在旧金山DiscoveryBeat 2010的会议现场，zynga east的负责人Brian Reynolds向读者详细解读了FrontierVille这款兼具传统游戏元素的社交游戏是怎么改变zynga在社交游戏领域的研发的。

布莱恩-雷诺兹

在zynga east办公室和其他zynga办公室最大的区别是这里汇聚了大量的传统游戏开发人员。负责人Brian Reynolds本身也是开发传统游戏出身的，主要的作品包括Civilization II以及Alpha Centuari。

FrontierVille是今年早些时候由zynga推出的facebook社交游戏，该游戏有一个极大的特点，除了一般情况下的facebook社交游戏玩家，还同时吸引到了不少传统游戏玩家。现在该款游戏有超过3000万的月活跃用户。

pincus-wired

在这之前sfweekly发表了更多评论家的负面观点，认为zynga在抄袭的道路上越走越远。据zynga前员工的爆料该公司的理念是抄袭其他开发者的理念再加以提炼提升以及更加有效的商业运作。

即便是FrontierVille，在该游戏推出之前Meteor Games公司也推出了类似主题的游戏Ranch Town。但是与传统游戏的结合让FrontierVille成为一款与众不同的超级游戏。

zynga首席执行官马克-品克斯Mark Pincus在接受连线杂志的采访时曾表示FrontierVille才是迄今为止zynga推出的最完美的作品。FrontierVille是目前为止zynga投入最多研发经费的游戏。Mark Pincus表示，该游戏贯穿了之前zynga旗下游戏的大量精华。

Brian Reynolds领导下的zynga east就主要专职于FrontierVille的开发。（本文由游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译）

Veteran game designer Brian Reynolds said today that FrontierVille, the game that launched earlier this year, was a way for Zynga to experiment with a new kind of social game design — and the experiment that paid off.

Reynolds was speaking at VentureBeat’s DiscoveryBeat 2010 conference in San Francisco. Before joining Zynga, Reynolds’ led design on classic games like Civilization II and Alpha Centuari (you can tell they’re classics because all of VentureBeat’s writers were basically squealing with excitement when he took the stage). So he might seem like an odd fit with Zynga, which is well-known for being less focused on creativity and traditional game design and more on user growth and retention than on traditional game design qualities (to the point where critics say Zynga is just a ruthless, unoriginal copycat.)

One thing that helped with the transition, Reynolds said, is the fact that he wanted work at Zynga. He wasn’t dragged in through an acquisition — he had already become interested in social games and Facebook, and he wanted to learn the new tricks of social game design.

“If you don’t like Facebook games, I would say, don’t make them,” he said.

Plus, some of the ideas that Reynolds learned from legendary game designer Sid Meier still apply in Zynga, he said. Meier liked to build a prototype as quickly as possible, then improve it based on what users do, and it’s the same as Zynga. At the same time, in both traditional design and social design, it’s important not to overvalue with users say they want. In the case of the Civilization games, for example, if the designers followed every player request the games would have become overloaded with features and force players to micromanage the game in a way that became tedious.

Plus, Reynolds was put in charge of a new team, Zynga East, which included more traditional game designers than the rest of Zynga, and which was focused on creating Frontierville. Executives viewed that melding of the Zynga approach with traditional game design as something of a test which might or might not get exported to the company as a whole.

Not everything went smoothly, Reynolds acknowledged. When Frontierville launched, it saw a lot of user traction right away, but then usage flattened out. The problem was that the team didn’t have an analyst focused on looking at user data, so there were basically a bunch of designers flying blind. Then, when Zynga finally put a full-time analyst on Frontierville, usage started taking off again. Now it has 30 million users, making it one of the company’s biggest games.

Reynolds said those numbers make Zynga say, “Cool, that works. Let’s do it some more.”（source：venturebeat）