作者：Charlie Czerkawski

期望能够从事游戏行业工作的人往往会对游戏的制作产生误解，甚至有时已经进入该行业的人都会犯此错误。我也不例外，我自己也犯过同样的错误。

多年以前，我在一个QA测试实验室工作，在一次午餐时间讨论起游戏设计时，有个同事认为新游戏想法和玩法“往往”出自设计师，因为是他们将想法变成视觉性的东西。会产生这种看法是可以理解的，但是当它出自游戏从业者口中时就显得有点幼稚。显然，你从错误的角度看待游戏制作，并没有真正理解游戏的制作、架构及“创作”过程。

chess from filebuzz.com

以象棋这款桌游为例，你觉得它是怎么制作出来的呢？

象棋有着悠久的历史，但是从设计角度来看，游戏不可能靠某位雕刻家雕琢出所有棋子且自动生成玩法而形成的。所以，认为仅靠艺术师就能够设计出视频游戏的想法与认为仅靠天赋秉异的雕刻家就能设计出精妙复杂的桌游一样显得极欠妥当。

现在，如果你想要重新设计游戏，你可能需要先从纸上或屏幕上的图表开始，然后或许你需要制作纸质棋子。游戏成形后，即便只是相当初步的形态，你才会开始构思凌驾于冲突和战争之上的主题，创造出个性化的棋子。艺术从此刻开始才真正发挥作用，与设计师的才华和技能相结合，创造出一系列棋子。所以，团队合作才是成功的关键。

事实上，视频游戏也是这样构建起来的，要经过系列迭代过程。

开发者首先构建起最基本的原型，使用方块、灰盒和临时的资产。游戏玩法便通过这些资产构建而成，一旦游戏玩法生产后，艺术才进入游戏开发循环中，开始铸造覆盖于游戏玩法外表的视觉美学。

这是对游戏制作过程极为精简的概述，真正的过程要复杂得多。当然，游戏玩法开发过程也是由许多个子循环组成的。比如，首个阶段通常是让角色得以在空荡的环境中进行移动，然后在这个环境里添加障碍物，然后是敌人等其他元素，由此构建出整个场景。最后才是艺术元素。整个过程复杂且费心费力。

然而，要点在于，游戏玩法往往并非由艺术来确定。设计师主导游戏玩法的创造过程。或许这个过程涉及多次头脑风暴，由整个团队的成员参加。有时，与我们之前假设的象棋设计师一样，视频游戏设计师也需要首先在纸上构建新想法！当然，设计师在构建游戏玩法时会咨询其他人的意见，考虑玩法所涉及的技能（游戏邦注：但是最后做出决定依然是游戏设计师的责任所在！）。

程序员的职责是让游戏能够顺利运转，解决系列问题以及开发过程中所碰到的难题。艺术师负责完善游戏的视觉吸引力，也就是我们所看到的视频游戏表象。最终是否能够成功完成游戏很大程度取决于这些人间的互动，所有人都有自己擅长的领域。制作人负责将游戏投放到市场。但如果设计师认为自己的工作只是“告诉其他人要做什么”，那么游戏就注定要面对失败！

设计师的职责

上文已确定和描述游戏设计师的具体职责。遗憾的是，许多职业指导者除了提供这种模糊的定义外，并没有进行深入扩展。但是，你之所以要阅读这篇文章，肯定是想看到些许具体内容！你想要知道，自己应该怎么做才能成为游戏设计师。

颇令人遗憾的是，世间并不存在通往游戏设计的直达之路。即便当你认为自己已经找到时，你也会发现期间充满众多不可预测的变化因素。事实上，我有时觉得这更像是个迷宫，而不是路径。但是，我将根据当前的行业状况提出自己的意见，尝试创造若干比较实用的方法，分为7个独立的章节。

对于这些指导意见，你想要或觉得自己需要采纳多少，完全取决于你自己，遵循这些指导意见也无法确保你获得游戏设计岗位。但是，每个章节中的内容至少能够引发你进行思考，帮你决定下一步的走向。值得欣慰的是，如果你留心这些意见，你也许能够变成自己预期的杰出设计师。（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）

Excerpt: How Games Are Made – A Common Misunderstanding

Charlie Czerkawski

People who aspire to work in the games industry – sometimes even people who are already working in the industry – fall into the trap of misunderstanding how games are made. I don’t exclude myself here, because I’ve made the same mistakes myself.

Several years ago, while I was working at a QA Testing lab, during one of the many lunch-time discussions pertaining to game design, a colleague stated that he imagined it was the artists who ‘usually’ came up with the ideas and gameplay for new games, as they were the ones ‘making it happen’ visually. This is an understandable point of view, although it seems a little naive when it comes from someone already working in the industry. But he was certainly looking at game creation from the wrong angle, not really understanding how games are made, how they are structured, and the processes by which they are ‘invented.’

Let’s take the game of chess as an example – the board game, rather than any computerised version. How do you imagine it came to be?

Chess is as old as the hills, but from a design perspective, it would never have been formulated as a game by a sculptor intricately carving out all the wonderfully artistic playing pieces and then hoping that gameplay would somehow take shape. I doubt if anyone would ever think that it could have happened like that. Yet imagining that the artist alone would design a video game is as strange as assuming that the talented sculptor of pieces would have designed the clever, complex and mathematically precise game that is chess.

If you, today, were to attempt to re-design it, you would probably begin with diagrams on paper, or possibly on screen, then maybe you would make paper ‘placeholder’ pieces. Once the game was functioning as a game, even in a fairly rudimentary fashion, you could then start to devise the over-riding theme of conflict and war and create a persona for each of the individual pieces. It is at this point where art – with all its individual skills and talents – would come into play, working closely with those personas, and contributing to them – and a series of sculpted pieces would be created. As ever, teamwork would be the key.

This is, effectively, how video games are built up too, through a series of iterations.

The developers begin with a basic prototype, blocked out with cubes/grey boxes/throw-away assets. The gameplay is built to function with these assets, and once gameplay exists, the art is moved into the game, effectively as an aesthetic which ‘lies over’ the gameplay.

It is true that this is a very much simplified overview of the game creation process, and things do become far more complicated. There are, of course, many sub-iterations within gameplay development. For example, the first stage is usually to move a character in an empty environment, then place obstacles within this environment, then enemies, etc, building up the scene. Along the way, the final art is introduced – a tricky and demanding process.

The main point of this, however, is that the art does not usually dictate the gameplay. The designers ‘play around’ with the gameplay. There may be brainstorming sessions which involve whole teams of people, and sometimes, like our hypothetical chess designer, the video game designer will have to try things out on paper first! Of course, they will do this in consultation with others and with a deep awareness of and respect for all the other skills involved, but the decisions to be made will be the responsibility of the designer.

The programmer will make the game work, solving a series of difficult and sometimes intractable problems along the way. The artist will add that vital, visual appeal which we all know and love within video games. The success or otherwise of the finished game will depend very much on the interactions between these people, each with his or her own area of expertise. The producer will have overall responsibility for bringing that game to the market. But if the designer has some misguided idea that his job is simply to ‘tell everyone else what to do’ – the game is probably doomed from the start!

What Should You Do To Become A Designer

The previous sections have effectively set the scene, defining and describing the role of game designer. Unfortunately, the advice given by so many career guides does not extend much beyond these rather vague definitions. But you’re looking for something a bit more concrete, aren’t you or you wouldn’t have downloaded this eBook! You want to know what you have to do to become a designer.

The bad news is that there is no sure fire direct route into game design, and even when you think you may have found it, the path ahead will be full of unexpected twists and turns. In fact I sometimes think it’s more of a maze than a route. It therefore follows that clear-cut advice can be problematic. However, I will give you my opinions based on the current state of play and attempt to formulate some kind of pragmatic approach, divided into seven separate sections.

It’s up to you how far you want or need to follow these instructions, and following them is no guarantee of a job in game design. But at least the discussions in each section will give you food for thought when you’re trying to decide where to go next. And the good news is that if you pay attention to at least some of this advice, it might just give you a head start over the multitudes of young people who say they want to ‘make video games’ with no clear idea of how they are going to set about it. (Source: Game Career Guide)