作者：Keith Judge

在2011年的开发大会上， Hello Games工作室的Sean Murray是独立开发日的主题演讲者。他的演讲的要点是，我们经常听到独立开发者的励志传奇，却很少听到说独立开发者追求梦想失败的故事。我的经历就是这样的故事。

2011年4月，我离开呆了三年半的Lionhead工作室（那期间我参与开发《神鬼寓言》系列）。那时候，我在游戏行业已经当了近11年的程序员了，我非常渴望制作一款自己的游戏，而不是呆在团队中给别人打工。我有几个朋友也从AAA转型为独立开发者了，取得了一些成功，所以我觉得以我的经验，胜算还是蛮大的。在没有太多资金储备的情况下，我成立了Razorblade Games工作室，开始开发一款游戏（还没取好名字）。

failure(from jrbriggs.com)

我的独立开发者朋友建议我先用Unity制作小游戏，比如说iOS/Android益智游戏，然后再组建公司。但我太自以为是了，完全无视那条建议，直接就着手自己的PC游戏了。因为我已经有PC和Visual Studio了，所以我不需要初始成本。那时我坚信自己大约9月就能做出一款可以发布的游戏。

当我说自己开始做游戏时，严格地说来是不对的——我其实是在制作图像引擎。工作了几个月后，游戏设计渐渐成形。我知道我的美术技能不佳，所以我打算把游戏背景设计成第一人称科幻，图像简单、空间狭小、没有人类角色——游戏机制就是，在不同时空切换，改变重力方向以解决谜题。如果这听起来有点像《传送门》，那你就对了——那款游戏给了我很多灵感。

一切都进展顺序。我一直在写代码、每天都有新引擎特性添加进来，我学习使用Blender构建游戏关卡。我激情满满，很高兴从公司雇用中解放出来，很满意自己的工作。我还在写文章表达自己的兴奋之情。6月，我去布赖顿参加开发大会，把我粗糙的游戏展示给与会者看。那个版本只有一个小型关卡，表现了交换时空和重力操纵这两个核心机制。我跟别人谈论这款游戏的最终效果、我如何从无到有制作游戏的引擎——基于光、高动态范围、动态模糊、快速抗锯齿等的物理原理。人们似乎对我的游戏很感兴趣。我自然是喜出望外了。

然而，我很快就遇上大问题了——钱。我靠自己的储蓄和妻子的收入过活，但还要付房贷和养两个孩子，钱很快就不够花了。我必须拉赞助才能继续我的项目。回头想想，我完全不知道为什么我不尝试找发行商或风投——我猜我是害怕被拒绝。我认为众筹是一条出路。Kickstarter当时已经很火了，尽管那时英国的项目还不能在那个网站上申请众筹，所以我求助于现在已经倒闭的8bitfunding.com。这个网站的优势在于，你筹到多少钱就能拿走多少钱，而不必首先达到目标资金。人们对我的项目感兴趣，钱开始流入我的帐户，我非常惊喜。我给每一家我能想到的游戏网站写邮件，邮件里加了一个我的游戏视频的YouTube 链接，希望那些网站能报道我的项目，以便促进众筹。只有一个游戏博客给我的游戏写了一篇文章，另外有一家网站回复我，如果内容更多一点，他们就有兴趣。他们是对的——在报道游戏方面，我还太业余。

资助很快就停了，大部分来自我的朋友、Facebook和Twitter上的粉丝。我发起一个目标为10000美元的众筹活动。这笔钱只够我支付两周的房贷——显然不够维持开发工作。我给Digital Foundry打工，给他们做游戏开发文章的写手和技术顾问，但这笔收入仍然是杯水车薪。

最后，没办法了，我去找合约工作了。10月底，Relentless Software公司里的好人们跟我签了四个月的合同，帮他们开发Kinect Nat Geo TV。我非常希望四个月后我能存下一笔钱，然后继续经营我的Razorblade Games。但结果是，我在Relentless一呆就是整年，并且没有存下多少钱（每天往返于布赖顿的钱比我估计的要多得多！）。在往返于公司和家的路上，我用笔记本继续做我自己的游戏，我重新设计了游戏，把重心放在重力操纵机制上，因为原型表明，用时空切换作为游戏机制其实不太好。

然而，我这样做的工作远远少于我自己在家干6个月的成果。我发现在工作日里，我很难把做这一份代码的心态调整到做另一份代码的心态，所以我只好把精力全部放在Relentless的合约工作上。

现在，我在吉尔福德的Pitbull工作室，与Epic Games合作开发Unreal Engine 4。这是一份有趣的工作，我很满意，但仍然想着回去做自己的游戏。我不知道我什么时候才能继续自己的项目——我已经很长时间没有任何重大进展了。

对于那些在我的众筹活动中慷慨解曩的人们，我永远感谢你们对我和我的游戏的信任（也许是误信）——我仍然欠你们一款游戏！

以下是我从经历中总结出来的教训：

1、我严重低估了开发一个项目所需的资金。你必须有很好的资金来源，或大量存款，才能开始独立开发的冒险。众筹活动的成功率太低，除非你获得大量媒体报道和/或已经非常出名。

2、我对自己要做的游戏抱有太大野心。我居然妄想凭一己之力做出像《传送门》那么大那么复杂的游戏。我真应该听取别人的建议，从小型的、简单的游戏入手。

3、自己做引擎虽然有趣，并且能积累大量经验，但也是一个代价昂贵的错误。6个月的工作，我只能拿出一个很短的概念DEMO。我本应该使用SDK、Unity或其他现成的引擎，但我作为一个资深引擎程序员的骄傲不允许！

4、我需要美工或关卡设计—–我被Blender折腾得厉害，它使我花了太长时间才做出一个DEMO关卡。另外，跟别人合作其实是一个获得反馈的好办法。

5、我严重低估了制作一款游戏所需的时间。我以为我在2011年9月就能发布我的第一款游戏了，现在想来真是可笑。我没有做任何详细的计划表和项目管理文件，只凭我的脑袋记住时间，埋头写代码——这是一个错误，特别是考虑到我手头上有的资金少得可怜。事实上，我没有一份真正的商业计划——做游戏？

虽然这是一个昂贵的“失败”，我仍然把那6个月的经历当成我人生中一段最愉快和满足的时光。我收获了很多，并且绝对会再次尝试！（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）

Confessions of a failed indie developer

By Keith Judge

At the Develop Conference in 2011, Sean Murray of Hello Games was the keynote speaker for the Indie Dev Day. One key point he made was that we hear a lot about the successful indie developers, but barely ever hear from those who failed in the pursuit of their dream. This is my story.

In April 2011, I left Lionhead Studios after 3? years working on the Fable franchise. I’d been a programmer in the games industry for nearly 11 years at this point and felt a burning desire to build a game on my own, rather than being part of a large team. A few of my friends had made the switch from AAA to indie with some success so I felt with my experience I had a decent chance. With not much money in reserve, I formed Razorblade Games and began work on a (still untitled) game.

My fellow indie friends advised me I should start small, perhaps making a puzzle game for iOS/Android using Unity and building the company from there. Arrogant as I was, I completely ignored this advice and set about building a game of my own on PC, on the basis that I already owned a PC and a copy of Visual Studio, so there would be no initial outlay of money to get started. I believed at the time that I would have a shippable game by around September that year.

When I say I started building a game, this isn’t strictly true – what I actually built was a graphics engine. The game design gradually formed as I was working over the first couple of months. I knew that my art skills were greatly lacking, so I had a vision of a stark first person sci-fi setting, with simple geometry, small rooms and no human characters – the game mechanic based on switching between alternate universes and changing the direction of gravity in order to solve puzzles. If this sounds a little like Portal, you’re right – that game was a huge inspiration for the project.

Things went well. I was writing a lot of code, new engine features were being added daily and I was learning to use Blender to build the game levels. I was highly motivated, happy to be free from employment and getting a lot of satisfaction from the work I was doing. I was writing AltDevBlogADay articles about how awesome it all was. In July I went to the Develop conference in Brighton,  taking a build of my fledgling game to show to people – a small, single level showing the core alternative universe switching and gravity manipulation mechanics. I talked with people about my vision of what the game would (eventually) become, I talked about how I’d built the game engine from scratch – the physically based lighting, HDR, motion blur, FXAA, etc. People seemed impressed.

I was on a high.

However, there was huge elephant in the room – money. I was living off savings and my wife’s income, but with a mortgage and two children, this was running out fast. I needed external funding to keep going. Looking back I’m not completely sure why I didn’t try talking to a publisher or venture capitalist – I guess I was paralysed by a fear of rejection. Instead I thought crowdfunding was the answer. Kickstarter was becoming popular, though unfortunately was not available for UK based projects at the time, so I used the now closed 8bitfunding.com. This site had the “advantage” that you got your pledge money straight away, rather than having to hit a funding target first. I was initially amazed by the interest people showed and money was starting to come in. I wrote emails to every gaming website I could think of, with a link to a short (silent) YouTube video of the game, trying to get some press to promote the campaign. Only one gaming blog wrote an article about my game, and one other wrote back saying they’d be interested if there was more content. They were right – it was a pretty amateur attempt at announcing a game.

The income quickly stopped, most of which had come from friends, Facebook and Twitter associates. I had created the crowdfunding campaign asking for $10,000. In total I made enough to pay the mortgage on our house for just two weeks – clearly not nearly enough to sustain development. I did a some paid work for Digital Foundry, as a writer and consultant on a few technical gamedev articles, but again this was small change in the grand scheme of things.

Eventually, something had to give, so I started looking for a paid job. At the end of October, the lovely people at Relentless Software offered me a four month contract working on Kinect Nat Geo TV. I fully expected to save a bunch of money and start again with Razorblade Games after this time, but I ended up staying at Relentless for a full (and fun) year and ended with very little cash in reserve (commuting to Brighton on a daily basis was more expensive than I had estimated!). I continued to work on my own game on a laptop on the train journeys to and from work, redesigning the game to focus on the gravity manipulation as the prototype showed that the alternative universe switching just wasn’t that good as a game mechanic.

However, I didn’t do anywhere near as much work as I had done in six months working alone at home. I found it hard to mentally switch from working on one codebase during the working day and my own outside of this time, so ended up focussing my efforts on the paid work at Relentless.

Today, I’m working for Pitbull Studio in Guildford, working with Epic Games on Unreal Engine 4. This is satisfying and fun work, but there’s still the niggling desire in the back of my head to get back to writing my own game(s). I just don’t know when (if ever) this will happen – I haven’t done any significant work on it for a long time.

To the people who sent me money in my crowdfunding campaign, I’m eternally grateful for your (perhaps misguided) belief in me and the game I was building – I still owe you all a game!

To summarise, these are the major lessons I learned…

I vastly underestimated the money needed to pay for the project. You need a good source of funding, or a lot of savings to make the indie adventure work. Relying on a crowdfunding campaign is a huge gamble that’s unlikely to pay off unless you can get a lot of press and/or are already well known.

I was way too ambitious with the game I was trying to build. I was trying to build something the size and complexity of Portal all on my own, when I really should have listened to people and built something small and simple.

Building my own engine, whilst fun and a great learning experience, was an expensive mistake. For six months’ work all I had to show for it was a short proof of concept demo. I should have used UDK, Unity or one of the other available game engines and got on with building a game, but my pride as an experienced game engine programmer didn’t let me!

I was sorely missing an artist or level designer – I struggled with Blender and it took me an awfully long time to build the demo level I had. Also, having someone work with me would have been a great way to get feedback on what I was doing.

I vastly underestimated the time it would take to build the game. My prediction of shipping my first game in September 2011 was, in hindsight, laughable. I actively avoided any detailed scheduling and management of the project, preferring to just get my head down and write code – this was a mistake, particularly given the slim funds I had at my disposal. In fact, I had no real business plan at all – Make game, ???, PROFIT was about as detailed as it got.

Whilst an expensive “failure”, I still count the six months I spent on Razorblade Games as one of the happiest and satisfying times of my life. I learned a huge amount in this time and would (will?) definitely do it again!(source:gamesbrief)