戏邦注：如如何执行或者该做什么）的新环境能够帮助你将想法从一层不变的束缚中拯救出来，让你能够使用新方法去解决之前数月中所疑惑的问题。

paintball（from gamasutra）

彩弹球便是《战争机器》封面的灵感来源。我们不能决定灵感到底来自哪里–就像Will Wright是通过阅读一本建筑书籍才找到《模拟人生》的灵感；而Cliff Bleszinski是在欧洲之旅中获得《战争机器》的“破坏之美”的灵感，并且其部分游戏玩法还是来自玩彩弹球的过程中。在办公室外部，你将能够找到许多对开发项目大有帮助的内容。

游戏授权

如果寻找新玩家和新灵感都未能奏效，那么还有第三种选择。如果其它方法都失败了，或者现实阻碍你继续致力于游戏中，那么让其它工作室去掌控你的项目便是一个不错的选择。幸运的是，最近也出现了两个引人注目的例子，也就是343 Industries的《光晕4》以及Kojima Productions和Platinum Games的《合金装备崛起：复仇》。

从Bungie手中接过《光晕》的开发权对343来说其实是一个巨大的挑战。如果取得了成功，他们也不一定能被游戏最大的用户群体，也就是休闲FPS玩家所熟知。如果遭遇了失败，他们将以摧毁了《光晕》的名号被载入游戏产业历史。幸运的是，他们最终取得了成功，而这很大程度是归功于他们是以新视角去看待这一IP。

尽管在过去10年里，《光晕》系列一直在进行着各种完善，包含游戏玩法的调整，添加全新多人模式以及各种故事线，但却有一点始终不及第一款游戏，即新鲜感。玩家将在最初的《光晕》中与Covenant战斗，驾驶Warthog，探索广阔的战场，遭遇神秘的先驱文物，与Flood战斗等—-第一款游戏便是包含了这些新体验才能吸引了无数玩家的注意。

Halo 4（from gamasutra）

所以《光晕4》便努力去找回这种新鲜感和敬畏感。当然了，之后的系列游戏虽然拥有更高级的图像，在线游戏玩法，ragdoll动画以及玩家能力，但是它们却很难再体现出第一款游戏所具有的敬畏感了。而343便因为能够明确这一点是值得再次使用的核心元素而获得肯定，也正是如此这家新工作室才能取得成功。

《合金装备崛起：复仇》则是另外一个故事。直到最近我们才了解到该项目混乱的开发历史，但幸运的是这款游戏能够走过如此崎岖的发展历程而最终发行。因为Kojima的团队不能创造出玩家所要求的快速行动游戏玩法，所以这款游戏差点就被扼杀在摇篮里，不过当他们委托Platinum Games接管游戏开发时，该项目最终保住了性命而能够继续向前发展。

尽管Kojima的团队是游戏产业中最顶级的开发团队之一，但是他们就是因为太聪明了所以未能意识到该项目失去了优势，不过幸好他们能够利用工作室关系而授权Platinum进行开发，并最终取得了骄人的成绩。

体验的多样性：可再生的创造性资源

产业中还存在着各种各样的情况。不管是鼓励更多女性，变性开发者还是少数族群去创造游戏，这都是一种很棒的趋势，并且能够进一步鼓励那些重视具有创造性新体验的玩家和游戏制作人。

你必须问自己，是否对当前的游戏多样性感到满意？即使答案是肯定的，难道你就不会好奇如果拥有新视角的话自己可能创造出怎样的新游戏？

这是一个神奇的产业。让我们期待它能够继续培养创造性表达，鼓励更多新人的加入并不断探索任何可能的新领域。

（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）

Three Strategies for Curing Developer’s Block

by Ben Serviss

Imagine this: Your indie studio’s newest title, Dream Game, is a surprise hit! As accolades pour in, sales climb and climb, and your head seems to be wrapped in a shimmering fog of pride and disbelief. Your baby, the dream project you poured yourself into for the last few years, is an unquestionable success.

Fast forward ten years later. The publisher calls yet another concept meeting about Dream Game 9, even though Dream Game 7 just hit the shelves two weeks ago – not to mention you’re behind schedule on Dream Game Party for handhelds, Dream Game Tactics XL for mobile, and that damn Dream Game CCG that you’ve been trying to avoid. You wearily pencil in the meeting, thinking, “If only I could start over on something new, I wouldn’t have to work on the same games anymore!”
When did this happen? When did your dream game become something you’d do anything to get away from?

In any creative hit-driven industry, managing risk is a critical task. Most of the time, the safest project is the one most likely to succeed; yet ideas that don’t stray far from the pack tend to wear everyone out involved in the product lifecycle in the long term – from the creative directors to the line developers, QA testers and even the audience.

Luckily, there are techniques that can help with managing developer’s block, grouped under three main strategies: Finding fresh blood, re-invigorating yourself, and delegating with trust.

Finding Fresh Blood

When your team’s been slogging away on a project for too long, it’s easy to lose sight of the original vision you had at the start, or even maintain the same level of enthusiasm all the way through. Fortunately there’s a secret weapon to help counter this, and it’s probably something you’re already doing: playtesting.

The joys of playtesting.

Exposing your game to new players can give you a rejuvenating kick right in the inspiration when you see how new players actually react to the game, especially when you’ve been making significant progress behind closed doors. If you can structure playtests to make it as exciting for your testers as possible, they’ll respond with contagious enthusiasm that could spread to the rest of the dev team.

The next step is just as logical – bringing on new team members, whether they’re interns, industry newbies or veterans. As long as your team configuration is structured to encourage and manage new ideas, adding a new voice to the project can do wonders for assessing the current state of the game for new possibilities.

Re-invigorating Yourself

Recruiting new people and ideas can definitely be helpful, but don’t underestimate your own capabilities. If you’re trudging through a bad case of developer’s block, it might be time to ask yourself some hard questions. Are you getting stuck in a rut? Is your current project starting to bore you, even though you couldn’t wait to get into the office a few months ago? If this is the case, you might be due for an infusion of inspiration.

A great way to manage this is to seek out new activities and experiences, ideally beyond your comfort zone. The strange, heightened sensation of being in a completely new situation with no pre-formed ideas of how to act or what to do can help jolt your thought process out of its rut, opening you to new ways of looking at the same problems you’ve been dealing with for months.

Paintball was an inspiration for Gears of War’s cover shooting.
It’s impossible to say where inspiration can come from – Will Wright drew inspiration to create The Sims in part from reading a book about architecture; Cliff Bleszinski credits Gears of War’s “destroyed beauty” aesthetic from a trip to Europe, and parts of its gameplay from playing paintball. Live a little outside the office and you’ll be amazed at what it does for your project.

Delegating with Trust

If finding new voices and searching for inspiration doesn’t work, there’s a third option that might. If all else fails, or if circumstances prevent you from continuing to work on the game, recruiting another studio to take the reins is a viable option. Fortunately, there are two recent high-profile examples of this we can examine: 343 Industries’ Halo 4 and Kojima Productions and Platinum Games’ Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.

Taking over for Bungie as the steward of the Halo franchise was an incredible challenge for 343. If they succeeded, their reward would largely be anonymous to their largest audience segment of casual FPS fans. If they failed, they would go down in history as the team that ruined Halo. Luckily, by all accounts they succeeded, and in no small part to their ability to look at the IP through new eyes.

While the Halo games have gradually perfected their formula over the last decade with gameplay tweaks, new multiplayer modes and a (debatably confusing) multitude of story threads, one key element had all but been abandoned after the first title: a sense of wonder, from when everything about Halo was new. Fighting the Covenant for the first time, driving the Warthog, exploring the wide-open battlefields, encountering cryptic Forerunner relics, battling the Flood – the first game packed in moment after moment of these brand new experiences, and a generation of fans was born.

Halo 4 made efforts to restore the series’ sense of wonder and awe.
Sure, later games saw advances in graphics, online play, ragdoll animations and player abilities, but none of them managed to recapture the sense of awe that permeated the first game. 343 is to be commended for identifying this as a key pillar of the franchise worth revisiting, and it’s not unreasonable to see why it took a brand-new studio to make it a reality.

Metal Gear Rising is another story. The project’s troubled development history wasn’t well known until recently, but luckily the game has managed to overcome its rocky path to release. Nearly cancelled because Kojima’s team simply couldn’t produce the fast action gameplay required, it was only when they entrusted Platinum Games with handling development duties could the project move forward.

While Kojima’s team is one of the top development houses in the industry, they were smart enough to realize that the project was not playing to their strengths, and utilized their studio relationships to delegate actual development of the game, trusting Platinum to do what they do best, to critically acclaimed results.

Diversity of Experience: The Renewable Creativity Resources

There’s a burgeoning movement happening in the industry for more diversity. Whether it’s encouraging more women, transgendered developers or ethnic minorities to start making games, this is an excellent trend and should be encouraged whole-heartedly by any gamer or game maker who values innovative, new experiences.

Look at it this way – are you satisfied with the variety of games available today? If you answered yes, and you’re aware that the industry is still dominated by straight white males, doesn’t that make you curious about what new kinds of games we’d have if we had more varied points of view contributing?

This industry of ours is an amazing thing. Let’s make sure it can continue fostering creative expression, encouraging newcomers and exploring new realms of what’s possible for the next generation, and for the one after that.(source:gamasutra)