本文原作者：Oliver Milne 译者：ciel chen

Josh Parnell是独立游戏开发者，他是2012年通过Kickstarter成功众筹共计18万美元来制作《极限理论》（Limit Theory），从而开始崭露头角的。这款游戏是一切皆由程序生成的太空模拟游戏。然而，开发在众筹成功后进入了瓶颈。很多人都知道，在2015年Parnell从公众眼前消失了6个月，再出现时带来了他的精神健康抱恙的消息，原来他是回到了父母身边去看病了。他向GamesIndustry.biz吐露了在独立游戏开发中他是如何挣扎着保持清醒的经历。

“我独自一人住在田纳西州山上的小木屋里，那里很安静，这也是我之所以想在那里进行开发的原因，但是同样地，那里也真的是一个容易让人疯掉的地方，因为你永远都是一个人在写着代码。”他这样告诉我们。除了Kickstarter宣传文中提到令人印象深刻的概述——独自开发以外，这个游戏中只有音乐和声音效果是从外部获取的资源——也就是说在Parnell临近崩溃的时候，他只有孤身一人。

“我最终的情况是要一个人来面对开发过程中遇到的大问题，而如果你想保持游戏的高质量，你就要写好每一行代码——要让它有很高的性能、还要让它有高效的机械感——但是你是一个人，所以你还要在开发中超高效发挥水准，”他说，“然而这个问题并不好解决。特别是考虑到——说真的我以前从没有做这种大项目的经验，所以我从没有过它会完不成的概念。”

Staying sane in indie development（from gamesindustry.biz）

Limit Theory代码规模已经达到了10万行，一个人完成这样的代码规模是不可能的，Parnell在使用自制的“Limit Theory 脚本语言”来缩减代码量时，导致了让人无法接受的游戏性能表现——这样棘手的问题给他的内心世界带去了灾难性后果。

Parnell是在大学的时候开始Litmit Theory的开发的，而他在精神上崩溃的时候只有22岁。“21、22、23岁正是我精神病征的形成期，这段时间我的大脑经历了非常多的变迁，”他提到。“也因此，在我经受精神压迫的时候，我糟糕的生活习惯——不眠不睡、饮食不健康、以及除了开发Limit Theory以外什么也不干——无疑恶化了这个病状。”

“很显然，对于那些生活经验丰富的人以及论坛友人们知道了我的生活方式以后，都会跟我说很多次类似于‘Josh,你快停下来吧，不然你会崩溃的’这样的话。但是，你懂的，对于一个没有那种经历的22岁年轻人来说，这些话的真正含义我很难真正体会。但是该来的还是来了，而且来得如此猛烈。我的大脑有一段时间几乎都是处于一种当机的状态。那真的——真的是一段非常不愉快的时光。”

说来有趣，精神健康问题在游戏行业其实是见怪不怪了，在那些“高压时期”和随时丢饭碗的压力下，患精神疾病的风险和症状就容易被放大。能自由掌控自己的时间和知识产权，这乍一看好像可以为独立游戏开发者们减少一些压力，但是Parnell说独立游戏开发者的生活法时本身就存在风险：“一方面，你觉得你在做自己喜欢的事，这种激情让你觉得自己作为一个独立开发者真是棒极了；另一方面，这种激情也正是危险的源头——当它成为你的工作，消耗着你的时间的时候，一切都变了。不过你很难看清这点，因为你脑袋里想的全都是‘哇，我在做我喜欢的是耶，它一定会非常棒的！’”

事实上，正是因为独立游戏开发者能够做出自己想要的游戏，才导致了这些问题的产生。Parnell说：“我认为这是一大诱因。当然因人而异，但是就这种圆梦的概念（如果你好好想想的话）本身就已经很危险了。因为很多（虽然不是大部分）人有梦想，并把梦想放在在一臂之遥的距离……当你真的可以抓住它的时候，你就会试着让它成真，而艰难险阻便随之而来——因为你已经离梦想很近了，你想让它更近一点，你想让它成为现实。为了实现这个梦想，你时常要面对一写肮脏、混乱或者你毫无兴趣的东西，而这样的梦想——跟你想象的不一样。”

看过Limit Theory的Kickstater页面的话会知道，这款游戏野心可不小，无限的宇宙生成系统、飞船的战略性控制、供给链的创造、一个带有NPC的“丰富社交系统”、除此之外还有很多内容。有如此愿景的抱负正是导致了结构效率问题的直接因素，这在2015年对Parnell造成了重大打击。可能很多人会觉得这不过是个警醒傲慢的独立游戏人要勇于面对现实的故事罢了，然而让人欢心鼓舞的是——Parnell在带病的情况下成功做到了，而且现在仍旧坚守着游戏的工作——用的是一种更健康的方式。

他说“我现在有了非常正常的工作时间安排表，我把工作和个人的空间分隔开来了，我强烈建议同僚们也这么做——起床之后直接坐上椅子开始写代码真没什么好的，而且还有点儿危险。”现在Parnell回到了他在Baton Rouge的老家，更加注重了对工作和生活的平衡。

有了五年前Parnell在Kickstarter成功众筹得到的资金加上独自一人开发游戏的低开销，这使得他有足够的时间针对游戏的效率问题做结果试验，Parnell一年的时间里基本上都在针对这些问题进行处理，一年后的现在他很有把握——通过LUA脚本语言和C语言结合方法——这些问题都被很好地解决了。然而他拒绝对游戏的发行日期发表评论。

“我不会给出一个时间表的，这只是因为我要真给了的话我还会倒的。”他还说：“但是我可以告诉你们，如果接下来几个星期在【明确C和LUC语言之间的分工】方面顺利的话，我预计大部分剩下的时间会用来做游戏的平衡阶段内容。因为现在新游戏层出不穷——然而想找到好玩有格调的游戏却像大海捞针。是的，我在精神崩塌之前确实放了大量内容在游戏里，并且它们现在已经开始运转了,我觉得这时候最大的挑战就是——假设没有什么大型差错的话——让这个宇宙有一种对的感觉。”

Parnell的进步是肉眼可见的。一个相关论坛用户问他：“我想看看我们完美主义者Josh（他现在喜欢被叫做更健康、更均衡的务实者Josh）的作品（the smoldering corpse）”，他现在可以指出Limit Theory的demo将在一月份得克萨斯州的圣安东尼奥举行的PAX South游戏展上继续展出，他写道：“我将会把一个操作器交给完全不认识的陌生人，让他们玩玩这款无疑是相当不完美(但是很美)的游戏demo。完美主义者Josh想要写一个能够让这些陌生人在10个不同场景进行选择的demo，每个展示的都是LT游戏的不同模块。务实者Josh则追求稳定性，希望不要有太多漏洞就好了。在【PAX South游戏展】过后，我希望我将能够给你们呈现出这个作品（the smoldering corpse）来。

在经历了这么多以后，Parnell现在变得十分冷静。他说“如果我可以带着经历过一切后吸取的经验教训回到过去，重新来过，那现在一切都会变得不一样。但是这些事情确实让我吸取了我应得的教训——比如保持健康的工作方式、用更全面的视角审视游戏而不是在趣味性和细枝末节上较真——说实话，这些事如果我没有经历过，真的永远无法体会到。”

他说其他小型游戏开发者也存在这样的风险：“我认为我经历的挣扎不是我一个人才有的——很多的独立游戏开发者，尤其是那些想要冒险干一番大事的人，他们会逼着自己做下去，因此他们也必须面对于生活与工作的平衡抗争。”

现在Parnell最担心的问题是如何保留住他对游戏的最初设想。“这真的是很难的一部分——也是相当重要的一部分——记住最初的梦想。”他解释道。“也可以这么说：铭记还未增添实施细节的最初游戏设想。所以我有时试着花一些时间来什么都不做，光幻想着Limit Theory的未来——我总是沉浸在这种幻想里，把最初对游戏设想的愿景停留在脑海里。”

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Josh Parnell is an independent game developer who first rose to prominence in 2012, when he successfully Kickstarted Limit Theory, his procedural-generation-heavy space sim project, to the tune of $180 000 USD. Since then, however, development has been rocky. Famously, in 2015, Parnell vanished from the public eye for six months, reappearing with an announcement that he had been suffering from severe mental health problems, and had returned to his parents’ home and sought treatment. He spoke to GamesIndustry.biz about the struggle of staying sane in indie development.

“I was living alone in a cabin in the mountains of Tennessee, which is very peaceful, and that’s why I wanted to develop there – but, you know, it’s also a good place to go crazy, because you’re alone all the time, just coding,” he told us. Developing solo – despite the impressive sum raised by the Kickstarter campaign, the only parts of the project he has outsourced are the music and sound effects – Parnell was isolated when the wheels began to fall off the bus.

“I ended up in a situation where I was facing the big problem of developing something very large as one person, which is that if you want it to be high quality, you’ve got to write it really well – it’s got to be high performance, it’s got to be high efficiency in the machine sense – but you’re one person, so it’s also got to be super high efficiency in the development sense,” he said. “And that is just not a real easy problem. Especially considering that, honestly, I just did not have the experience of taking on something this large before, so I did not foresee that being a deal-breaker.”

As the size of the Limit Theory codebase approached 100,000 lines, it had become impossible for one person to maintain, whilst saving lines by using his homebrew ‘Limit Theory Scripting Language’ resulted in unacceptably poor performance – and the intractability of that problem had devastating consequences for Parnell’s state of mind.

“What makes you so great as an indie dev is your passion… On the other hand, that’s exactly the danger of it, because the minute it becomes work, or the minute you let your life get consumed by it, everything changes”
Parnell was in college when he first started developing Limit Theory, and at the time of his breakdown was only 22. “21, 22, 23 are very formative times, and the brain can change a lot during that time,” he noted. “And so that’s when I was also experiencing mental issues, no doubt exacerbated by my terrible life habits – not sleeping, not eating healthily, and really honestly not doing anything but Limit Theory.

“Those are all things that are so obvious to someone who’s had a good bit of life experience, and forum members would tell me that so many times – like, ‘Josh, you need to stop this, or you’re gonna crash and burn’. But, you know, to a 22-year old who’s never experienced that, I think it’s hard to convey what that really means. But it happens. And it happened big time. My brain just kinda shut down on me for quite a while. And it was just not – It was not a fun time.”

Anecdotally, mental health problems are widespread in the games industry, with ‘crunch time’ and job insecurity serving to elevate the risk and aggravate the symptoms of illness. Being in control of their own hours and intellectual property might, on the face of it, seem like it would reduce those problems for indie developers, but Parnell says the indie lifestyle comes with its own risks: “On the one hand, what makes you so great as an indie dev is your passion. It’s that you’re doing what you love. On the other hand, that’s exactly the danger of it, because the minute it becomes work, or the minute you let your life get consumed by it, everything changes. It’s hard to see that coming when all you’re thinking about is ‘Oh, I’m just going to be doing what I love, it’s going to be great!’

The very fact that indie developers are able to try to make the game they really want to make can contribute to the problem, Parnell said. “I think that’s a big risk factor. Of course it’s going to vary for everyone, but just the concept of taking your dream and trying to make it reality, it you think about it, is a dangerous concept already. Because a lot, if not most, people will have a dream and keep it that way – keep it at arm’s length… When you take that, and you try to make it reality, that is when the difficulties can arise. Because now you’ve got to get close to the dream. You’ve got to see the details of it. You’ve got to bring it down to reality – to implementation – and oftentimes that’s gonna involve a lot of dirty, messy or just generally uninteresting stuff that isn’t really part of that dream sensation that you have. When I thought of Limit Theory, my dream game, I didn’t dream about screwing around with rendering optimisation and collision detection.”

Limit Theory’s Kickstarter page is certainly not short on dreamy ambition, advertising infinite procedural universes, strategic control of ships, creation of supply chains, a ‘rich social interaction system’ with the game’s NPCs, and more besides. The ambition of that vision led directly to the structural efficiency problem that knocked Parnell for a loop in 2015. It would be easy to conclude that this is nothing more than a cautionary tale about indie hubris meeting reality head-on. But the heartening truth is that Parnell made it through his episode of illness, and is still working on the game – and in a much healthier way.

“I think a great many indie devs, especially the ones who are going to try to do something big, something high-stakes, and push themselves to do it, they’re going to have to face that same struggle of life balance”
“I’ve got a fairly normal work schedule,” he said. “I’ve separated my work and personal space, which I highly recommend for any indie dev – it’s not great to be able to roll out of bed into your chair and start coding. It’s a little dangerous.” Now back in his hometown of Baton Rouge, he is paying much more careful attention to his work-life balance.

The success of his Kickstarter five years ago, combined with the low cost of one-man development, has given Parnell time to experiment with solutions to the game’s efficiency problem. Now, after a year working almost exclusively on that, he’s confident he has the issue solved, using a combination of the scripting language LUA and C. He refuses to be drawn, however, on the game’s release date.

“I won’t give a timeline simply because I continually fail when I do give a timeline,” he admitted. “But what I can say is that if the next few weeks go well, in terms of [working out the division of labour between the C and LUA], then I foresee most of the rest of the time actually being spent on the balancing phase. Because currently it’s very easy to implement new gameplay – it’s not easy to make sure that that gameplay is well-tuned and actually fun. So I do have loads of stuff that was implemented before the mental breakdown mapped out already, and I think the most challenging part – assuming nothing huge goes wrong – will just be getting this universe to feel right.”

The progress he has made is tangible. Asked by a concerned forum member to “Show me the smoldering corpse of Perfectionist Josh” (in favour of being a healthier and more well-balanced ‘Pragmatic Josh’), Parnell was able to point to the Limit Theory demo he would go on to show off at January’s PAX South event in San Antonio, TX, writing: “I’m going to put a controller in the hands of total strangers and let them play what will undoubtedly be a (pretty, but) highly imperfect demo. Perfectionist Josh wants to write a demo that lets them choose between like 10 different scenarios, each one showcasing a different piece of LT gameplay. Pragmatic Josh is gunning for one solid thing without too many bugs. After [PAX South], I hope I will have presented you guys with this smoldering corpse.”

With the benefit of hindsight, Parnell is philosophical about his experiences. “If I could go back and do it again and keep all the experience I’ve gained from those failures, then everything would be different,” he said. “But it’s exactly those things that taught me the lessons that I really needed to learn, like being healthy in terms of work and keeping a more global perspective on the game instead of getting tunnel-visioned into tiny details – just all these things that I don’t know how to learn them without experiencing them, quite honestly.”

The risks, he said, are shared by many other small developers: “I don’t think the struggles that I went through are at all specific to me – I think a great many indie devs, especially the ones who are going to try to do something big, something high-stakes, and push themselves to do it, they’re going to have to face that same struggle of life balance.”

The main problem he has now is maintaining his sense of the game as he originally envisioned it. “Really the hard part – the critical part – is remembering the dream,” he explained. “Remembering the vision as it was before it got loaded down with the implementation details, so to speak. And so I actually try to spend some time when I can just be doing nothing and fantasising about the Limit Theory that I always fantasised about, to try to keep that vision in my mind.”（source：gamesindustry.biz ）