作者：Gabriel Cornish

上周我有幸创造了一款非常糟糕的游戏。不久后我将把它带到我的网站上，但在那之前我想先谈谈我所学到的一些事以及我所领悟到的处理失败游戏的最佳方式。

首先判断你的游戏是否是垃圾。

precision(from gamasutra)

不要狡辩！你会知道这种感觉。关于项目的一切都是复杂的。不要想着“这是一种挑战，我应该想出解决方法。”一款糟糕的游戏不仅会不断带给你各种问题，同时致力于这样的游戏也会让你感到无趣。比起打扫你自己的房子，你需要投入更多努力去启动游戏编辑器。

在花一周时间创造一款游戏的时候我学到了一件事，即如果你并不乐于创造游戏，那么游戏变得出色的几率也会迅速下降。一个优秀的项目能够推动你去思考游戏未知的可能性。而一个糟糕的项目则只会让你想到“我到底该如何挽救它？”

以下便是答案：

如果你是一名独立开发者，你将有可能创造出糟糕的游戏。如果你现在并不是在创造糟糕的游戏或原型，你便过得太过安逸了。

独立游戏开发者的魅力便在于你将去冒险，但是你需要在这些风险未能给予你任何回报的时候察觉出来，从而避免损失。

“大师们的失败次数远远多于刚刚尝试的新人。”—-Stephen McCranie

以下是我在面对一些失败项目中所学到的。

1.你已经投入了工作。明确你可以从中获得什么。

离一周游戏截止日期还有3天多的时间。然而我知道这款游戏已经是个失败品。尽管我投入了许多时间于该项目中，但并非所有努力都是白费的。我可以将某些资产用于其它项目，我也明确了一些“也许可行”的理念，并且我从中获得了不少所需经验。

如果你看到一款游戏未能够按照你所希望的方式呈现出来，那就果断地抛弃它并思考自己能够从中获得什么，然后继续向前走。

2.一款糟糕的游戏并不会因为你完成了它而感激你。

是的，游戏很糟糕。我没有动力再继续完成它。然而我却面对着一个截止日期，并且我不能错过它。所以我匆匆忙忙地“完成”了游戏。这意味着我花费了最少的工作将其带到完成状态。而对于我来说这会造成：

蹩脚的按键菜单。游戏与重新游戏按键是唯一的选择。

没有任何重大事故。如果这意味着删除引起问题的功能，我便会毫不犹豫地摆脱它。

创造并确保它的运行。

就是这样了。如果你知道一个项目不能有效发展，那就投入最少的工作去完成它，然后继续前进。

3.立即开始下一个项目。

失败并不是一件有趣的事。将游戏带到完成状态能够减少失望，但是你仍然不能从希望事情有所不同的想法中恢复过来。克服这种情况的最佳方法便是尽快开始投入下一款游戏中。

这能够维持势头并让你没有太多时间沉浸于之前的失败中。不要误解，你需要写下或在心里进行事后分析，但是不要太过深入思考，你还有其它事要做。

如果你说对于下一个项目还没有任何想法，那就开始进行各种尝试。在屏幕上创造某些内容并让它们动起来。灵感并不会一直罢工。如果你和我一样，它便很少会罢工。不幸的是我们的一周游戏截止日期并不会关心我们是否有灵感。它只会希望游戏能在每个周末准时出现在“完成”文件夹中。

对过去的项目挥手道别。投入一个新项目中，然后继续前进。

如果你已经投入了几个月或几年时间于一个项目中，那么我的建议可能并不能满足你的需求。我发现拯救一款糟糕的游戏是件非常困难的事。并不是说这是不可能的，而是非常困难。不管你是否致力于这样的项目几天，几周，几个月或几年，你都需要仔细思考一下是否应该告别这样的项目。

然后目光直视前方大胆地迈出前进的步伐。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

How to deal with making horrible games, gracefully

by Gabriel Cornish

I had the pleasure of creating a pretty bad game last week. I’ll get around to posting it on my website soon, but I’d like to talk about a couple things I’ve learned and the best way I’ve found to handle a failing game with grace.

First things first. Determine whether or not your game is crap.

Don’t get defensive! You’ll know the feeling. Everything about the project is hard. And not in a “Oh, this is challenging and I should figure out how to solve it” kind of way. A bad game is not only continuously throwing problems your way, but it’s not exciting to work on. It takes more effort to boot up your game editor than it is to clean your entire house.

One of the things I’ve learned while making one game a week, is that if you’re not excited to work on the game, the chances of the game being any good, begin to drop dramatically. A good project has you thinking about the unknown possibilities of the game. A bad project has you thinking, “how the hell do I save this thing?”.

Here’s the thing:

If you’re an indie dev, you’re going to make bad games. If you’re not making bad games or prototypes, then you’re playing it too safe.

The beauty of being an indie game developer is that you get to take risks, but you need to be able to know when those risks aren’t going to pay off and cut your losses. Rejoice though!

“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried” – Stephen McCranie

Here are some things I’ve learned for dealing with a failed project.

1.) You already put in the work. Get what you can out of it.

I had three more days until my deadline to wrap up the week’s game. However, I knew the game was already a failure. Though I put quite a few hours into the project, not all was lost. I have assets I can reuse in another project, I’ve crossed off one more idea that “might work”, and I got some much needed experience.

If you see your game isn’t turning out the way you’d hoped, scrap the project and see what you can take away from it…then move forward.

2.) A bad game doesn’t excuse you from finishing it.

Yes the game was horrible. Yes, I had no motivation to work on it any longer. However, I had a deadline and I wasn’t going to miss it. I quickly got the game to a point where I could call it done. This means I did the least amount of work possible to get it to a finished state. No matter what, get into the habbit of finishing what you start. For me this came down to:

Crappy one button menus. Play and Replay buttons were the only options.

No major crashes or freezes. If this meant stripping out a feature that was causing the problems, then I got rid of it without thought.

Building and making sure it runs.

That’s it. If you know the project isn’t going anywhere, do the least amount of work possible to get it to a finished state…then move forward.

3. Get started on the next project immediately.

As useful as it is, failing isn’t fun. Getting the game to a finished state will help with the disappointment, but you still won’t be able get over wishing that things had gone differently. The best way to get over this is to start on the next game as soon as you wrap up the old one.

This keeps the momentum going and gives you less time to dwell on your failure. Don’t get me wrong, you should absolutely do a written or mental post mortem, but don’t linger on it too much. You have work to do.

Don’t have any ideas for your next project? Just start playing around with something. Get things on screen and make them move. Inspiration isn’t always going to strike. If you’re like me, it strikes rarely. Unfortunately my one game a week deadline doesn’t care if I’m inspired or not. It expects a game delivered into the “Finished Fucking Games” folder on my desktop every Sunday.

Wrap up your old project. Boot up a new one…then move forward.

If you’ve invested months or years into a project – maybe my advice won’t fit your needs. I have, however, found that it’s difficult to save a bad game. Not impossible. Difficult. Whether you’ve been working on it for a couple days, weeks, months or years – take a good hard look at whether you’d be better off wrapping up the project…

Then, keep your eyes ahead and move forward.(source:gamasutra)