背景

可以说，有些iPhone和iPad应用几乎一问世就同设备牢牢绑定。自2009年末发行以来，《愤怒的小鸟》就变成iTunes上的主流下载内容，成为几乎所有用户都会下载的经典便携游戏。这款游戏的开发商Rovio Mobile是家芬兰公司，值得一提的是，公司自2003年成立以来已推出超过50款游戏，该公司能够迅速把握机会，转投新兴智能手机市场。App Store是快速营销新游戏品牌的理想平台，因此Rovio觉得这将是发行原创作品的良好渠道。最终，公司创造出一款颇具沉浸性的谜题游戏，成为现代手机领域一大奇迹。

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1. 构思

Jaakko Iisalo：2009年初，我在Rovio studio向团队呈现我的若干想法。每个构思都各不相同。但我就构思内容勾勒出突出而独特的角色。我给其中的一个创意取名“小鸟”；其借鉴当时我非常喜欢的多款游戏，但同时有自己的原创主题。游戏包含某些同《Patapon》相似的基于节奏的玩法。所构思的角色并无法真正飞翔—–现在回过头来看，觉得有些令人费解，但大家都很喜欢这个看似脾气暴躁的小鸟角色。我们觉得我们得制作更多必要参数内容，让作品变得更成功，但我们坚持采用小鸟角色，同时让它们看起来更愤怒。

我们想要制作通俗易懂的休闲游戏。我们希望利用触屏控制，因为这是平台的一大特点。我们希望基于物理原理的玩法，因为我们很喜欢此元素，而且发现越来越多的用户开始转投《粘粘世界》类的物理游戏。我们希望设置灵活的评分系统，能够既适应新手玩家，又能够满足希望积累成就的硬核玩家。

2. 设计

Jaakko Iisalo：作为游戏设计师，我总是对于角色有很多的想法。在《愤怒的小鸟》中也不例外，首先是构思阶段的小鸟角色及它们的特性。角色随后由我们的高级美术师Tuomas Erikoinen进一步润色。这主要是视觉内容制作部门成员的工作，我提出游戏元素、内容和角色，然后Tuomas将其转化成视觉内容。

小猪就是我设计方式的典型例子。我倾向创造具有较少活动组件的圆形轮廓角色，小猪就是此过程的产物。我试图将它们打造成卡通形象，尽量摆脱小猪真实的样子，赋予它们亮绿的颜色，圆形而有活力的耳朵。卡通风格外观是整个过程的基本视觉轮廓，我们尽量在游戏中采用较少语言、菜单和指南，旨在让内容变得更通俗易懂。每个游戏主题的背景画面和创建模块也是由Tuomas制作，我主要负责完善玩法细节，视觉特效（游戏邦注：目的是让游戏呈现独特感觉）。关卡内容由我及游戏美术师Tuomas Erikoinen和Joonas Mäkilä共同设计。

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3. 创建

Tuomo Lehtinen：我是项目编程的主要负责人，我的工作是制作游戏引擎和关卡编辑器。Miika Virtanen，他现在是我们的技术副总裁，负责制作图像引擎及开发跨平台技术。初期开发之后，团队规模迅速壮大，我们逐渐拥有更多新程序员，负责不同平台的游戏新功能和更新内容制作。开发《愤怒的小鸟》面临的最大挑战是令游戏在古老而缓慢的设备上也能够顺利运作。虽然游戏属于休闲和卡通风格，表面看起来非常简单，但手机设备的物理运算非常有挑战性。

游戏基于扩充版Box2D物理引擎，同时结合新鲜图像纹理，我们投入许多时间针对处理能力较弱的设备优化代码。初期发行后我们将其投放至其他平台，我们从中学到许多关于当前智能手机平台局限性、延展性和变化性的知识。

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发行

Matthew Wilson（市场营销经理）：我们决定通过Chillingo发行游戏。这是基于投资所选择的营销方案，其余就是繁琐的跑腿工作，回复收到的各种询问和邮件，发微博，在Facebook上做宣传。游戏起初的销量并不起眼。我们通过口头宣传将其变成芬兰首屈一指的应用，然后将此成功举措再次运用于瑞典。苹果差点就忽略关于我们的App Store推荐请求，后来他们注意到我们。2009年2月，《愤怒的小鸟》在英国App Store获得推荐，随后很快变成排名第一的应用。

为引起关注，我们开始尝试别具创意的东西。首先，我们查看App Store的成功作品，发现其中有款游戏都有独特的预告片。这促使我们萌发制作《愤怒的小鸟》动画预告片的想法，截至目前，此预告片有超过1200万次的浏览量。总而言之，游戏的许多元素都是在制作过程中逐步完善。从游戏目前的数亿次下载量来看，我们可以肯定地说，我们的选择完全正确。

游戏邦注：原文发布于2011年10月5日， 文章涉及数据以当时为准。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Design Diary: Rovio & Angry Birds

BACKGROUND

There are some apps for the iPhone and iPad that many would say should almost be bundled with the device out of the box. Since launching at the tail end of 2009, Angry Birds has become a staple download for iTunes and a portable gaming classic that virtually everyone owns. Developer Rovio Mobile is a Finnish firm with a pedigree for producing over 50 games titles since forming in 2003, and was quick to pounce on the emerging smartphone market at just the right time. With the App Store providing an ideal platform for rapidly marketing a new gaming brand, Rovio decided it would be the perfect outlet for unleashing a wholly original idea. The result was a bright, bold, addictive puzzler that would become a modern mobile phenomenon…

1. CONCEPT

Jaakko Iisalo: In early 2009, I was pitching a number of concepts to the team at the Rovio studio. Each concept was quite different from the next, but I’ve always drafted very strong and distinctive characters for any concepts that I’ve created. I had titled one of my concepts “Birds”; it was a cross between many of my favourite games at the time, with a completely original theme. It had some rhythm-based gameplay elements similar to Patapon, for example. In any case, the concept didn’t really fly – in retrospective, it was perhaps a bit convoluted – but everybody loved the grumpy-looking bird characters I had created. We decided to set out more parameters of what was needed from the concept to be successful, but we decided to stick with the birds and make them angrier.

We wanted to make a casual game that would be accessible to everybody. We wanted touch-screen controls, because those were a strong point of the platform. We wanted physics-based gameplay, because we loved it, and we were seeing more and more people spend time with physics-based games like World Of Goo. And we wanted a flexible scoring system, which would cater for complete novices as well as for hardcore gamers who want to collect every achievement available.

2. DESIGN

Jaakko Iisalo: As a game designer, I have always had a strong vision of the characters. Same with Angry Birds, it began with the birds and their characteristics right in the concept phase. The characters were then refined by our senior game artist, Tuomas Erikoinen. That was pretty much the division of work in the visual aspects – I came up with the game elements, materials and characters, and Tuomas created the visual look.

The pigs are a good example of my design, I have always created characters with round, basic shapes with minimal separate moving parts, and the pigs are sort of the end result of that evolution. I tried to create them as cartoony and as unlike actual pigs as possible, which gave them their bright green colour and round, bubbly ears. A cartoony, cel-shaded look was our basic visual guideline throughout the project, and we tried to use as little language as possible in the game, menus and tutorials to make it more accessible.
The background graphics and building blocks for each theme of the game were also created by Tuomas, and I focused on specifying gameplay details and graphical effects that were added to the game to give it a unique feel. Levels were designed by myself, and game artists Tuomas Erikoinen and Joonas Mäkilä.

3. BUILD

Tuomo Lehtinen: I was the lead programmer for the project and I was tasked with creating the game engine and the level editor. Miika Virtanen, now our VP of technology, created the graphical engine and developed our multiplatform technology. After initial development, the team has grown significantly, and we have a number of programmers working on new features and updates of the game on different platforms. The biggest challenge in developing Angry Birds has been making the game run smoothly on older, slower devices. While the game is casual, cartoony and looks very simple on the surface, the physics calculations are rather demanding on the mobile hardware.

The game is based on the Box2D physics engine with extensions, and combined with the crisp graphical textures, we actually spent a lot of time optimising the code for devices with less processing power. When we have taken the game to other platforms since initial release, we have definitely learned a lot about the limitations, scalability and variation in the current smartphone platforms.

THE LAUNCH

Matthew Wilson (Marketing Manager): We decided to publish the game through Chillingo, as it was one of the most successful independent publishers. This choice was basically our financial marketing effort for the game, the rest was diligent footwork with answering every inquiry and email we received, tweeting and communicating on Facebook. The game didn’t really pick up sales at first. We made it to number one in Finland by word of mouth, and then replicated the success in Sweden. Apple – who had all but ignored our pleas to feature the game in the App Store – started to take notice. In February 2009, Angry Birds was featured in the UK App Store, and went to number one shorty thereafter.

To get noticed we tried to do things a bit differently from everyone else. For starters, we looked at the most successful games in the App Store, and noticed that not one of them had a proper trailer. This gave us the idea of producing a cinematic trailer for Angry Birds, and to this day the trailer has over 12 million views on YouTube. To sum it all up, many things clicked into place in the process of creating Angry Birds. With 50 million downloads to date, we can safely say we did something right.（Source：webdesignermag）