作者：Lex Decrauw

两年前我们在Steam的Early Access平台上发行了《动作影星亨克》。一年后当我们完成游戏创造后便离开了Early Access。去年我们发行了游戏，并且拥有足够的时间去反思我们在Early Access上的表现，我将自己的一些想法记了下来希望对那些打算在Steam Early Access上发行游戏的开发者有所帮助。

action_henk_kidsroom（from gamasutra）

现在的Early Access还不是最让人信任的平台，这也是我为何觉得必须与你们分享自己的经验教训的原因，如此其他开发者便可以更好地利用在Early Access上的时间。有许多工作室都不能有效地执行Early Access发行，并因此导致许多玩家对Early Access避而远之。而如果能够做好在该平台上的发行，它将带给游戏很多益处。

决定Early Access是否适合你的游戏

首先你需要做的便是明确你到底需不需要Early Access。Early Access有很多优点：在开发期间能够带给你社区反馈，能够较早创造收益，在游戏发行时便拥有一个社区，能够提高游戏的曝光度，当你真正完成游戏时你将是在经历第二次发行过程。

虽然这些优点听起来很吸引人，但它同时也伴随着不可小觑的风险：玩家可能对游戏留下糟糕的初印象，除非你做些什么特别的尝试否则媒体往往不会对Early Access感兴趣，维持一个社区需要你投入大量的时间，你需要频繁地发布更新内容，有可能因为较早的发行而导致你最终发行变得没什么用了。你还必须确保你的游戏是否足够适合Early Access。你的游戏需要匹配一个能让你快速创造更多机制并利用在Early Access上的时间去添加更多内容的模式。

最后一个同时也是最大的一个风险便是，在你进行Early Access期间游戏的收益是没有保障的。你可以在Early Access平台上发行游戏，你也会发现有无数原因会导致游戏销量不理想。但是一旦你在Early Access上发行了游戏，你便对那些购买了游戏的玩家做出了承诺，即你一定会完成这款游戏。所以在此之前你必须确保自己从心理上和财政上都做好了准备。

你还必须问自己一个重要的问题：“我的游戏概念是否足够特别能够去承担上述的这些风险？”

我并不能提供给你们这个问题的答案，但我可以提供给你们一些相关建议。我将在此列出我们从《动作影星亨克》在Steam Early Access上的发行所学到的一些最重要的经验教训。

最初的Early Access架构

也许这听起来再明显不过，但是最初的Early Access架构必须包含你的游戏的真正核心机制。即使没有图像，音频，特效，关卡编辑，角色定制，内容等等，你的游戏也有可能获得成功。但是当你在创造一款和《动作影星亨克》一样的跑酷平台游戏时，你便需要在最初的架构中呈现出适当的平台游戏机制。如果你的核心机制全部呈现于游戏中并且非常接近于最终成品，用户便会有“虽然还不完整，但是这款游戏真的很棒！”的想法，而这便是你选择Early Access以及大多数玩家会接受你的游戏的原因。

收集所有数据

有些玩家会在论坛或社交网站上提供给你游戏反馈，但大多数情况下你都需要主动去寻求反馈。因为大多数玩家都是认为自己喜欢游戏才去购买游戏的人。你并不能想当然地认为玩家都会提供给你反馈信息。

询问玩家对于游戏的看法是获取反馈的一种方式，但是这种方法不仅会浪费大量时间且不能带给你大量有帮助的数据。我会建议开发者（不管是不是在Early Access上）去创建一个分析系统，这能够提供给你们真正且无可争辩的数据而帮助你们有效地完善游戏。

在《动作影星亨克》中，我们便广泛使用了分析系统。我们使用分析系统去完善游戏的一个例子便是我们在设置获得奖牌所需要时间的时候。在《动作影星亨克》中，玩家必须尽快到达短道终点才能获得铜牌，银牌，金牌或彩虹奖牌。在最初游戏版本中，获取奖牌所需要的时间是随机的。但是在游戏发行后排行榜逐渐被填满，我们便发现在某个关卡获得金牌似乎太过简单，而在其它关卡中获得奖牌又太过困难。我们希望的是每个玩家都能够获得铜牌，80%的玩家能够获得银牌，50%的玩家能够获得金牌，而只有3%的玩家能够获得彩虹奖牌。为了做到这点我们记录下了每个玩家获得奖牌的情况并在整个Early Access过程中不断调整玩家获取奖牌所需要的时间。如果我们发现20%的玩家在一个关卡中获得了金牌，我们便需要降低金牌获取难度。下面的图表便是我们在Early Access的一个游戏架构。

medaldata（from gamasutra）

虽然这只是其中的一个分析案例，但是你总是希望能够追踪所有情况。你希望了解玩家在什么时候会死掉，玩家觉得哪个关卡很难对付，玩家会选择怎样的角色等等。所以你应该去追踪所有对之后游戏发展有帮助的数据。

而对于分析你也可以使用一些现有的系统。就像在《动作影星亨克》中我们便结合了GameAnalytics和Steam的统计系统，除此之外还有很多其它插件能够帮到你。我们也经常使用Unity，而现在它也推出了一个分析系统，我们决定在创造下一个项目的时候尝试看看。

确保玩家社区始终了解情况

你必须确保开发过程足够透明公开。你必须让玩家社区清楚他们所购买的半成品游戏将在某一天完成。你肯定不希望玩家误会你并未致力于他们花钱所购买的内容中。这便意味着你必须频繁更新游戏信息，与玩家在论坛上保持互动，或创建一个开发博客去呈现给玩家你的工作进程。你同时还需要让玩家感受到你有在认真聆听他们的心声。

虽然聆听玩家的心声很重要，你也必须避免对玩家百依百顺。你在论坛上交流的玩家群组只是你的玩家基础中的一部分。他们往往代表的是那些喜欢你的游戏并希望表达自己对游戏看法的人，每次当他们在玩游戏时都会冒出一些新的建议内容。而学习如何有效面对这些玩家便是你在Early Access上需要掌握的最主要技能之一。你必须牢记以下内容：

不要轻易做出承诺。玩家社区会记住你说过的每句话，他们也将会引用你说过的话去反击你。人们总是很容易误解你说过的东西，所以你最好确保自己能够尽可能清楚地进行说明。如果有人建议你创造功能X而你的回应是“这听起来不错，我们应该这么做！”，那么他们便会期待你真正创造出这一功能。而如果你之后决定不去创造这一功能，你便可能因此让他们感到失望。这也将引出我的下一点内容。

不要玩家社区说什么就去做什么，不管他们的建议听起来多优秀。进行Early Access本来就会增加你的项目时间，所以不要再浪费更多时间去创造那些不值得投入更多开发时间的功能。再创造每个功能前你必须问自己：“这一功能是否能够提升游戏价值并为它创造更多销量？”如果答案是“可能不行”，那么你就需要再三考虑是否要创造这一功能了。我们便未能有效执行这一要点从而将原本计划的5个月Early Access时间延长到了13个月。因为玩家社区的建议我们一而再再而三地往游戏中添加更多功能。下图便是我们所添加的各种功能。需要注意的是Steam上的大多数游戏往往只拥有该列表中的5，6，7项内容，而即使我们删除了一半的内容也不会影响游戏的销量。只是我们太难开口去拒绝玩家的提议。

清楚何时离开Early Access并始终将这一时间牢记于心

如果你能够遵守开发时间表，你便能轻松决定离开Early Access的时间。但对于大多数工作室来说，在开发过程中时间表总是会频繁地发生改变。最大的原因便是，因为社区的影响游戏设计会不断发生变化。你将放弃许多适合你们游戏的功能，并从众多功能中选择一个开始创造。你永远都不会觉得游戏已经完成了，所以你也很难为项目设定一个截止日期。如果你的游戏已经创造了一些收益的话你便会更难做。不管你是否该继续开发游戏，你都应该重新问自己我们在之前所提到的问题：“这一功能是否能够提升游戏价值并为它创造更多销量？”如果答案并不是肯定的“yes”，你可能便需要结束开发了。

featurelist（from gamasutra）

当你决定离开Early Access时，你需要呈现给人们一些惊喜。你需要提供给媒体一些全新的新闻，你也希望那些之前看过游戏的人能够重新回来尝试全新内容。如果你只是删除了游戏的”Early Access“标签并期待着游戏能够获得巨大销量，你可能要失望了。关于《动作影星亨克》我们的做法是隐藏了一些我们正在创造的内容从而在游戏发行时能够带给公众一些惊喜。《动作影星亨克》的前半部分拥有35个发生在孩子卧室的关卡。于此同时我们也致力于创造另一个发生在室外的环境。没错我之前的确说过你们应该确保开发过程的透明公开，但是为了在发行当天呈现出惊喜你有必要拥有一些小秘密。

总结

Early Access是一个对你有帮助的平台，而你需要制定一个进入该平台的计划。准备一个有效的游戏架构，有效对待玩家社区，并从玩家社区中获取重要信息，你将因此收获一批忠实粉丝。

发布带有和最终版本一样的核心机制的最初架构。在Early Access过程中不断添加一些内容。

利用分析去追踪所有有用的信息。

为玩家社区随时待命。听取他们的看法，并清楚何时不该听从他们的意见。真正公开你的开发过程。

不要无止境地致力于游戏开发中，为其设置一个截止期限。

为游戏真正发行准备一些惊喜！

（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）

What Action Henk taught us about launching on Steam Early Access

by Lex Decrauw

Two years ago we launched Action Henk on Steam’s Early Access platform. One year later the game was done and we left Early Access. In the past year that our game has been out we’ve had plenty of time to reflect on how we handled Early Access and I’ve compiled my thoughts into a list of guidelines for developers who are thinking about releasing their game on Steam Early Access.

Early Access doesn’t have the greatest reputation right now and that’s why I believe it’s important to share experiences so other developers can use them to make the most out of their Early Access time. There are plenty of studios out there who don’t do Early Access right and they are causing players everywhere to turn away from Early Access as a whole, while, if done right, it can be great for the quality of a game.

Determine if Early Access is a good match for your game

The very first thing you need to do is to find out is whether or not you actually need Early Access. Early Access comes with a lot of advantages: community feedback during development, generate revenue sooner, have a community built up when the game launches, hype/exposure, and you get a second launch moment when you finish the game.

The advantages sound nice, but they come with great risks which shouldn’t be underestimated: players might get a bad first impression, press is usually less interested in Early Access unless you’re doing something extraordinary, maintaining a community takes a staggering amount of time, you have to release updates frequently, and you have a chance that the final launch ‘bang’ isn’t going to do much because you’ve already had a launch moment earlier. You also have to make sure that your game is a good fit for Early Access. Your game needs to fit a model where you can quickly create the core mechanics and use the bulk of your time in Early Access to add content.

The last risk, and probably the biggest one, is that revenue is certainly not a guarantee during your Early Access period. You can launch the game in Early Access and there are a million reasons why sales could fall short. However, once you do launch on Early Access you’re making a promise to the players who have bought your game that you are going to finish what you’ve started. You have to make sure that you are mentally and financially prepared to deal with a rough start.

The big question you have to ask yourself is: “Is my game concept special enough to justify taking the above mentioned risks?”

I can’t answer this question for you, but I can offer you my advice when you decide to go through with it. I will list below the most important things we’ve learned during the time we had Action Henk in Steam Early Access.

The very first Early Access build

It’s going to sound obvious but the very first Early Access build absolutely has to contain the core mechanics of your game, as final as possible. You can get away with your game missing parts of the art, audio, special effects, level editing, character customization, content, etc. But when you’re making a speedrunning platformer game, like Action Henk, you’re going to need proper platforming mechanics in your first build. If your core mechanics are all in the game and tweaked to (near-) final quality it will make the user say: “This game feels great! There’s just not a whole lot of game.” And that’s okay! That’s why you’re in Early Access and the vast majority of your players will accept this.

Farm all the data

Some players are going to give you feedback on forums or social media, but for the most part you’re going to have to actively look for feedback. This is because most of the players are just gamers who bought a game they think they’ll enjoy playing. Giving feedback takes effort and that’s not something you can blindly expect from your player base.

Asking players what they think of your game is one way to get feedback, but this takes a lot of time to get a relatively small amount of useful data. Also I would advise any developer, in Early Access or not, to build in an analytics system because this gives you facts and undeniable data which can help you tweak your game.

In Action Henk we used analytics everywhere. A good example of where we used analytics to improve the game is when we were setting medal times. In Action Henk the player has to reach the end of a short track as fast as possible to get a bronze, silver, gold, or rainbow medal. In the initial version of the game these medal times were arbitrary values, values we felt were right. After launch the leaderboards started filling up and naturally we found out that for some levels it was too easy to get a gold medal, where on other levels it was way too hard. In the ideal scenario we wanted pretty much every player to be able to get a bronze medal, ~80% of the players should be able to get silver, ~50% should be able to get gold, and ~3% should be able to get the hardcore rainbow medal. To get to these percentages we logged the medals scored by every player and adjusted the times required for the medals throughout Early Access. If we saw that only 20% of players were getting a gold medal on a level we knew that we had to make the gold medal time easier to obtain. The table below shows the data from one of our later Early Access build, the percentages are right about where we wanted them.

This is just one example of analytics but you want to keep track of everything. You want to know where players die, which levels they have trouble completing, which characters they play, etc. Track everything that could even be remotely useful.

For keeping analytics you can use several existing systems. In Action Henk we used a combination of GameAnalytics and Steam’s statistics system but there are a ton of plugins available for whichever engine you’re using. We always work in Unity and it now comes with an analytics system out of the box, we’re currently giving it a go for our next project and it seems to work great so far.

Keep your community in the loop

Try to keep your development process as open as possible. Your community needs constant assurance that the half-finished game they bought is going to be finished at some point. The last thing you want is an angry mob who think you’re not working on the game they spent their money on. This means that you have to do frequent updates, interact with players on the forums, make a dev blog or vlog, and show the players what you’re working on. You’ll have to show the players that you’re hearing them.

While listening to your players is important, it’s just as important that you avoid a situation where you’re doing everything they ask. The group of players you’re talking to on the forums is the vocal minority of your playerbase. They usually represent the people who are extremely happy with your game and want to express that, and the people who have a new suggestion every time they play. Learning to deal with these people in the right way is probably one of the most crucial skills to have while you’re in Early Access. These are some of the things to keep in mind:

Never make promises. The community remembers every single word you say, and they won’t be afraid to use your own words against you. It’s also incredibly easy for someone to misinterpret something you say so try to be as clear as possible. If someone suggest you develop feature X and your response is “That sounds great, we should do that!” they’re going to expect you to make the feature. If you then decide that you’re not going to make that feature you’re going to have to let them down and this is always a hard thing to do. This brings me to my next point.

Don’t do everything the community suggests, no matter how good their ideas sound. Doing Early Access is going to add time to your project, so don’t add even more time to that by creating features which are nice to have, but not really worth the development time. Before creating each feature you should think to yourself: “Is this feature going to increase the value of my game in a way that leads to more sales?” and if the answer is “Probably not” then you should be careful about creating that feature. This is something we didn’t do and it more than doubled our time in Early Access, we went from a planned 5 months to 13 months in Early Access. We just kept adding feature after feature because when someone suggested a cool feature our response was “Should we create it? Why not, let’s go.” This resulted in the feature list seen below. Note that most games on Steam have about 5, 6, or 7 items in this list, not 14. We could scrap half of the items on this list and our game would have worked just as well and most likely would have sold the same. It’s just that we were terrible at saying no to our community in our quest to keep them as happy as possible.

Knowing when to leave Early Access and what to keep in mind

If you managed to stick to your development schedule it’s going to be easy to decide when to leave Early Access. However for most studios the schedule changes dramatically and constantly during development. The biggest reason for this is that the game’s design is constantly evolving because of community influence. You’ll always be left with a list of features that would be nice to have in your game, and it’s easy to just pick an item off that list and start developing it. Your game is never going to feel entirely done, this makes it hard to put a deadline on your project, and this is even harder if your game is already generating revenue. Whether or not you should continue developing comes back to the question we’ve asked ourselves earlier in this article. “Are these features going to increase the value of my product in a way that leads to more sales?” and if the answer is not a firm “Yes”, it might be time to bring your development to an end.

When you’ve decided to leave Early Access you’re going to want to do so with a big bang. You need to give the press something new to write about and you want people who’ve seen the game before to come back to something new. If you’re just going to remove the ‘Early Access’ label and expect a big number of sales then you’ll be left disappointed. The way we did this with Action Henk was by hiding some of the things we were working on so we could release them as a big surprise at launch. The first half of Action Henk has 35 levels in a children’s bedroom environment. Behind the scenes we were working on an outdoor environment and another 35 levels. I know, I just said you should have an open development process and show everything to your players, but it’s great to have some sort of surprise on launch day and that requires a little secrecy.

In summary

Early Access is quite a commitment and you need to enter it with a plan. Be prepared with a solid build of your game, treat your community well, learn from them and you’ll be rewarded with lifelong fans.

Launch the first build with the core mechanics as finalized as possible. Use the Early Access period to add content.

Go crazy with analytics, track absolutely everything.

Be there for your community. Listen to them, and know when to not listen to them. Be open and honest about your development process.

Don’t keep working on your game just because you can, set a deadline.

Launch with a bang!（source：gamasutra）