《植物大战僵尸》开发者聊《八爪怪》的制作过程

原文作者：Dean Takahashi 译者：Megan Shieh

George Fan是热门游戏《植物大战僵尸》的联合创作者之一。继《植物大战僵尸》之后，他创立了一家名为All Yes Good的独立工作室，并为我们带来了一款既疯狂又有趣的新游戏《八爪怪（Octogeddon）》。

《八爪怪》是一款街机风格的动作游戏，游戏背景是：一只变异的八爪鱼意图毁灭世界。这款2D游戏将于本周四在PC游戏平台Steam上首次亮相。八爪鱼的控制很简单，玩家可以用键盘上的两个按键来左右旋转它。随着时间的推移，玩家会为这只八爪鱼添加各种奇葩手臂作为武器，这样它就变成了一个极具破坏力的“风火轮”。敌人会从章鱼的四面八方扑来，试图阻止它毁灭像“自由女神”这样的地标。

这款游戏很有潜力。《植物大战僵尸》的巨大成功促使EA在2011年以6.5亿美元的价格买下了PopCap Games工作室。而发行于2013年的《植物大战僵尸》续作，下载量也已经超过了2500万次。

在2012年的一次独立游戏开发竞赛（Ludum Dare）中，Fan设计出了《八爪怪》的原型。当时的竞赛规则是，一位开发者必须在48小时内独立设计出一款游戏，设计内容涵盖玩法和美术。而在这之后的四年多里，他与一个四人开发团队一起对这款游戏进行了润色。

记者：可以聊聊开发过程吗？

George Fan：一开始的时候，你可以一关一关地玩下去，有点像《植物大战僵尸》里的模式。游戏由多个关卡组成，一旦通过了所有关卡，你就击败了游戏。

后来我尝试了一些Roguelike元素——游戏中有一定数量的关卡，你可能需要尝试3-8次才能击败游戏，但每个周目都会感觉有些不同，而且每次尝试都会让你变得更强。

尽管大多数Roguelike游戏的难度都很大，但《八爪怪》不会。虽说这是一款适合在twitch上直播的游戏，但它不会有像《植物大战僵尸》那样广泛的吸引力，因为你很难用一款动作游戏吸引到所有类型的玩家。

关卡模式的好处是，一旦你通过了一个关卡，就总是会从这个关卡开始玩，而不是从头开始。虽然我觉得Roguelike模式比较有趣，但当时我想的是“也许这是错的，也许我该回到关卡模式，把Roguelike元素留到后面，等玩家击败游戏以后再使用。” 这种搭配可能会好一些。

因此，刚改成Roguelike没多久，我就叫我们的程序员改回关卡模式…几个月后，我又不想把最有趣的地方藏在最后面。于是我不得不再次说服我们的程序员，那是一次艰难的谈话，为了再次说服他，我甚至写了一篇稿件，把其中缘由都清清楚楚地列了出来。

octogeddon(from venture beat.com)

现在我们又回到了Roguelike结构，我认为这是对的选择。这种设计更能迎合Steam用户的喜好，因为在当今游戏时代，可重玩性实在是太重要了。而且如果有人想要直播这款游戏，他们肯定会选择Roguelike而不是关卡模式，因为Roguelike模式观看起来有趣得多。
记者：你说的“Roguelike”是指“一旦玩家死了，就得从头开始”？

Fan：玩家会有几条命，一旦把这些命都用完，他们就得从头开始。与大多数Roguelike不同的是，它有一种持久性。每次尝试失败时，游戏都会把你带到一个店主那里。这时候你可以购买永久升级，这样一来，每个周目就都会有很酷的新东西可以尝试。有了这些永久升级，你自然而然会变得越来越强，也会在游戏中走得更远。

记者：总共有多少人参与了《八爪怪》的开发？

Fan：核心团队包括我，Rich Werner和Kurt Pfeifer。我的角色是设计师；Rich Werner是我们的美术，《植物大战僵尸》的美术部分也是他做的；Kurt Pfeifer是我们程序员，他之前负责将《植物大战僵尸》移植到Xbox上。除此之外还有一位音乐家和不少beta测试员。

我们制作《八爪怪》已经有四年了，如果可以的话，我们也想早点做完，可是中间遇到了种种问题所以拖延了进度。除此之外，给游戏取名字也花了不少时间。总体而言，整个开发过程算是挺顺利的，尤其是游戏设计的部分；而且我们都曾在Popcap任职，这点也为我们省下了不少麻烦。

这是我们第一次真正实现独立。《八爪怪》的原型比《植物大战僵尸》的原型更完善，因为它从一开始就很有趣。在后期润色的过程中，出现了一些起起落落，期间我们遇到了许多极具挑战性的事情，但这一切都是值得的，因为最终我们还是把这款游戏做出来了。我们希望《八爪怪》的表现能够和《植物大战僵尸》一样好，甚至超越它的成就，但这是由你们来决定的。

记者：当时是不是觉得独立出来是制作这款游戏的唯一办法？或者说独立制作是比较好的办法？

Fan：我想尽自己最大的努力成为一名独立开发者，因为我不想承受来自外界的任何压力。我想做我想做的游戏，不想别人为我定下规则——“这是你要做的游戏，必须用这种商业模式”之类的。因此，对我而言独立制作是唯一的出路。但我也知道，这肯定会带来挑战。

记者：整个开发过程长达四年，期间有没有出现过财务方面的压力？

Fan：没有，这方面的压力倒不是很大，但我也不能一直这样下去，对吧？总之没有出现过那种极端的状况，比如说“如果不马上推出这款游戏，我就没钱吃饭了”。

Image Credit: All Yes Good

记者：游戏推出以后，你有什么计划？

Fan：《植物大战僵尸》和《八爪怪》的另一个差异是，开发了差不多两年半以后，《植物大战僵尸》其实随时都可以上架了，但是我们等到三年半以后才将它推出，因为我们花了一整年的时间在给游戏润色；而《八爪怪》的情况更像是“我们已经花了太长时间了，必须设置个发布日期，然后朝着这个目标冲刺。”发布日期已经定下来了，这点没法改，但其实还有很多好的想法没有实施。

我有一张清单，上面列着我想做的所有事情，我打算把其中的一些额外内容以DLC补丁的形式发布出来，这些内容都将是免费的。我们的想法是等游戏正式发布了以后，再去动这些东西（额外的模式和道具），它们现在都还只是一堆想法而已。

记者：《植物大战僵尸》的开发经验可曾对你产生影响？

Fan：这点很有趣，因为《八爪怪》是在《植物大战僵尸》的阴影下制作的。我总是在无意间提醒自己“这款游戏必须像《植物大战僵尸》那样出色”，不过这样想对我其实是没好处的。我正在尽自己最大的努力把它想成是独立的一件事情，试着把它做到最好。但无论我怎么努力，也还是免不了偶尔拿它与《植物大战僵尸》进行对比。因为在《植物大战僵尸》之前，我做的游戏都只是游戏而已；但现在它等于是一个无形的标准。

记者：做好的东西又得重新改，而且你还不确定更改后的效果是否会更好，这个过程一定很痛苦吧？

Fan：游戏设计很多时候是这样的。开发者经常需要瞄准一个大方向，朝着这个方向去试验，试过了才能知道这些想法好不好用，很多事情都没有确定的答案。参考你读过、听过、玩过的东西，同时也要依赖于你的直觉，但最终，我认为我们的选择是正确的。不过比起《植物大战僵尸》，这个项目中的不确定因素更多。

Image Credit: All Yes Good

记者：预定的发布日期真的加快了你们的开发速度？

Fan：工作室里的人都快崩溃了。2016年的时候，我告诉他们2017年上旬要发布这款游戏；2015年底的时候，我们就一直在说“赶快把这游戏发布了吧”。但是在这个过程中，我们两次切换到关卡模式，然后又两次切换到Roguelike模式，因为这点，所以多花了很长的时间。还有一点是，我们低估了游戏的大小，一开始做出来的游戏大小超出了我们的预测。

记者：这款游戏应该会火，去年就得到了很多关注。

Fan：是啊，去年有很多人关注这款游戏。但是今年会有很多新游戏同期推出，所以我不知道该期待些什么。不过我感觉已经有越来越多的人开始关注这款游戏了，我之前发布了预告片的一个小片段，大家的反应都蛮兴奋的。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

George Fan, the co-creator of the phenomenal 2009 hit Plants vs Zombies, is back with a crazy and fun new game called Octogeddon from his new indie studio, All Yes Good. I’ve played it, and I suspect it’s going to be a big deal.

Octogeddon is an arcade-style action game where a giant octopus becomes angry and destroys the world. The 2D side-movement game debuts on the PC gaming platform Steam on Thursday. The octopus is simple to control, as you rotate it left or right using just two keys on your keyboard. Over time, you add weapons and more arms to the octopus, so that it becomes a wheel of extreme firepower. But the enemies come at the octopus from all directions, hoping to stop it from destroying landmarks like the Statue of Liberty.

This game has hit potential. Plants vs Zombies played a role in Electronic Arts deciding to buy PopCap Games for $650 million in 2011. The sequel, released in 2013, has been downloaded well over 25 million times.

Fan got the idea for the game during a game jam, Ludum Dare, in 2012. One person was supposed to design an entire game, from the gameplay to the art, in 48 hours. He came up with the idea, but then spent the next four-plus years polishing it with a team of four people. I interviewed him about it, and then played the game. I’ll have a full review for it tomorrow.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: Tell me about how your progress.

George Fan: When you last played it, the game was more like—I call it campaign mode, where you go level by level. It’s like Plants vs. Zombies. There’s a level structure, and once you pass those levels you beat the game. I was toying around with something that I thought might be more interesting for this game. It takes some inspiration from roguelike games, where there’s a set amount of levels, and you’re not really expected to pass them all the first time.

One way our game is very different from most other roguelikes—they’re notorious for being extremely difficult. Our game is not. Just because it’s a twitch game, there’s going to be some level of—it’s not going to have as wide an appeal as Plants vs. Zombies, which was mostly strategy. This game has a good deal of action. There are limits there. For an action game to be interesting to all kinds of people, that’s very hard to do. In any case, we were toying around with some roguelike structure, some random elements. Every time you play, it feels different enough, hopefully. It might take you three to eight tries to beat the game. Every time you play you’re getting stronger and stronger.

The ups and downs came from—we tested that on some younger kids playtesting the game. The nice thing about the campaign structure, once you pass a level you’ll always start from that level. You’re not set all the way back. I thought, “Maybe this is wrong. Maybe we should go back to the campaign structure and save the roguelike elements for after you beat the game.” Even though I felt like that was the more interesting mode. Maybe you could have adventure mode, the first mode, and then do roguelike after that, and you’d get the best of both worlds, kind of.

That was a dip. We had a huge upheaval in the whole game. It took a long time to convince my programmer to go back to the adventure mode after we’d just made the switch. And then, a few months later, I really thought—hiding the more interesting mode at the end, if we could avoid that, I really wanted to avoid that. I had to convince my programmer, again. That was a tough conversation. “This is for the best.” I wrote this whole thing out in preparation.

And so now we’re back to the roguelike structure, which I think is the right call. I’m 99 percent sure this time. It fits with the Steam audience a lot better. It’s much more interesting in this day and age, when replayability is so important. If people were going to stream this game they’d stream the roguelike mode instead of the campaign mode, because it’s a lot more interesting to watch.

GamesBeat: By roguelike, you mean that if you get killed, you start over?

Fan: You do have a certain amount of lives, but yeah, if you lose all your lives you start over. What’s different here from a lot of roguelikes is there’s a persistence to it. There’s a meta-campaign, where every time you end a run, it takes you to this shopkeeper. He’s the new Crazy Dave. At that point you can buy permanent upgrades that last between games. The cool part about that is, every time you start over you’ll have cool new things to try. You’ll naturally be stronger than you were the last time. You’ll get further in the game.

GamesBeat: How many people did you wind up working with altogether?

Fan: The core team is—you have me, as the designer. We had an artist, Rich Werner, the same guy who did the art for Plants vs. Zombies. We had Kurt Pfeifer, our programmer. He did the Xbox adaptation of Plants vs. Zombies. We’re working with a musician as well. Not a whole lot of people. We have a lot of beta testers. We’ve been working on it for about four years. Obviously we’d like to have gotten it done sooner. We had those upheavals we were talking about. We’ve had hiccups through the process.

I can send you a chart I drew in MS Paint, a chart of, over time, how good I felt about each game. I drew a chart for Plants vs. Zombies. With Plants vs. Zombies, the first prototype started out pretty low. It wasn’t very much fun. You were spending too much time nurturing your plants. I took all that nurturing part out, so you didn’t have to micromanage anything anymore. But it constantly went higher and higher. There were small dips. When we had to figure out the name of the game, that was a dip. But overall it was really smooth. The game design process was smoother, and we had that shield of being within Popcap. That took care of a lot of stuff for us.

This is our first time really being indie. With Octogeddon, that first prototype was much higher than Plants vs. Zombies, because it was fun right off the bat, right at the game jam. But then it dipped further and further below. “How do we make this into a full game?” It made these huge rises and falls, with each of those upheavals. We had a lot of challenging things happen. But at the very end it shoots up. At the time I made the chart there were three weeks left. It exponentially rises to meet Plants vs. Zombies and possibly even pass it. But I’ll leave that up to you. I just feel like the game did get a ton better in the final month or so.

GamesBeat: Do you feel like going indie was the only way to do this? Or a better way to do this?

Fan: Hmm. There’s good and bad about being indie. I’m going to try my hardest to be indie from now on, just because I want to be able to not have any outside pressure. I want to make the games I want to make. I’d rather not have anyone dictating anything – this is the game you have to make, this is the business model, anything like that. For that reason, indie is the only way to go for me. But there are definitely challenges that go with it.

GamesBeat: Did you have enough money to keep going for such a long development? Was there any pressure on that end?

Fan: No, it wasn’t any huge pressure, but at the same time—I can’t just keep making this forever, right? But it’s definitely not anything like, if I don’t release the game I can’t eat.

GamesBeat: What’s the plan for afterward? Do you plan to support this in the future?

Fan: The other reason this game isn’t like Plants vs. Zombies—I feel like with Plants vs. Zombies, for the whole last year, we could have launched the game at any point. It was ready to launch two and a half years in, and we launched at three and a half. That whole last year was just polishing like crazy. This game is more like—it’s taken too long already. Let’s set a release date and sprint toward it. We can’t change that now, but there is a lot more I would like to get into the game.

For sanity’s sake, I have this bulleted list of all these things I want to get in. I just move them to a section that says, “First DLC patch,” something like that. Which is going to be free. But extra modes, extra cool power-ups you can get, we’re definitely thinking—we’re going to move that until after launch. Nothing is set in stone. It’s just a bunch of ideas that I’ve moved to this section that I think I’d like to do.

GamesBeat: What do you think you’ve learned from this compared to what you learned from Plants vs. Zombies?

Fan: This was interesting, because one, it was made in the shadow of Plants vs. Zombies. As much as I told myself—I knew it would be a pitfall to say, “This game has to be as good as Plants vs. Zombies.” I’m pretty sure I’m never going to make—I’ll never say for sure. But I’ll be happy if I never make a game as good as Plants vs. Zombies, because I feel like I already did something really awesome with that.

It’s not beneficial to think in those terms, like I’m trying to challenge that. I’m trying my best to just think of this as its own thing, trying to make it the best it can be. But I can’t push the whole Plants vs. Zombies thing out of my mind completely, as much as I tell myself. That’s a challenge, making something right after you make something very successful. Every game before Plants vs. Zombies, I was just making a game. Now, after making Plants vs. Zombies, I’m making a game in that shadow.

GamesBeat: Do you have to argue with yourself about that kind of perfectionism?

Fan: Well, I’m not a perfectionist, but I do like to polish games a lot. The cutoff for getting new content in the game was supposed to be two weeks ago, but it was really today. At this point I’m just telling myself—I made that list of things I want to get in for the first patch. It’s always a challenge. You could be adding features forever.

Here’s something funny. When we all sat down to make this game, after I’d done the game jam version, we said, “This is going to be a fun year-long project. We’ll spend a year making this. It’ll be great. Obviously it’s not as big in scope as Plants vs. Zombies, so it shouldn’t take that long, right?” We were pretty wrong about that. It ended up taking longer than Plants vs. Zombies by a bit.

GamesBeat: It seems like you had to do not just a lot of polishing, but also retracing your steps, going back to try something new. That’s a more painful process.

Fan: That’s why, if you see the chart, it’s going up and down. [laughs] It was for the best, I think. But it’s hard to know for sure. You played the version from last year where it was just a campaign. I remember you liked it. I came here thinking, “Well, maybe he won’t like this as much.” But in the big picture I think this is the right decision. You can tell I’m not a marketer.
That’s what game design is a lot of the time. It’s a lot of taking aim and shooting in the general direction. You can test it out afterward, but a lot of the time you just don’t know for sure. You make your best guess. You rely on everything you’ve read and heard and played, but you also rely on your gut intuition, all this unconscious—I just think this is the right call. But there was a lot of uncertainty in this project, more so than in Plants vs. Zombies.

GamesBeat: Little touches like the people falling out of the buildings, that’s an improvement.

Fan: I’m glad I fought for that. I did have to fight for it, because we’re trying to lock things down. I joked that I think people falling out of buildings is going to raise our Metacritic score by a whole point. I really think it could. I wasn’t sure it was going to happen, but I saw it in there yesterday and I was overjoyed.

GamesBeat: Was deciding on a release date what you motivated you to finish it?

Fan: People on the team were going crazy. I told them, “Early next year,” and this was in 2016. All of late 2015 we were saying, “Let’s converge on releasing this game.” Since you last saw it, though, it’s changed to—oh, man, was that after—I can’t remember. There were two switches to campaign mode and two switches to roguelike. I can’t remember whether you played it before all that process or in the middle. But that made the game take longer to come out.

We also just underestimated how big it was going to end up being. Every game has a size that is ideal for it. You want to build it to that size. We underestimated what that would be for the kind of game this was. Initially we thought it would be a much smaller game.

GamesBeat: It should get a lot of attention. It got a lot of attention a year ago.

Fan: Yeah, we got a good amount of buzz last year. There are a ton of games coming out, so I don’t know what to expect. I feel like I’ve been getting more vibes of people seeing—I posted just little clips of the trailer, without divulging the full trailer yet, and people seemed pretty excited. （Source:venturebeat.com  ）