作者：Kris Graft

今年是游戏开发者第2次在GDC上不谈成功，而是讨论自己经历过的失败。但“失败讨论会”发言者和听众在总结这些失败做法时并没有感到沮丧。

来自《粘粘世界》开发商2D Boy的Ron Carmel主持了这场讨论会，开场便指出了分享失败经验的重要性。Carmel说道：“如果人们不交谈和分享他们的失败做法，我们就会失去90%的学习机会。”

a-big-fat-failure(from essex1.com)

他提到了所谓的“成功神话”，解释道：“成功是经过长期失败才得以实现的。”即便是Carmel的2D Boy也并非瞬间获得成功。

Jamie Cheng来自Klei Entertainment（游戏邦注：其代表作包括《Eets》和《Shank》），他谈到了自己工作室的失败游戏——《Sugar Rush》。工作室在这款在线游戏上花了3年时间，游戏的美术风格历经5次制作和修改才得以完成，游戏进行过3次内测，却在离正式发布两周时间时取消。

Cheng表示，游戏原本的名称为《Eets: Sugar Rush》，玩家在游戏中控制棉花糖对战。游戏获得位于温哥华的Nexon认可。

游戏逐渐变成夹杂游戏开发商和发行商想法的产物。游戏的特色逐渐消失，游戏的方向也越来越模糊。

当温哥华的Nexon完全切断对游戏的投入时，这款游戏便已经注定要失败。

但是，工作室仍然不想放弃，所以他们努力将《Sugar Rush》转变成主机游戏《Scrappers》。但是，这款主机游戏依然未能发布。

Cheng说道：“我们没有下定决心自己真正想要做出的是什么样的游戏，我们不知道作为独立工作室要如何同发行商合作和相处。”

Klei最终成功制作和发布了《Shank》，这款游戏便是工作室清晰制定创作愿景后的产物。

接下来发言的是来自Supergiant Games的Amir Rao。这个工作室成功地发布了自己的首款游戏《Bastion》。但是多数人并不知道，发布的游戏中缺少了一个失败了的重要功能。

《Bastion》有丰富的美术效果，独特的解说员，但Rao说道：“本来游戏还有个令人兴奋的园艺功能。”

Rao很清楚为何要在游戏中设计这个功能。“园艺是种每个人都能够理解的美学，我们想要尝试在游戏中使用这种美学，将其应用到动作RPG中，因为这是史上从未有过的做法。”

工作室花了一年的时间设计这个园艺功能，主要借鉴《宝贝万岁》、《牧场物语》和《文明：变革》等游戏中的某些系统。

玩家可以在游戏世界中找到各种种子，将它们带回名为Bastion的家园，种植和培育，看看它们能够长成什么。Rao说道：“问题在于玩家根本不知道发生了什么，向玩家传达介于播种和获得最终植物之间的信息是件相当困难的事情。”

Rao得出了最后的结论：“人们对整个种植系统的理解不过只是菜单而已。”

Scott Anderson和他的团队之前制作了一款解谜平台游戏，名为《Shadow Physics》，这个项目最初看上去成功的可能性很高，但是最终却被工作室抛弃。

Anderson说道：“大约8个月前，我们失去了该项目的资金来源，于是游戏项目被取消了。”《Shadow Physics》之前的开发由Indie Fund赞助。

Anderson承认：“游戏的概念相当不错，但是确实不是很有趣。”

《Shadow Physics》的失败还有其他多种原因。Anderson说道：“我们制作游戏的动力是外部奖励，比如财富和名声，而不是真正对项目产生激情。”

游戏技术方面也有一定的问题，游戏玩法过于依赖物理引擎。

Anderson说道：“游戏并不能有效地运转。我们过于依赖某些Braid机制。”

游戏的开发过程同样存在问题，重复开发成本过于昂贵，雇佣员工是基于团队是否喜欢这个人，而不是新员工是否适合团队需要。

此外，交流成为团队中的一大问题。员工总是避免发生冲突，但随后团队变得消极。

据Anderson所述，《Shadow Physics》原本的设计目标是款Xbox Live Arcade游戏，但是Indie Fund和平台的绑定给游戏带来致命的后果。《Shadow Physics》是款低预算游戏，却要同《地狱边境》和《Shadow Complex》等高预算XBLA成功游戏竞争。

最后，Anderson表示，游戏并没有获得真正的支持者，最终被他们所抛弃。

《Fantastic Contraption》开发者Colin Northway谈到了在游戏开发早期阶段认识到失败的重要性。他花了数个月的时间，尝试在《Flocking》等项目中找到游戏玩法的突破点，但最终都未能成形。

Northway说道：“《Flocking》是个我认为想法很棒的项目，但是我却无法将其制作成真正的电子游戏。”他向开发者们提出了警告，尽管有时候会很喜欢某个想法，但并不是所有的想法都能够制作成游戏。

他说道：“我之前会深入挖掘每个小游戏想法，但这样的研究往往是毫无意义的。这也是许多游戏设计师失败的原因。”

“当你在进行游戏设计时，你应当选择最成熟的果实……你的工作是找到最甜美的果实……”

现在，Northway觉得自己已经找到了走出游戏设计误区的方法。他目前正在制作一款名为《Incredipede》的游戏，游戏出现在东京游戏展的Sense of Wonder Night上。他说道：“我希望所有开发者都能够找到走出误区的方法。”（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）

GDC 2012: Game devs find lessons in their failures

Kris Graft

For the second year at GDC, game developers got together not to talk about their best practices or their successes, but instead about their failures.

The session, “Failure Workshop,” was hampered by technical issues that caused various delays, and the irony of that wasn’t lost on the amused speakers and audience.

But eventually those problems were (mostly) ironed out.

Ron Carmel of World of Goo house 2D Boy hosted the panel, and opened by stressing the importance of sharing experiences of failure. If people don’t talk about and share their failures, “We’re missing out on 90 percent of our learning opportunities,” Carmel said.

He talked about dispelling the “success myth,” explaining that “the successes that you see usually come after a long string of failure.” Even Carmel’s 2D Boy was not an overnight success.

Jamie Cheng of Eets and Shank developer Klei Entertainment talked about his studio’s failure — an online game called Sugar Rush. The studio worked on it for three years, did the art style for the game five different times, held three closed betas, and was only two weeks away from a full ship. But it never shipped.

Cheng said the game was originally called Eets: Sugar Rush, and had marshmallows fighting one another. It was greenlit by Nexon in Vancouver.

The game gradually became a mish-mash of ideas from the game developers and ideas from the publisher. It became diluted, and the game didn’t really know what it was supposed to be.

Impending failure became clearer when Nexon Vancouver totally shut down, and with that, the backend for the game was gone.

But the studio still didn’t want to give up, so it tried to convert Sugar Rush to a game called Scrappers for consoles. But it still didn’t ship.

“We didn’t have a conviction of what we really wanted to do,” said Cheng “…We didn’t know [how to work with a publisher] as an independent [studio].”

Klei eventually created and successfully shipped Shank, a game made with a much clearer creative vision.

Next up for the workshop was Amir Rao of Supergiant Games. The studio did ship its first title, Bastion, to much success. But what’s not known by most people is that it shipped without one big feature that failed.

Basiton had a rich art style, a unique reactive narrator, and, Rao said, “It was going to have a rich and exciting gardening feature.”

The reasons for including this feature were clear for Rao. “Gardening is an aesthetic that everybody understands. … We wanted to try and take that aesthetic … and apply that to an action RPG, because that is something that we haven’t seen before.”

The studio spent a year working on the gardening feature, influenced by games like Viva Pinata, Harvest Moon, and even certain systems from Civilization Revolution.

Player would find seeds out in the world, bring them back to the hub called Bastion, put them in planters, water them, and wait to see what they would become. The problem was that players had “no idea what was happening,” said Rao. “It’s really hard to communicate the intermediate part of planting” that happens between burying the seed, and having the final plant.

“You know people understand a lot better than planting? A menu,” Rao determined.

Scott Anderson and his team were working on a puzzle/platformer game called Shadow Physics, a project that appeared at first to be set up for success, but eventually was abandoned.

“About eight months ago we lost our funding, and the game was cancelled,” Anderson said. Shadow Physics was previously funded by Indie Fund.

The failure has since sunk in, and Anderson admitted, “The game was a great concept but it wasn’t really a lot of fun…ever.”

There were other various reasons why Shadow Physics failed. “We were driven by external rewards,” such as fortune and fame, Anderson said, instead of a true passion for the project.

There were also problems with the game’s tech, and the gameplay relied too much on the physics engine. He said the game was just not “tight,” and there were unpredictable game systems.

“The game just didn’t work,” Anderson said. “We chased certain Braid mechanics a little too much,” he added. He said at times there was too much “Braid envy” going on in the game design.

There were also issues with the development process, iteration was becoming expensive, and the hiring process was based on if they liked the person, rather than if he or she was a good fit.

Additionally, communication issues “were a big problem with the team in general.” People wanted to avoid conflict, but then it became a “passive aggressive war zone,” said Anderson.

Shadow Physics was supposed to be an Xbox Live Arcade game, but the combination of Indie Fund and that platform was fatal, said Anderson. Shadow Physics had a relatively low budget, and was chasing high-budget XBLA successes like Limbo and Shadow Complex.

In the end, Anderson said the game “didn’t really have a champion,” and was eventually abandoned.

Fantastic Contraption developer Colin Northway talked about the importance of identifying failure in its early stages. He spent several months trying to find the gameplay breakthrough in projects such as the bird-inspired Flocking, but they just didn’t materialize.

Flocking was a project “that I thought was fantastic and a good idea, but one … that I couldn’t get to function as a video game,” said Northway. He stressed to developers that just because you’re really in love with an idea, “you won’t always be able to make a game about that.”

“I was looking under smaller and smaller rocks for game ideas,” he said. That search is often futile. “That’s the downfall of a lot of game designers,” he said.

“When you’re doing game design you should be picking among the ripest fruit… your job is to find the sweetest fruit. … your job is not to eke something out of the cracks that will be playable.”

Now, Northway feels that he has found his way out of the game design wilderness. He’s currently working on a beautiful game called Incredipede, which appeared at Tokyo Game Show’s Sense of Wonder Night. “I hope none of you get lost, and I hope all of you make your way out,” he said. (Source: Gamasutra)