本文原作者：James Batchelor

就现在而言，也许很少有人在游戏设计行业听过Jack Attridge这个名字。

不过，他的简历会让看过的人印象深刻——曾经在Mind Cand工作室为风靡全球的《Moshi Monsters》做过游戏音频，后来又进入了的22Cans工作室担任了更重要的职位，要知道22Cans可是资深游戏开发者Peter Molyneux创立的独立游戏工作室。

《神鬼寓言（The Fable）》的创作人Peter将Attridge收入靡下，任命他在《好奇魔方Curiosity: What’s Inside The Cube and Godus》中担起承上启下的重要职能。很快地，Atrridge在这个项目中收获良多，但是由于他在《上帝也疯狂2（Godus）》的一些缺陷上有所争议，加上他自己本身想要尝试一些新东西——Atrridge离开了22Cans工作室。两年后的今天，它创立了自己的公司：Flaovourworks。

Godus（from gamesindustry.biz）

Attridge将作为游戏界专业人士在北欧游戏会上发表讲话，同时也将作为Gamesindustry网站的追踪采访对象接受我们的采访。在会议之前，我们联系上了这位从游戏设计转型的企业家，希望了解他最近在忙什么工作以及他之所以会选择离开像Molyneux这样游戏界偶像的羽翼护罩的原因。“在22cans工作的日子里，我密切地参与着游戏设计，但却没有最终项目决定权，”他这样告诉GamesIndustry.biz。“我能做的只有给建议和方向，所以你要做的只有表示支持和行动起来去实现这个远景——这种情况在你的搭档是像Peter这样总有新鲜点子的人的时候尤其明显。最终，这种体验让我不禁想赶紧能按照自己的想法来做事。而就在那段时间，我碰巧在伦敦接触了一部叫做《被淹死的人》的浸入式话剧表演。”

这个部话剧对Attridege来说是个启发——将近40名的演员在台上表演，这部话剧允许观众对游戏背景进行探索、能亲临现场感受情节发展、而不是坐在远远的观众席上观看而已。对于能够浸入到故事中心感受这些“味道、温度、亲密感、触感和真实感”，而不是座位旁观者来观看——Attridge感到欣喜若狂，并且突然顿悟了。

他回想：“关于那个话剧我可以聊个没完，不过最重要的一点是它敲醒了我，让我意识到一个问题：我到底为什么还在做游戏？”

“那种氛围和意境在我的心中埋下了一颗种子，唤起了我十年前一个古老的想法。那场表演让我印象太深刻了，再也没有其他能如此触动我的作品了（除了经典游戏《合金装备》）。那时我明白了，我终于想起了到底什么称得上是最棒体验，我必须开始采取行动了。”

于是Atrridge围绕着游戏开始组建起了自己的“剧团”。他有认真考虑过是什么让他对游戏开发如此失望，并坚定认为游戏“正在渐渐失去锋芒”，最后总结出是因为游戏设计已经变得越发停滞不前了，人们现在只对那些新兴科技(或者任何可以算作是新奇事物的发明)才会提起兴趣。这是Attridge决定另谋出路的原因。

浸入式话剧表演《被淹死的人》让Attridge质疑为什么游戏设计不再让他兴奋，并激发他去寻找讲述故事的新方法

“每个人都对VR着迷的很大部分原因在于人们对新事物的追求。VR对我们来说是一个更有趣的挑战，它让我们可以在现有安装基础上寻找创新机会，还能在不失去现有玩家的基础上扩展新的玩家群体。”

“作为一个我们无法义正言辞根据自己初衷来做设计、只能按照现有游戏惯例作为支撑的游戏行业，我们往往无法做出能吸引更多新玩家群体的游戏。一个游戏开发者会做的最简单的事情就是用Unity引擎做一个3D立方体然后让它来回动起来，不过就算是这么简单的步骤都能让你通向成为3D界大师之路，并且就是这样单独的一个概念就能立马变成一个吸引不了太多潜在新玩家的核心创意点。我们甚至会从最基础水平上去对我们的设计、技术、流程甚至美学进行不同角度的思考。”

所以Flavourworks工作室的目标是致力于推翻游戏设计传统概念来创造一些新东西。这些“东西”只会对一些特定的少数开发者、投资者和记者（包括GamesIndustry.biz）透露，这是Atrridge希望能维持的保密程度。他现在只愿意向公众透露:他们的团队现在正“专注于游戏的叙述式体验上”。

Attridge这样阐述道：“我们花了很多的时间反思像‘ludonarrative dissonance’（意指游戏故事与玩法之间的冲突）这类的游戏以及其他一些细节方面的东西。我们开发游戏的时间里很大一部分都用在努力融合故事和游戏设计让人没有违和感。我们知道我们想做的不是电视剧和电影情节的混合体或者很常见类型的游戏。所以当我们在开发期间看到了像《Firewatch》或者《Inside》这些新型游戏获得了成功的时候，我们倍感心安。”

“我们在故事叙述的新形式上有个很明显的机会——就是我们的内部技术的使用。对于一个刚起步的工作室来说，要建立一个自己的开发引擎听上去根本就跟疯了一样，尤其是在这个Unity等主流引擎纵横的时代里。为了我们理想的游戏体验，我们必须出色地完成它。从长远来看，我们将要开发的引擎会让我们未来在多平台制作各种游戏体验上缩短很多时间。所以它会是我们公司宝贵的财富和持续发展的优秀策略。然而，前提是我们要有好的故事可讲，否则都是白搭，而这也是我们所面对最大的机遇。”

我们的团队正在比任何创业工作室都要努力地在工作，这点等你了解我们Flavourworks工作室第一款游戏的完整制作流程时就会马上清楚了——Attridge相信这样努力的付出在成功的道路上会是值得的。然而在这个独立游戏数不胜数、创业工作室争相斗艳的时代里，光靠年轻的勇气不再是成功的必要充分条件了。

所以Attridge说道：“作为众多独立游戏开发公司中的一名新小型企业，我们也知道如果没有带给玩家什么新的内容最后我们只会被淹死在独立游戏的大海之中。我担心很多独立游戏工作室并没有做好带游戏脱颖而出的准备，因为他们有的也许只是对游戏的激情，而没有考虑到游戏行业的商业现实——这是大多人意识不到，却对游戏开发的创造力有重大意义的部分。

“我们现在基本上就是在和AAA级游戏巨作竞争，而我们却无法期待玩家为了证明自己是独立游戏爱好者就对我们区别对待，接纳我们。所以，我们认清了现实，知道要想能跟那些大型游戏开发公司竞争只能在游戏体验上下功夫，我们要做出让玩家愿意花费时间的独一无二的游戏体验。”

在经历了玩家对《上帝也疯狂2（Godus）》强烈抵制后，Attridge发誓在游戏没准备好之前再也不会进行展示——虽然他现在觉的玩家使误解了游戏觉得它抄袭了之前发行过的一款游戏。

幸运的是，Attridege以及他的几名员工曾经在22cans学到了很多东西，包括其创立者的野心勃勃、也包括曾经一度被高度期许的《上帝也疯狂2（Godus）》却引来了强烈抵制这件事里的教训。

Attridge说：“我有一个很大的优势就是我有巨人的肩膀可以站。通常这将有利于发现一些当你位处游戏或者商业的权力中心时所难以优先注意到的问题。现在的我对于这些问题就能够有所感受了。”

“但是自从我离开22cans的那天我就说了‘我们以后不会对任何无法展示内容有任何说辞’。关于这点从第一天就给我们带来了糟糕的影响，我们已经有了一个完整并且打磨精致的游戏原型，对此每个人包括记者在内都叫喊着让我们展示一下，但是我们在《Godus》所经历的戏剧性转变的伤痛还没痊愈，因此我们让大家很扫兴。回想一下，要是回到当时我们应该展示一下我们的作品的，主要是我们老怕大家会觉得我们又从哪里偷偷抄袭了已经发行的游戏，不过如果我们老停滞不前想这些有的没的那是要疯的。”

幸好，结果证明这次和22cans备受瞩目的和平分手是非常正确的。当Attridege和他的Flavourworks员工递交声明时，Molyneux事实上当场就同意并鼓励他们在晚上空余的时间做他们的游戏模型了——这是其他工作室负责人会极力制止的事。Molyneux这样的做法其实已经把在接触发行商和投资者方面的风险最小化了，因为Flavourworks团队已经把展示自己宏图的游戏概念演示给做好了。

事实上，Attridege和Molyneux之间关系依旧紧密：“在我离开后一两个月，他听说我们很快从投资人那里获利了。于是他把Ian Livingstone叫上，邀请我们和他们见面。在我们向他们展示游戏后五分钟左右，我们得到了他们投资的offer，我们当时真是高兴坏了。现在Ian都还是我们的非执行董事长。”

然而Attridge把注意力依旧放在新游戏的设计和生产方面，不过由于他跟随着前导师在创建运行22cans工作室的经历让他吸取了很多教训：要经营生意是需要很多错综复杂的技巧的。

“其中招聘是最棘手的事情。”当被问到他所面临的最大的挑战是什么的时候他这样答道。“尤其是当你没有业绩、没有可以吹捧的游戏作品、却要求要有特定类型的人才、然而你却付不起一份能跟成功大公司相比的有竞争力的薪资的时候，招聘实在是太难了。”

“加入我们的人是看到了我们正在做的事情背后的潜力，他们希望能有一个全新的开始做一些与众不同的事，让特殊的驱动力保持我们目标的宏伟。C++程序员是尤其难找的，我么会继续努力寻找下去的。”

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Jack Attridge is perhaps not the best known name in games design. At least, not yet.

Nevertheless, his resumé makes for impressive reading. After a stint at Mind Candy providing the audio for global phenomenon Moshi Monsters, he branched into a broader role at 22Cans – the independent studio founded by long-running games developer Peter Molyneux.

The Fable creator took Attridge under his wing, making him a vital cog in the machine that produced Curiosity: What’s Inside The Cube and Godus. Attridge learned much, and quickly, but controversy over Godus’ shortcomings – plus his own growing desire to try something new – led him to depart the studio. Two years ago today, he formed his current company: Flavourworks.

Attridge will be one of the many industry experts speaking at Nordic Game Conference as part of a track curated by GamesIndustry.biz. Ahead of this, we caught up with the designer-turned-business-owner to find out what he’s been working on and why he left the tutelage of an icon such as Molyneux.

“At 22cans, I was intimately involved with design but not leading the final direction of the projects,” he tells GamesIndustry.biz. “I could only advise.

“However, in that situation the worst thing you can do is go against the creative direction, so you can only support and realise the vision – especially with someone like Peter who can often surprise you with a novel solution. Ultimately, the experience really gave me the urge to act on my own ideas. Then around that time I walked into an Immersive Theatre show in London called The Drowned Man.”

The production proved to be a revelation for Attridge. With a cast of nearly 40 actors, The Drowned Man allows its audience to explore the sets and watch the drama unfold first-hand, rather than viewing it from a distance in an auditorium. Attridge found himself bowled over by “the smells, the temperatures, the intimacy, the touch, and the authenticity” of being in the centre of a story rather than detached from it – and it led to an epiphany.

“I could talk forever about it, but the important point is that it woke me up and made me question: why am I even making games?” he recalls.

“The atmosphere and tone really planted a seed in my mind that married with an old idea I had over a decade ago. [The show] was so impressive, I can’t think of another single instance where inspiration has hit me so hard – except maybe the original Metal Gear Solid. I just knew that now I had been reminded of what a great experience could be, I needed to act on it.”

Far from abandoning games and starting up his own acting troupe, Attridge pondered why he had become so disillusioned with games development and why he believed the medium was “starting to lose that spark”. He concluded that game design was becoming increasingly stagnant and only the promise of new technologies – or anything that can be viewed as much as a novelty as an innovation – was stirring people’s interests. Attridge was determined to find another way.

Immersive theatre show The Drowned Man made Attridge question why games design didn’t excite him anymore, and encouraged him to find new ways to tell stories
“A big part of what has got everyone obsessed with VR is just an urge for something new,” he says. “For us it was a more interesting challenge to find that innovation within an existing install base, and once more to broaden the audience for games without leaving existing gamers behind.

“As an industry we are often too guilty of designing for ourselves, and using existing game conventions as crutches, and that’s always going to keep the barrier to entry high for newcomers. The easiest thing a developer can do is place a 3D cube in Unity and make it move around, but even that basic step funnels your experience into being somewhat about the mastery of 3D space, and that concept alone could immediately be a core idea that just doesn’t appeal to a lot of potential new gamers. We’ve tried to think differently about things on even the most foundational level in our designs, our technology, our processes, and even our aesthetics.”

Hence Flavourworks, a company dedicated to creating something that aims to shake up the concept of game design. This ‘something’ has only been shown to a select handful of publishers, investors and journalists (GamesIndustry.biz included), such is the level of secrecy Attridge hopes to maintain. All he is willing to say publicly at this stage is his team is “focusing on narrative experiences”.

“We spend a lot of time thinking about the common discussions around the genre like ludonarrative dissonance as well as many subtler aspects,” he elaborates. “Much of our development time goes into making story and design feel inseparable rather than if they were two individual departments. We knew we didn’t want to do pastiches of existing TV and film moments or genres as games so often are, and it has been reassuring to see the success of fresh titles like Firewatch or Inside whilst we’ve been in development.

“The most obvious opportunity we have in telling stories in a new way is through our in-house technology. It sounds absolutely bonkers to build our own engine when you’re a startup, especially in the age of Unity and other engines. For the experiences we wanted to make, it was a necessity to make the standout experience we wanted. In the long run this has given us a platform with which in the future we can make many experiences in a shorter amount of time and for multiple platforms. Now that we have it singing, it has proven to have been an invaluable asset and a sound strategy for the company. However, none of that matters if we don’t tell good stories, and that’s the biggest opportunity of all.”

The team is working as hard, if not harder, than most start-up studios – that becomes immediately clear when you understand the full production process of Flavourworks’ debut game. But it’s that effort that Attridge believes will help improve their chances of success. In an age of countless indies and start-ups vying for attention, simply being a plucky young team is no longer enough.

“As a new small indie dev turning up to a sea of indie devs, we knew we would drown if we weren’t bringing something new to the table,” he says. “I worry about a lot of indies that feel underprepared when needing to standout with their game, because they may be so passionate about it but they haven’t considered the business realities, which people often don’t realise is a huge part of the creativity of making a game.

“We are basically competing with the blockbuster AAA titles, and we can’t expect to be accepted differently by consumers for being an indie darling. So coming out of the gate we knew we had to have something unique enough that we could compete with the big developers in terms of offering an experience worth people’s time.”

Having experienced the backlash against Godus, Attridge vowed not to show his game until it was ready – although now feels that it may be misconstrued as a copy of titles that have been released since
Fortunately, Attridge and a number of his staff gained experience during their time at 22cans, learning not only from the ambitious visions of that studio’s founder but also the outcry surrounding the once highly-anticipated Godus.

“I had a great vantage point being able to sit on the armrest of a veteran,” says Attridge. “Often it was advantageous for spotting issues that are a lot harder to prioritise focus on when you’re in the driving seat of a game and a business. That’s something I can sympathise with now.

“But from the day I left I said, ‘We won’t say anything that we can’t show’. The annoying side of that was that from day one, we had a full and very polished prototype that everyone – including journalists – was screaming at us to show off, but we’d been burnt from the publicly radical changes Godus went through, which let people down. In hindsight, we probably could have shown off what we had back then, and there’s always the fear that people will assume we’ve just copied from titles that have launched in the time we’ve been in hiding, but that stuff will drive you crazy if you dwell on it.”

Fortunately, the remarkably amicable split from 22cans proved to be invaluable. Once Attridge and his Flavourworks colleagues had handed in their notice, Molyneux actually approved and encouraged them to work on their prototype in the evenings – something other studio heads would have worked tirelessly to prevent. This minimised the risk when reaching out to publishers and investors, as the Flavourworks team already had a working concept demo of their ambitious game.

In fact, the relationship between Attridge and Molyneux is still strong: “A month or two after I left, he heard we were quickly getting interest from investors. He teamed up with Ian Livingstone and invited us back to meet with them. Five minutes after showing them the game they offered to invest and that got us off the ground at the start. Ian is now also our non-exec chairman.”

While Attridge remains focused on the design and production of his new game, he has learned many of the hard lessons his former mentor encountered after founding 22cans: the intricacies of running a business.

“Hiring is the trickiest thing,” he says, when asked about the biggest challenge he has faced. “Especially when you have no track record, have not announced your game, require a really specific kind of talent, and can’t afford to compete with the benefits you get with a job at the giant success stories.

“The people that have come on board see the potential of what we are doing, want to be a part of something different, at the start of something new, and have that something special that keeps us aiming high. C++ programmers have been particularly hard to find, and we’re still looking.”（source：gamesindustry.biz  ）