作者：Cassandra Khaw

Tiny Glitch制作人及thatgamecompany前雇员Robin Hunicke在日前的欧洲GDC上坦承，“我有延期癖。”

除叙述最终造就thatgamecompany热门游戏《Journey》的3年严酷考验外，Hunicke还谈到几点制作这款游戏的经验收获。

Robin Hunicke from aralbalkan.com

“我们着迷于‘及时’延期。事实情况的是，我们签订不切实际的时间表，认为随后多半可以延长期限，我们因整个项目的紧张氛围而付出代价。”

“我们不擅于提取个人的真实判断，大家没有意识到就游戏进行‘及时’变更的真实成本。管理任务列表非常费劲，若你习惯于在3-5个成员的团队中工作，那么要激发设计师和美工积极性，促使他们与你达成共识所需完成的沟通量将令你感到沮丧——这就像是个约束。”

她接着提醒大家，随着团队规模的扩大，可能会出现传达错误及偏离方向的情况。“和成员们保持沟通，你有200名还是10名员工无关紧要——其中风险通常非常高。”

贪婪是另一误区。“我们总是眼高手低。虽然我们反复迭代，但我们丢弃许多构思。它们有些不合时宜。着眼于这些功能和构思，但拒绝扩展团队或项目（游戏邦注：以让它们在实际时间周期里更具可行性）的做法致使我们付出昂贵代价。”

“这不仅让团队成员筋疲力竭，他们需要超负荷完成工作，同时促使他们对游戏的创意总监丧失信心，因为这听起来有些疯狂。最佳的避免方式是，将你的若干游戏构思，若干杰出构思落实到项目中。”

Hunicke表示，另一误区就是“焦虑训练”，“我们对于彼此都非常严格。”

她解释到，他们承受无法言明的内在焦虑。“当你身处高压项目中时，你必然陷入这样的情形：你因合作伙伴而生气、失望，这很难掩饰，我们通常很难消除这些情绪。”

虽然很难处理，但Hunicke表示，当这些问题得不到解决时，它们就会在不合时宜的情形中显现出来，如在成员们试图相互给予支持的设计会议。

最后，Hunicke谈到她所谓的“文化战争”，将其称作最后一个障碍。“项目通常存在两类人员——需要持续工作，以获得前进感的成员；每天都很有压力，需要有足够时间摆脱办公室压力的成员，这样他们才能够放松自己，静下心来，在工作中保持创造性。”

“你多半会说，当项目接近尾声阶段，团队最终需要处理文化的不一致问题，这最终能够让公司创始人获得全新开始。”

“但我不免还是会幻想一个平行宇宙，相反，通过完善沟通，回避关键要素，或是克服减缓制作过程的个人恩怨，这将促使团队伙伴相互信任，获得主人翁感觉。”（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）

What went wrong during the making of Journey

by Cassandra Khaw

“Hi. I’m Robin. I’m an extensionholic,” Tiny Glitch Producer and former thatgamecompany employee Robin Hunicke admitted to her GDC Europe audience on Tuesday.

Aside from relating the rigorous three-year ordeal that led to the eventual publication of thatgamecompany’s much-loved Journey, Hunicke also provided some relevant and almost startlingly frank takeaways from their experience building the game.

“We were addicted to ‘just in time’ extensions.” Hunicke said. “The fact of the matter is we signed an unrealistic schedule believing, in our heart of hearts, it would probably be extended later, and we paid for that stress in the entire project.”

“We were poor at extracting realistic individual estimations and people failed to confront the true costs of ‘just in time’ changes to the game. Managing a task list is a drag and if you’re used to working on a team with 3 to 5 people, the amount of communication you need to do to keep designers and artists motivated and on the same page with you is really frustrating – it can feel like a straightjacket.”

She went on to warn that, as teams grow in size, there is a clear and present danger of miscommunicating and getting off-course. “Always, always talk to each other. It doesn’t matter if you’re two hundred people or ten – the risk is always great.”

Greed was another mistake. “We had eyes that were much bigger than our stomachs. While we were iterating, there were many ideas that we chucked. They just didn’t seem right. Being attached to those features and ideas but being unwilling to expand the team or the process in ways that made them feasible in a realistic period of time was very costly to us.”

“Not only did it wear down individual people on the team who felt the burden of being pressured to perform way more than they actually could, it eroded trust in the creative leadership of the game because it sounded crazy. The best way to avoid is to let some of your ideas, some of your best ideas, to not be implemented on THIS project.”

According to Hunicke, another mistake had been the ‘anxiety train’. “We were really hard on each other.”

She explained that they had given in to internal, unexpressed anxieties. “When you work on high pressure projects, you’re bound to get into situations where you are angry and frustrated at the people you work with and it’s impossible to hide that but it’s often really difficult to confront it and process it in a way that gets resolved.”

Though hard to deal with, Hunicke observed that when such issues go unaddressed, they have a tendency to make appearances at inappropriate situations like design meetings where everyone is trying to be supportive of each other instead.

Lastly, Hunicke cited what she called the ‘culture war’ as their final hindrance. “There were definitely two distinct types of people on that project – people who really needed to work constantly to get a sense of progress, who felt the weight of each day, and people who needed ample time away from the stress and the pressures of the office so as to be able to relax and clear their mind to be able to feel creative about the work we’re doing.”

“You could argue that running this project to the extreme end, that the team was finally forced to deal with the misalignment in the culture, which eventually made it possible to have fresh starts for the people who founded the company.

“But it is hard for me not to imagine an alternate universe where, through improved communication, key contributors avoided or overcame personal grudges that slowed the production down and, instead, created an ample amount of trust and ownership among their peers.”（Source：gamasutra）