作者：Charlie Hall

Gabe Newell写道：“我曾经与Neal Stephenson及其团队进行过交谈。他们开始走出隐身模式。每次当我与之交谈时，我的大脑便会出现嘈杂声。他们请求我帮忙的一件事便是找到更多程序员。”

电子邮件被发送到Valve Software名为“HLCoders”的分发列表中，这是自2001年起便一直存在着的。它充当着Source引擎编码技术的反向通道。如果你了解《半条命2》和《求生之路》的制作工具，你便会知道它。

除了各种类型的能手，有时候来自Valve内部的人会发出奇怪的求助，通常是关于他们之前从未看过的一些软件事宜。这并不是用于寻找新员工的列表，Newell也是在2010年10月的某一天开始使用它。

Newell写道：“之前我从未发表过有关这一话题的内容。但是我认为这是一个非常有趣的话题，所以应该将其公开。”

成功求职者应该曾经参与过AAA级游戏的制作，使用过Source和各种编程语言，并且能在游戏产业中很常见的协作结构中使用它们，并了解像“快速原型创建”和“迭代设计”等系统。如此标准的游戏开发者。

这份工作邀请的突出之出便在于它还要求求职者必须正式学过武术或舞蹈。

实际上，这封电子邮件是封秘密的邀请函，邀请人们到Stephenson的Subutai Corporation工作，并致力于将创造出《Clang》，这款动作控制的刀战游戏项目中。游戏最终将在Kickstarter上募集到50万美元的资金。

Michael Chang是最理想的。他不仅在大学中学过综合武术和日本剑术，同时从2006年开始他就一直致力于类似的游戏创造。

Chang说道，在台湾流传着一个笑话：如果中国大陆的每个男人，女人和小孩都往海里吐口痰，它们最终都会流向台湾。这也是他成为第一代美籍华人的部分原因，他的父亲想要逃离让人窒息的环境去外边寻找机遇。

他说道：“对于很多台湾公民来说，他们住在那片土地上主要是出于自豪感，否则便没有其它理由继续待在那里。虽然那是你的家乡，但是对于许多人来说，他们的梦想都是移民到美国。那也是我父母的梦想。他们希望拥有自己的院子，汽车等等。”

在高中的时候Chang便帮助家人创建起家族企业。他的父母通过从中国进口画架并使用他所创造的网站（即当他还是青少年时，而现在他一直对此表示自嘲）将其卖给美国的艺术家们。

他说道：“那真的很糟糕。我是使用Dreamweaver创造那个网站，并且还没有模版。虽然它能够运行，但却并未发生任何改变。与那个时期许多父母的想法一样，我的父母说道，‘嘿，你懂计算机，所以你当然能够创造一个网站！’”

他并不喜欢电子商务。他想要成为皮克斯的一名动画师，想要创造自己从小看到大的电影。但是他的父母想办法说服他去做一些与他们的画架生意相关的事。这也是他为什么会停止在加州大学洛杉矶分校的涉及媒体艺术中的学习。他在学习编程的过程中也学了油画—-即作为一种传达媒介。

“这让我能够发挥自己的艺术技能，并转换它。我便逐渐成为一个杂而不精的人，即任何问题的出现都是对于我的磨练。”

他的专长是程序动画，即教授计算机独自绘画的一种方法。

Chang说道：“比起亲自画幅画，这更像是我在教一只动物如何画画。这只动物也许会做你希望它做的事，但却不是每次都这样。”

他第一次感受到成功的滋味是在编写了一个能让简单的图画生动地呈现出来的程序。当用户拿起笔时，生物便能开始在屏幕上四处游动。当Will Wright在概念化《孢子》时看到了这一程序。

Chang说道：“那是在他们创建原型的阶段。Wright让一些成员去寻找黑客型的程序员。因为我一直都是Will Wright的粉丝，并且也玩过《模拟城市》，所以我便立刻提出了申请，并最终成为他们公司的实习生。”

Chang说道：“他们的艺术总监让我们去打印一些随机的图像。在午餐的时候，我便看到了有关拉面，篮球以及航天飞机等等的图片。然后他说，‘我希望你们能够利用这些图像并随机挑选一些元素而草拟出一架飞机。’”

Chang继续设计许多用户界面元素的早前版本，并最终成为了《孢子》的生物创造者。

在大学毕业后他加入了洛杉矶的加工承揽程序员行列中。他用稳定的工作和医疗福利换取了一系列高额的项目。因此他的工作经历可以说非常奇怪。

Chang曾为雅虎做过数据可视化工作，他说道：“他们收集了许多有关用户的数据。他们想将其绘制出来。他们希望以一种更加实际有效的方式看到这些数据。”

Chang曾涉足广告产业：“比起聘请一百名动画师去创造这些小片图像，他们选择雇佣三名程序员。”

Chang曾效劳于基督教科学组织派：“那是位于沙漠中间一个类似于迪士尼那样的城堡。他们将我们所有非科学论派支持者带到一个独立的房间，并且不允许我们使用网络。这就像是一个血汗工厂，而我在那里创造着传道用的3D图像。”

Chang也曾在上海一家初创企业工作过，他说道：“我想要旅游。这看起来就像是一个网络朋克，并且我也懂得中文。我们的客户包括索尼，微软等等。”

在30岁之前他便拥有了这些经历，甚至更多。

但是他的最多时间还是花费在游戏创造中。

他说道：“在2006年，我和朋友坐在房间里。我们对自己说，‘看，《Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast》是一款出色的游戏。但人们却不再玩这款游戏。我们需要使用一些内容去创造一款剑斗游戏。’”于是他们便开始一起创造游戏。

当2004年SDK发布时，它立刻打开了游戏modder与Valve代码共同发挥作用的水闸。人们总是在各种摆弄Valve的性能，在熟悉的单位上添加新的皮肤，或引进其它游戏模式和修改内容。甚至还曾出现过所谓的“彻底转变”，即几乎未剩下任何最初的游戏图像或机制。《军团要塞》系列便是基于这种方式开始的。

但是SDK将程序语言带到了更多用户面前，并提供给最资深的modder一些他们之前从未见过的强大工具。Chang的项目是Source mod的一大发展。

他的和朋友想要创造出像《Jedi Knight 2》那样的多人光剑决斗游戏。不存在虚假的宗教信仰，只是挥舞着刀剑进行砍杀。他们两到modding论坛上寻求帮助，并组建了一个小型团队。在2008年，即经过2年的工作，他的朋友最终放弃了努力。而Chang则坚持下去。

Chang说道：“那一年发生的真正有趣的事是我们被发现了。”另外一个mod团队，即负责基于网络朋克主题的成功多人Source mod—-《Dystopia》，刚刚结束工作。但其团队成员着眼于所有面向Source创造的游戏时，他们发现并喜欢上Chang的游戏，并邀请他加入自己的团队。

Chang说道：“他们所创造的是非常受欢迎的mod。那时候他们背后有数千名玩家。游戏中有武士刀，你可以进入网络空间，并在那里做一些能在网络空间里做的事，如坎门，坎摄像机等等。”

Team Dystopia的领导者退出了。突然间Chang受控于一些高技能的兼职游戏开发者，并慢慢组建成名为Puny Human的团队。在那之后的两年，他们的游戏《Blade Symphony》逐渐成形。

但这对于Chang来说仍只能算是兼职。2010年，在谷歌的邀请下他重拾了数据可视化的工作，即类似于他之前在雅虎所做的那样，但这次是面向外部使用。他在谷歌的工作面很广，从Google涂鸦到“100,000 Stars”（游戏邦注：一款Chrome浏览器应用，通过它你可以在银河系中进行星际旅游，查看接近地球的10万颗星星，也就是距地球几光年之内的各种星星，并且主要是受到《质量效应》的启发）。

当Newell的邮件出现在他的电子邮箱时，他与谷歌的合同即将到期，而在谷歌提供给他一份新合同前他有几个月的休息时间。

Chang说道：“我回复了这封电子邮件。这真的不能说是自大哈，我在邮件上说道，‘你知道吗，这份工作舍我其谁。你必须聘请我。’”

他接收到了面试通知。Stephenson的团队也认可他是最适合这份工作的人员。两个月后他正式加入Subutai Corporation。

Subutai Cor破ration是位于旧金山中心的一块秘密基地，由充满远见的作者，新闻记者同时也是企业家的Neal Stephenson及其合作伙伴与投资者共同运行着。Chang表示他所认识的Subutai主要有两个目的：讲故事和制作游戏。

他们一半的精力是在创造并销售Stephenson的数字娱乐应用“The Mongoliad”。这是一种订阅式服务，将向用户讲述一个架空历史（游戏邦注：描写并非真实发生的虚构历史），即东西方剑士兵戎相见，就好似日本的武士碰上了欧洲的骑士。Chang说道，Stephenson本身学过那些被遗忘的西方武术，如意大利和德国剑法，所以看着他的项目就好似尝试一些新方法去讲故事并从这些虚构内容中盈利。

而Chang的工作是致力于该公司的另一半事务。他将帮助玩家使用实验式动作控制器而进入武士或骑士的身体里。

从自身背景来看，他完全能够扮演好动画师和程序员的角色，他在UCLA的剑斗经历也能帮助他加快原型创建的过程。Subutai的团队之所以雇佣他便是因为他熟悉Source引擎。

Chang说道：“我在学习武术的最棒的经历是，老师要求我们在一个周六早上在太平洋海岸高速公路上的一个地点会面。所以我便开车前往那个地点。但是当我们到达时却发现四周被浓雾所环绕着。”

“我们脚下便是沙滩，沙子和海水。我们必须在被浓雾所弥漫的沙滩上进行剑斗比赛。这么做是为了训练我们的步法。只有保持步法的稳定我们才不至于跌倒。而我的确跌倒了很多次。”

对于Subutai来说聘请一名同样也是剑客的程序员的重要性在于，剑斗从未被有效地呈现在电子游戏中。许多人在PC上进行了各种尝试但却都以失败告终，甚至人们最近在基于动作控制的Wii上的尝试也失败了。即使是最相近的体验也缺少了实际战斗所具有的重力与精确度。Stephenson想要连接起现实与虚拟之间的缝隙，而Chang将成为这一项目的建筑师。

“我知道让你的左脚向前而右脚向后的重要性—-基于这样的姿势能够做出怎样的行动？当我转变姿势让右脚向前而左脚向后，我那持剑的手臂是位于右前方。这便是典型的防御姿势。反过来，当我持剑的手臂受伤了，我也可以向前攻击，就像是挥舞着棒球棒那样。”

“对于这些内容的了解有效地帮助我去理解Stephenson所设想的交流过程——就像想要拥有一场现实般的剑斗，并从游戏执行内部进行思考。”

Chang能够在几个月内为游戏创造一个简单的框架。在过去的一年里他将这一框架与实验式控制器整合在一起，然后开始删除游戏代码的一些大区块，并用新的代码取代它们，然后测试各种控制方法和用户界面设计。

他所面临的挑战是当你一起粉碎两个强大的骑士时如何模拟你所接收到的物理反馈。这是Chang在创造《Blade Symphony》时便遇到过的挑战，它倾向于更传统的打斗游戏（如《街头霸王》）那样的机制。

Chang说道：“这真的是需要解决的一些大问题。这并不是一些简单的问题。随着原型创建的发展，它们也需要面对一些变化。”

“它们需要一个程序员与武术家的结合体，同时也能够制作动画，因为该项目很大程度将依赖于程序与动画相结合的质量。同样地，武术和剑斗也很重要。”

尽管他是Subutai员工中少数的程序员之一，但是Subutai的每一位员工都希望能够成为一名剑客。该公司的核心价值是通过基于历史的娱乐去学习并复苏已经被遗忘的欧洲剑斗技能。该工作室甚至是那些世界上仅剩的一些以骑士身份战斗着的剑客的归宿。

Chang说道：“周末我们会用长剑练习。虽然并不是什么严格的练习，但教练也要求我们要在家不断练习舞剑。当我们在旧金山的一座公园见面时，很多人都带着好奇的眼光盯着我们，因为我们都握着一些塑料剑。不过我们将继续在那里做这些练习。”

所以可以肯定地说，Chang是世界上少数研究那些还在世的优秀剑客，同时还实践了他们所拥有的东方与西方剑法的人之一。但这并不是他在Subutai工作一年中最精彩的部分。

他说道：“我在Neal Stephenson的房子里闲逛着。之后Newell以及他的一些同事出现在晚饭的餐桌上。我的右手边坐着Gabe Newell而左右边是Neal Stephenson，而我的脑子里一直想着，‘我到底该怎么处理这种情境？”

在那之后一年，即Chang的合同快到期时，他做出了离开Subutai的决定。他很难说出离开的原因。考虑到他的工作性质，他甚至很难说出为什么自己说不出原因。

Chang说道：“甚至到了今天，我还是有点困惑。我知道他们即将开始在Kickstarter上募集资金。我知道他们的方向开始从Source引擎转向一些更容易创建原型的平台，如Unity。”

在Chang离开后，该公司为《Clang》募集到超过50万美元的资金。他表示自己所创建的原型被Subutai用于宣传视频中。

但是在那之后几年该项目却暂停了。许多支持者对于该团队用光了Kickstarter的资金但却未创造出一款成品感到失望。

Subutai尽可能地去扭转新闻。其最新更新表示未能找到合适的发行商是该项目“暂停”的主要原因。Chang表示他曾在2011年为Subutai创造面向发行商的展示内容。但是他们却并未接受。

不过Chang也从未停止创造自己的游戏。当他在为科学论派的鼓吹者，为雅虎和谷歌，甚至是为Neal Stephenson工作时，他仍继续与一个小型核心团队一起制作着《Blade Symphony》。

对于一个刚刚迈入30岁的男人，致力于一个项目七年真的是一段很长的时间。鉴于Chang的专业历史，《Blade Symphony》成为他从大学毕业后生活中唯一不变的内容。

Chang说道：“许多开发者都有许多理念。他们会不断探索这些理念，并在没有足够的毅力坚持下去时半途放弃。”

“如果我并未完成一件事我便不会开始另一件事。我如此相信它，所以我必须完成游戏开发。如果我现在不坚持下去，之后我也不可能再坚持其它事—-如此我该如何开始另一个项目呢？这可能只是一个谎言。所以我选择作为一名承包人并回到谷歌。”

“现在，白天的时候我并未在开发游戏，而到了晚上我便可以探索自己的游戏开发了。”

《Blade Symphony》一直在发展着。这也多亏了他自己在Kickstarter上的成功募资。Chang拥有引擎授权能够销售游戏。2013年4月他进入了Steam的Earlu Access平台，而在夏天，Steam Sale成为了他和团队最重要的时刻。他希望在明年的适当时机正式发行游戏。

但现在仍有许多工作要做。

Chang说道：“我们团队中存在着一个特殊的国际时间，即当澳大利亚人刚刚醒来时，德国人却也刚刚入睡。所以我们需要敲定一个合适的时间开会。”

“现在我们将游戏放到公众面前，并让大量玩家对其进行测试。因为现在处于公测，所以它将暴露在玩家面前。他们能够不断提供给我们反馈，甚至比我们能够处理的反馈还要多。”

到今天共有1万多人玩过《Blade Symphony》。Chang即将完成功能列表，并即将完成最后的游戏。

没人比不断壮大的玩家社区更兴奋了。

Chang说道：“关于《Blade Symphony》最酷的地方在于社区自发组织了道场大师/学生系统。这里有游戏内部大师能够修改我们的地图并添加这些训练极点。他们将站在这些训练极点前，并基于一定距离教授学生们。”

“他们会使用武术中的许多术语。这里存在一个曲线步骤，在此他们将教授学生舞动右手，绕着敌人，然后摆动左手并袭击他们的后背。他们会让学生们反复练习。在下班时间他们也将做些自己的事。”

Chang表示，这些玩家便是“鲸鱼”玩家，即免费游戏领域所使用的一个术语，用于描述那些花了大量金钱于游戏中的玩家。但比起金钱，这些鲸鱼玩家带给小团队的是大量的时间。

这让Chang知道他成功地在虚拟领域创造了一个能让玩家学习武术的平台。他实现了玩家的需求。而玩家也正在为他的游戏掏钱。

这可能不是基于触觉的行动控制的未来，即剑斗迷们在过去十年里所幻想的。但这却是很长一段时间以来最接近的情况。

（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）

Blade Symphony: What sound does a successful Kickstarter make?

By Charlie Hall

“I’ve been talking with Neal Stephenson and his team,” Gabe Newell wrote. “They are starting to come out of stealth mode. … Every time I talk to them, my brain comes away buzzing. … One thing they asked me to help them with is to find some more coders.”

The email was sent to a Valve Software distribution list, called “HLCoders,” that has been in existence since 2001. It serves as the backchannel for Source engine coding expertise. If you’re serious about screwing around with the tools that made Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead you’re already on it.

In addition to tinkerers of every flavor, every once in a while someone from deep inside Valve sends out a weird call for help, usually about some software quirk they’ve never seen before. It’s not a list that’s used to find new employees, and it had never been used by Newell until that day in October, 2010.

“I haven’t posted to this alias before,” Newell wrote, “but I thought this was an interesting enough subject that it would be worth a post.”

The successful candidate would have credit on a triple-A game title, have experience with Source and various programming languages and be able to use them inside collaborative structures common to the games industry, systems with names like “rapid prototyping” and “iterative design.” Pretty standard game dev stuff.

What made the job offer unique was that it also required experience in the formal study of either martial arts or dance.

In reality that email was a cryptic invitation to apply for a job at Stephenson’s Subutai Corporation, an opportunity to work on the unannounced project that would become Clang, a motion-controlled sword fighting game. The game that would eventually be Kickstarted to the tune of half a million dollars.

Michael Chang was the perfect candidate. Not only had he studied mixed martial arts and Japanese sword fighting in college, but he had been working on a similar game since 2006.

And, unlike Stephenson, he still is.

Shanghaied

There’s a joke among Taiwanese nationals, Chang says, that goes like this: If every man, woman and child in China spits in the ocean it will drown Taiwan. It’s part of the reason he’s a first-generation American, the son of immigrants who came looking for opportunity outside a sphere of influence that practically smothered them.

“For a lot of Taiwanese citizens you either stay there due to pride, or you don’t have any other reason to stay there,” he says. “It’s your hometown, but for a lot of people it’s their dream to move to America. So that [was] my parents’ dream. They wanted to have a yard and cars and stuff.”

Chang helped to build the family business in high school. His parents import easels from China and sell them to artists online in the U.S. using a website he built when he was a teenager, something he laughs about now.

“It’s terrible,” he says. “It’s made in Dreamweaver out of templates. It works, but it still hasn’t changed. Like any kid at that time my parents were like, ‘Hey you know computers. You can make websites!’”

E-commerce wasn’t his passion. He wanted to be an animator at Pixar, to make the kind of movies he grew up watching. His parents convinced him to do something a bit more practical with their stack of easel cash. That’s how he ended up at UCLA in the Design Media Arts program. He studied programming like some would study oil painting — as a medium for expression.

“It allowed me to take my artistic skill set, but then to transform it. … I became this sort of jack of all trades kind of guy, where any problem that presented itself just sort of clicked for me.”

His specialty was procedural animation, a way of teaching computers to draw on their own.

“Instead of painting a painting,” Chang says, “it’s more like I’m teaching an animal to perform. And the animal might do what you want, but it won’t do the exact thing every time.”

One of his first tastes of success was building a program that made simple drawings come to life. As soon as the user lifted their pen a creature would begin to swim around the screen. It was exactly the kind of work that appealed to Will Wright when he was conceptualizing Spore.

“It was during their prototyping phase,” Chang says. “Wright basically had a bunch of people look for hacker programmer types. … I’ve been a Will Wright fan for my whole life and I’d played SimCity. So I applied instantly, and I got the internship.

“The art director would have us go and print out some random imagery,” Chang says. “During lunch … there would be these printouts laying out of fucking ramen noodles and a basketball and the Space Shuttle or whatever. He’d say, ‘I want you to take each of these images and shuffle them and sketch out a planet made from those things.’”

Chang went on to design many early versions of the user interface elements that went into Spore’s Creature Creator.

After college he joined the new elite of mercenary work-for-hire programmers in Los Angeles. He traded the chance at a steady job and medical benefits for a string of highly paid projects. As a result his work history is certifiably weird.

Chang has done data visualization for Yahoo: “They collect so much data about their users,” he says. “They want a way of plotting it. And they want to see it in a cool, Tron-like way.”

Chang has worked in the advertising industry: “Instead of hiring a hundred animators to animate all these tiny bits of graphics they hired three programmers,” he says.

Chang has worked for the Church of Scientology: “It was in a Disney-like castle in the middle of the desert,” he says. “They put all of us non-Scientologists in a separate room with no access to the internet. It was sort of a sweatshop where I was creating propaganda 3D art.”

Chang worked from Shanghai for a startup that he cannot name: “I wanted to travel,” he says. “It just seemed really cyberpunk, and I already spoke the language. … Our clients included Sony and Microsoft, the usual guys.”

And he did all of that, and much more, before he turned 30.

But the whole time he was also making a game.

“In 2006 a friend and I were sitting in the living room,” he says. “Super bored. We’re saying to ourselves, ‘Look, Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast was a great game. It happened, but people stopped playing it. We really need something to scratch the sword fighting itch that we have.’” And so they began to make a game together.

Puny Human

When the Source Development Kit (SDK) was released in 2004 it opened the floodgates for game “modders” to come and play with Valve’s code. People had always tinkered with Valve properties, adding new skins on familiar units or introducing other game modes and tweaks. There had even been so-called “full conversions,” modifications so dramatic that barely any of the original game art or mechanics remained. The Team Fortress series started out that way.

But the SDK opened the programming language to more users, and gave even the most experienced modders powerful tools they had never had before. Chang’s project was part of a boom in Source mods.

He and his friend wanted to make a fighting game that played a lot like Jedi Knight 2′s multiplayer lightsaber duels. No hokey religion, just saber to saber. Steel upon steel. The duo trawled modding forums looking for help and built up a small, revolving team. In 2008, after two years of work, his friend dropped out of the effort. Chang stuck with it.

“The really interesting thing that happened that year was we were actually discovered,” Chang says. Another team of modders, responsible for the hugely successful cyberpunk-themed multiplayer Source mod called Dystopia, was winding down its work. When its team members looked at all the games being built for Source, they liked Chang’s the best and asked to join his team.

“Theirs was a pretty popular mod,” Chang says. “They had thousands of concurrent players back in those days. They had a katana, and you could jack into cyberspace, and in cyberspace you could do cyberspace things like hack doors and cameras and stuff.”

The leadership of Team Dystopia stepped aside. Suddenly Chang was in control of more than a dozen highly-skilled part-time game developers who slowly folded into the team, called Puny Human. Over the next two years their game, Blade Symphony, began to truly take shape. The art direction took on the brightly lit, glossy veneer Dystopia was known for.

But it was still a part time gig for Chang. In 2010 he was back in the states at the invitation of Google where he was doing data visualization, similar to what he had done for Yahoo but this time for external consumption. He did everything from Google doodles to 100,000 Stars, an experiment in programming for Chrome that was heavily inspired by Mass Effect.

But that fall his contract was up, and he had a few months off work before Google could offer him a new one.

That’s when Newell’s note landed in his inbox.

“I fired off an email,” Chang says. “It wasn’t cocky, but I said, ‘You know what? This job was made for me. You have to take me.’”

He was granted an interview. Stephenson’s team agreed that the job was made for him. He was working for Subutai Corporation two months later.

Subutai

Subutai Corporation is a secretive enclave in the heart of San Francisco owned and operated by visionary author, journalist and entrepreneur Neal Stephenson, his partners and investors. Chang says that the Subutai that he knows exists for two purposes: telling stories and making games.

One half of the house creates and sells content for Stephenson’s digital entertainment app, The Mongoliad. It’s a subscription-based service that tells an alternate history where eastern and western swordsmen meet and fight, a fantasy where Japanese samurai engage European knights. Chang says that Stephenson, himself a student of forgotten western martial arts like Italian and German swordsmanship, views his project as an experiment in new ways of telling tales and monetizing fiction.

Chang was hired on to work in the other half of the house, which he describes as more of a startup. He was brought on to develop just one of the many projects there, one that would help players explore the action of The Mongoliad through games.

Chang was hired to make the early prototypes for Clang. His job was to help players inhabit the body of a samurai or a knight using an experimental motion controller, a device he can’t discuss.

His background meant he was uniquely capable of filling the role of both animator and programmer, and his experience sword fighting at UCLA helped speed up the prototyping process. The team at Subutai hired him as much for his familiarity with the Source engine as for his skill with a blade.

“I took a year of kenjutsu in college, which is the Japanese form of sword fighting,” Chang says. “It’s not too dissimilar to kendo, but kendo is padded and it’s a sport. Whereas kenjutsu is the actual art of killing people with a bladed weapon.

“My best experience in martial arts was when … our master — our sensei — asked us to meet by the Pacific Coast Highway at a certain location on a Saturday morning in Bumfuck, California. … So I drove there. When we arrived there was fog.

“There was also beach, sand and water underneath us. We had to practice sword fighting on the beach in the fog. And the point was to train our footwork. And so your footwork has to be really stable or when you try to block something you will fall. And fall I did. A lot.”

What made it so important for Subutai to have a programmer who was also a swordsman was that sword fighting had arguably never been effectively reproduced in a video game. Many had tried and failed on the PC, and more recently on the motion-controlled Wii. Even the closest approximations lacked the weight and precision of actual combat, though. Stephenson wanted to bridge the gap between the real and the virtual, and Chang would be his architect.

“I know how important it is to have your left foot forward, right foot back versus the other way around — what motions can you do with that stance. When I turn with my right foot forward and my left foot back my sword arm is right in front of me. And that’s a really defensive posture. The other way around … my sword arm is already wound and I can attack forwards … sort of like swinging a baseball bat.

“And so knowing all these things lubricated the communication process between what [Stephenson] had in his mind — as far as wanting to have realistic sword combat — and went into what was actually implemented in the game.”

Chang was able to create a rough framework for a game in just a few months. Over the course of a year he integrated that framework with the experimental controller, and then began to remove large sections of the game code and replace it with new code, testing various control methods and user interface designs.

The challenge was to simulate the physical feedback you get when you smash two giant knives together. It was a challenge that Chang had already met with his interpretation for Blade Symphony, which leans heavily on the mechanics of more traditional fighting games like Street Fighter.

“These are really big problems to solve,” Chang says. “I’m talking research thesis paper big. These are not easy problems. … They needed that sort of fluidity as far as prototyping goes.

“They needed a programmer/martial artist hybrid who also could do a little bit of animation because the project was clearly going to rely heavily on the quality of programming and animation meshing together. … Likewise, learning martial arts and sword fighting was just as important.”

While he was one of the few programmers on staff, everyone at Subutai was expected to be a swordsman. A core value at the company was to study and keep alive lost European sword fighting techniques through historical recreation. The offices are home to some of the only remaining swordsmen in the world who fight as knights did.

“We did these Sunday practices with longswords,” Chang says. “A lot of it was not very rigorous exercise, but they did ask us to practice our swings at home. … We would meet at a park in San Francisco, with all these other people around you looking at you weird, because you have these plastic swords. And we would do these routines there.”

So it is safe to say that Chang is one of the few people in the world to have studied under some of the finest living swordsmen, and to have practiced both eastern and western styles under them. But that wasn’t the highlight of his year working at Subutai.

“I hung out at Neal Stephenson’s house,” he says, wide eyed. “Then [Newell] and some of his colleagues showed up for dinner, and I was sitting at this table with Gabe Newell on my right and Neal Stephenson on my left, and I’m thinking, ‘Where the fuck am I? How did I get myself into this situation? There’s gods sitting here.’”

One year later, at the end of his contract, Chang made the decision to leave Subutai. It’s hard for him to talk about the reasons why he left. Given the nature of his work, it’s hard for him to even talk about the reasons why he can’t talk about it.

“Even to this day,” Chang says, “I’m a little bit confused. I know that their Kickstarter was about to start. And I know that their direction was starting to shift from Source engine to something a little bit easier to prototype with, which was Unity.”

After Chang left the company the Kickstarter for Clang went on to be funded at over $500 thousand. He says his prototypes featured prominently in the video Subutai used in the pitch.

But a little over a year later the project was put on hold. Many backers were frustrated that the team appeared to have burnt through their Kickstarter money without creating a finished product.

Subutai spun the news as best it could. Its last update cites an inability to find a publisher as a major reason to “hit pause” on the project. Chang says he was making presentations for Subutai in 2011 to publishers. They didn’t bite then either.

But he never stopped working on his own game. When he was working for the Scientologists, for Yahoo and Google, even when he was working for Neal Stephenson, the production on Blade Symphony carried on with a core team of about a half dozen contributors.

Ronin

For a man just barely into his 30s, seven years is a long time to work on one project. Given Chang’s professional history, Blade Symphony has been the only constant in his life since college.

“A lot of developers have a lot of ideas,” Chang says. “They go and they explore those ideas, and they just give up on them half way through and [don't] really have the stamina to pursue them to the end.

“If I don’t finish this I will never start anything again. I believe in it so much that I have to finish this game development. If I don’t do that then I can’t — how can I even start another project? It would just be a lie. … So I chose to go back to being a contractor for Google.

“Now I’m not doing game dev in the morning, afternoon and evening. I’m doing different things during the day, and then in the evening time I can explore my own game dev.”

Blade Symphony is growing. Thanks to his own successful Kickstarter, which began and ended during his time at Subutai, Chang has the engine licensing he needs to sell the game. He bullied his way into Steam’s Early Access platform in April 2013, and that summer’s Steam Sale was a huge moment for him and his small team. He expects to release the game formally some time next year.

But there’s still plenty of work left to do.

“We have a very specific international time where the Australians are just waking up and the Germans are just about to fall asleep,” Chang says. “It’s exact. And it’s at that time that we can finally do a meeting.

“Right now we’re at the point where we put the game out and it’s currently undergoing huge amounts of player testing. Because it’s in beta it’s continually exposed to the fresh air of players. They’re continually giving me feedback, almost to the point where there’s almost more feedback than we can possibly handle.”

To date as many as 10,000 people have played Blade Symphony. Chang is nearing the point where the list of features is almost complete, and the time will come to exit the beta period and finish the game.

No one is more excited than the growing community of players.

“The coolest part about Blade Symphony,” Chang says, “is that the community self-organized into this dojo-like master/student system. There are in-game masters who would modify our maps and they would add these training poles. They will stand in front of these training poles, and they will teach students distancing.

“They borrow a lot of terminology from martial arts. There’s a curve step, where they teach students to essentially shuffle to their right, curve around their opponent, and then swing left and hit their back. And they would have their students practice over and over again. In their off hours they will even create their own events.”

These players are the “whales,” Chang says, a term used in the free-to-play space for players that spend a huge amount of money on a game. But instead of money, the whales give his small team a disproportionate amount of their time.

What that tells Chang is he is succeeding at creating, in a virtual space, a place to study the kind of martial arts he enjoys training in. He is fulfilling a need players have, one that he shares from his time playing Jedi Knight 2. And people are paying for his game.

It may not be the tactile, motion-controlled future that sword fighting aficionados have dreamt about for the last few decades. But it might just be the closest thing available for a long, long time.(source:polygon)