作者：Konstantinos Dimopoulos

独立工作室CBE Software（游戏邦注：其代表作为创新冒险游戏《J.U.L.I.A.》，最新作品是《Vampires!》与）首席执行官Jan Kavan最近接受了我们的采访。

Jan，你好，似乎你集多种才能于一身。能否为我们读者介绍下自己？

非常荣幸！我是Jan Kavan，我是个作曲人、大提琴演奏者、独立开发者及作家。虽然这些是我的强项，但我常签订一些糟糕的发行合同，之后却追悔莫及。我曾在布尔诺Janacek的表演艺术学院里学习音乐创作，并在特普利斯的音乐学院主修大提琴。现在，我主要从事软件开发，我是CBE Software这家独立开发公司的合伙人。

能否介绍下CBE？

最初，CBE是以Cardboard Box Entertainment起家。那时，我们只有两位在自己家中办公的开发者，即负责美术视觉的Lukas Medek和我，我们鲜少会面，主要通过互联网将各自开发的游戏部分组合起来。然而到了2011年，情况开始发生变化，我们成立了一家名为CBE Software的真正公司。这是CBE的巨大飞跃，因为现在我们拥有自己的办公室，可以在此高效地制作项目。作为敏捷开发方法的忠实拥护者，我想我们有望在今年推出三款游戏。

我觉得这是一个巨大成就，尽管目前我们面临财政紧缺问题。

你们刚刚推出了《Vampires!》，你认为这是怎样一款作品？

Vampires(from airbornegamer.com)

这是一款带有喜剧色彩的解谜游戏，其中混合了战略、解谜与动作题材。

你是如何设计这款游戏的？

它的来源十分有趣，它源于我们扩展CBE团队，其中加入了一位杰出的程序员Stepan Mracek，他既是编程方面的专家，并且在AI、数学等领域具有先进理念。

而且，我觉得是时候转变制作技术。《Ghost in the Sheet》、《J.U.L.I.A.》与《J.U.L.I.A. Untold》都是运用“Wintermute引擎”制作而成，但我知道，我们还需采用更复杂且更普遍的解决方案。毫无疑问，我已在《J.U.L.I.A.》这款游戏上将Wintermute的性能发挥到极致，这明显意味着，我再也无法在当前有限条件下完整地传递设计理念。公平而言，这种局限性显然是我以完全不同于引擎创作者意图的方式使用该引擎而造成的。

简而言之，我们打算制作出如同Unity引擎学习计划般小型、紧凑且设计精巧的游戏。历经多次迭代后，最终，我们得到了这个令人满意的游戏原型，接着，我们整合所有设计，取得现在这种紧凑效果。其实，我独爱这款游戏，因为我们在此投入了大量精力、创意与设计。而且我决定了那些可行元素，删除那些不可行元素，但总之，这是我们仨人的一场冒险活动。

在关卡设计上，大部分主要由Stepan负责设计，虽然Lukas与我也有参与其中。在此，我们的设计理念是，虽然我们拥有相同操控方案，但每个关卡应试图体现出稍微不同的玩法理念。虽然有些关卡完全遵循解谜模式，有些则更具节奏感（游戏邦注：比如，你应有节奏地将大蒜放在指定地点）。我们打算制定出多种不同关卡，我认为这是最佳设计选择。解谜模式不时呈现的新鲜感能给玩家带来惊喜。

有时，我们会困惑开发方向。是要打造休闲游戏？还是硬核游戏？这时，我们想到了奖励机制，而后做出多次调整，现在你可以选择游戏体验时长。我们已在其中尝试设置作为简单模式的基础棺材，而黄金棺材则具有较大难度，而且需要玩家进行额外思考。

难道你不担心同比更具普遍性的僵尸题材，吸血鬼题材会缺乏市场吗？

事实上，我从未考虑过这个问题。我不会为了随大流而遵循主流趋势。当然，如果我打算制作的游戏恰好符合当前趋势，那我也没必要逆流而行。但因为流行的是僵尸题材而制作这类游戏却并不是我的风格。

另一方面，我们总想在游戏中体现出自己的不同视角。以首款游戏《Ghost in the Sheet》为例，当时正好盛行恐怖幽灵与超自然故事。因此我们决定以包裹肮脏被单的幽灵为主角，制作出一个受到邪恶来世公司欺压的带有疯狂气质的超自然喜剧形象。

在制作吸血鬼游戏时，我们也采用相同做法。考虑到人人都把吸血鬼当作强大能力的化身。然而，我们却制作出具有疯狂酒鬼形象的吸血鬼，如果没有你的引导，它们常常会走进附近的陷阱。当然，我们也能自然而然地将此替代为无思想的僵尸形象，但我的僵尸可能会相当聪明，如果他们做出愚蠢行为，实则是为了误导人类。

为什么决定通过自己的商店发行《Vampires!》？

这基于多种原因。主要因为我们想为玩家提供最有效的DRM免费版本。在推出《J.U.L.I.A.》时，有个门户网站入侵了DRM版本，破坏了整款游戏——由于DRM版本中存在某些愚蠢算法，因此该游戏仅以每秒7帧的速率运行。幸好，我们找到了这个漏洞，并与玩家携手删除了整个入侵垃圾。因此在自己商店中，我能够确保自己总能立即发现并解决某些技术问题。这样，在发行商的技术支持并不显效的情况下，他们可以回到商店寻找更多游戏，而不是通过互联网呼唤我们出现。

另一关键原因是出于其简单经济模式。与发行商合作时，你常会听到五五开或三七分这类术语。其实，这是一种卑劣手段，即净收入分利。比如，我们的游戏定价为30欧元，如果你天真地认为，根据这种交易模式，你可以从每款游戏中创收15欧元，那你就错了。但事实上，会有个中间人与另一个中间人收取部分收益，最后，净收入只剩下5欧元。此时，你还需把这笔资产分为两份，最终只获得2.5欧元的收益，因为你还需缴纳税收。接着，你还需争取难以到手的报告单与发票支付；这需要很长一段时间……

通过自己商店推出《Vampiers!》时，我们将其定价为9.99美元，其中，我们只需支付云端托管费、PayPal费用，以及税收，但我们可以立马使用玩家支付的费用。这大大地减少了循环环节，方便我们真正掌控整个游戏。

当然，在运行自己商店时，我们应解决的真正挑战是说服玩家来访，为此，我们还需付出大量努力。

《Vampires!》属于各方面均十分出色的DRM免费游戏，而对于DRM与盗版现象，你有何看法？

无论是过去、现在还是未来，盗版现象无处不在。甚至追溯到我拥有C64的时代，仍存在不少快速破解复杂保护系统的高科技黑客。为自己产品添加DRM则会限制真正用户，因为解密高手不久便会推出DRM免费版本。大型的游戏公司可能会以法律方式解决这些问题，但我们独立开发商就无法做到。

我认为，这类问题根源并不在于“由于盗版行为，我失去大量盈利渠道”，而是“如果用户并不在意我们在游戏中投入的辛劳汗水，那我们为何还要制作游戏？”这种想法。在某种程度上，这极其类似大众融资心理。人们购买当前游戏的行为会决定我们是否制作下款作品。与大众融资不同的是，他们会迅速获得一款新作，且风险性较低。虽然这是当前大众融资领域的老套方式，但我仍十分困惑，为何人们愿意为那些劣质游戏掏钱。

同时，你们还着手开发创新型游戏《J.U.L.I.A.》；目前进展如何？

JULTA(from cbe-software)

这是三年辛勤劳作的成果。与《Ghost in the Sheet》不同的是，我们十分认真地对待这款游戏，在投入实际生产一年后，我否定掉整款游戏，回到绘制板，重新进行设计。比如，原来的《J.U.L.I.A.》版本中没有设置Rachel Manners这个角色。此时，我已将它原先发生在科技背景下的谜题收集模式，转换为有关单身女性，以及她与Mobot和J.U.L.I.A.关系纠葛的故事。

当然，其中还包含某些不同元素，总之，我十分满意这款游戏，以及其在无预算下达到的效果，我们是利用晚上空闲时间制作这款游戏。我相信，作为仅有两个人物的作品，该游戏会获得不错反响，而且，玩家给予的评价也令我十分满意。

然而，糟糕的是，我们在这款游戏中投入的三年辛劳汗水，并未获得收益上的回报。

保持创新，背离主流趋势是你们的主要目标吗？

我的目标是开发出具有价值的游戏。我们仍在为此奋斗着。我并不会为了创新性而制作独特游戏，但由于拥有大量游戏行业以外的创作灵感，我不会纯粹复制模版，因为我极容易受到外界影响。

你是否会考虑开发一些包含传统元素的项目？你相信美术视觉会成为重要元素吗？

在教授作曲课程时，也有学生咨询过类似问题。我认为，你做好真正的自己。当然，你必须从游戏，及生活中其它地方获得灵感，而复制现存模版更像工厂作业模式。而且，在有限的预算下，我们不会选择与大型开发商竞争。因此，我们只从事自己喜爱的项目，在每款游戏中加入自己拥有的所有创意。

对于未来，你有何打算？

目前，我们主要根据Lukas的创意创建一些特殊原型。我进行了大量研究调查，我不得不说，我感觉自己进入了一个完全新颖、独特且有趣的世界。其实，无需过多陈述，这又是一款包含神秘元素的故事游戏，同时也体现了某些现代方面。

但可笑的是，这都取决于《Vampires!》的成功！我们还能利用某些可能性，比如针对IndieGoGo活动以游戏演示样本创建原型，但我担心，由于我们不具备名气，因此即使这是个出色的原型，我们仍会失败。此外，大众集资者有点厌倦投资行为，他们首先得提供一些真正的游戏来吸引粉丝。我们希望，当代开发者不会因为未传递理想游戏而抹灭了创意。

另一方面，我们于2002年开始与Laura MacDonald合作，Lukas也在研究一款名为《Destinies》的大型冒险游戏。已经过去10个年头了，该游戏仍未成型，尽管我们在其中投入大量精力。基于我们当前具备的技能与技术，我们相信这会是一款佳作。当然，我们不可能在毫无预算的前提下实现，但如果我不得不选择开发某款游戏，答案肯定是《Destinies》。（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）

CBE’s Jan Kavan on Vampires!, J.U.L.I.A., Zombies and Being Indie

by Konstantinos Dimopoulos

Jan Kavan of CBE Software, the indie studio responsible for the freshly released Vampires! and innovative adventure J.U.L.I.A. is answering all our questions. All of them! Without fear or remorse.

Here:

Hey Jan. You seem like a man of many talents. Care to introduce yourself to our wise readers?

Thank you! My name is Jan Kavan and I am composer, cello player, indie game developer and writer. While those are my main talents, I am also extremely talented in signing bad publishing contracts and regretting it later.

I have a professional background in music composition having studied at Janacek’s Academy of Performing Arts in Brno and cello at the conservatory in Teplice. Currently I lead software development in a company which does business software solutions and I am co-owner of CBE software; an independent game development company.

And who are CBE?

Originally CBE started as Cardboard Box Entertainment. Back then we were just two bedroom developers, me and Lukas Medek, who is a visual artist, and we were putting our games together over the internet and our infrequent meetings. However in 2011 this changed and we’ve started a real company called CBE software s.r.o. This was a big leap for CBE as we now have our offices where we can work much more efficiently. Since we are big fans of Agile we were able to get three games out this year.

I feel this as a big achievement even if we’re currently financially struggling because of my aforementioned talent.

You’ve just released Vampires!. How would you describe it?

Comedy puzzler where drunken bobbleheaded ignorants meet reversed tower defense. It’s a genre mix where strategy, puzzle and action meet fun. And mainly – our vampires don’t glitter.

What was your design process?

This game has a funny genesis which stemmed from the fact that we’ve extended our CBE ranks with a new excellent programmer, Stepan Mracek, who is an expert not only in programming but also in advanced concepts like Artificial Intelligence, math etc.

I was also feeling that it’s about time we should switch our technology. Ghost in the Sheet, J.U.L.I.A. and J.U.L.I.A. Untold were created using the awesome “Wintermute Engine”, but I already knew that we needed to use a more complex and universal solution. With J.U.L.I.A. I’ve definitely reached the boundaries of Wintermute and it was for me obvious, that I can no longer fully deliver my design ideas with the current limitations. To be fair though, the limitations were obviously a result of me using the engine in absolutely different ways than the engine creator intended.

So to make it short, we wanted to do something small, compact and design-wise tight as a Unity engine learning project. After many iterations we finally came up with a prototype which we were confident with and we’ve started to tidy up the design so it would feel as compact as it’s now. The fact I loved about this game the most is that we’ve all put quite a lot of ourselves, our ideas and design into the game. It was up to me to select things which work and remove things which don’t but it was a fully joint venture of all three of us.

When it comes to level design, the majority of levels were designed by Stepan even if I and Lukas have our levels in the game as well. Our design idea about levels was that while we have the same control scheme, each level tries to present a slightly different gameplay idea. While some of the levels are strictly a puzzle, others are more rhythmical (e.g. you need to rhythmically place garlic to certain spots). We’ve tried to put a whole deal of variety in the levels and I feel that it was a good design choice. There is always a fresh take on puzzle solving which can surprise players.

For quite some time we’ve struggled with our personal direction. Is it a casual or a hardcore game? Then we’ve come up with the medal awards and did a lot of fine-tuning and nowadays you can choose how much you want to be involved with the game. We’ve tried to put the basic (wooden) coffin as an easy mode while golden coffins are often very hard and require a lot of out-of-the-box thinking.

Weren’t you afraid of going for vampires instead of the far more common zombies?

This is actually not how I think at all. I am not interested in following the mainstream just for the sake of flowing with the stream. Sure, if there was a game I desired to do and which would coincide with the current trends, why not? But doing a zombie game just because it’s trendy is not my style.

Another thing is that we always try to put things into different light in our games. Take our first game for example – Ghost in the Sheet. It was at the times when it was trendy to do scary ghost or paranormal stories. So we took the ghost, wrapped him in a dirty sheet and made a crazy paranormal comedy about the ghost who is being oppressed by an evil afterlife corporation.

The same goes with vampires. Everybody perceives them as a powerful force which should be taken into account. However our vampires are crazy drunken bobble heads who are so ignorant that without you they just walk away into the nearest trap. It would have been more natural to use zombies instead, who are mindless anyway, but my zombies would probably be pretty clever and if they acted mindlessly, they would do it just to misdirect humans.

Oh, and why did you decide on releasing Vampires! via your very own store?

There are many reasons. Main reason is that we want to provide players with the best available support and DRM free version. When J.U.L.I.A. was released, one of the portals put such an intrusive DRM that they broke the game – it would run in 7 fps because of some stupid algorithms inside the DRM. Out of sheer luck I’ve found out and worked together with players to remove that intrusive piece of junk. So in our store I will be always sure that we’ll meet and solve the technical issues immediately and our players in turn will come back for more games rather than having to hunt me over the internet when the publisher’s tech support is almost non-existent.

Another key reason is simple economy. When you go with a publisher, you often hear of terms like 50/50 or 70/30 etc. In reality this is a nasty trick. It’s a percentage of net incomes. Let’s say your game costs 30 Euro and if you’re naive you’d expect to get 15 Euro per copy from such a deal. But in reality there is middle man and yet another middle man and at the end of the chain the net income is 5 Eur. You divide it by 2 and get 2.5 Euro / copy which you have to tax. And poor players had to cash out 30 Euro which is quite a lot of money. Then you have to fight for reports and invoice payments which never arrive; ancient stories…

When we release “Vampires!” using our store and charge $9.99 for it, we only have to pay for cloud hosting, PayPal fees and taxes, but we can immediately use the money which our kind players pay to us. This greatly cuts down the loop and puts us in real control.

The real challenge to run our own store is of course to convince people that they should actually come over, but we’re working on it really hard.

Vampires! comes all nice and DRM-free, but what are your thoughts on DRM? On piracy?

Piracy was, piracy is and piracy will always be. Even back in times when I owned a C64 there were extremely skilled crackers who cracked very sophisticated protections really fast. Putting DRM in your product just punishes the real customers because crackers will very soon release the DRM free version anyway. Big companies might have legal ways to dealing with this, but we Indies don’t have such means.

So, in my mind, the problem doesn’t lie in “I’ve lost money because of pirates”, but “if people don’t care about us enough to pay for the hard work we invest into our games, why should we make them?” In a way it’s similar to the crowdfunding mentality. People decide if we make our NEXT game by buying the current one. Unlike the crowdfunding though they immediately get a new game to play so their risk is lower. While this is – in the current crowdfunded world – an oldschool approach, I still wonder why people nowadays tend to give more money for games which aren’t rather than for those which are.

You have also worked on the wildly unique J.U.L.I.A.; how did this project go?

It was three years of hard learning. Unlike Ghost in the Sheet, we took the game really seriously and after one year of real production I had entirely destroyed the game and decided to go back tothe drawing board to fully redesign it. The original J.U.L.I.A. for example didn’t have any Rachel Manners in it. I’ve switched the game from a puzzle collection in sci-fi setting into a chamber tale about a lonely woman and her relationship with Mobot and J.U.L.I.A.

There are surely things I would have done differently now, but generally I am really happy with the game and with how it turned out given our no-budget state and making the game in our spare time over nights. I believe that, as a work of a mere two persons, this game ended up quite well and, what’s more, I am happy with the reviews.

The dark side is that we never received a single cent from the game which brought us into very bad position after three years of such hard work.

Does innovation and staying away from mainstream trends feel like an important goal?

My goal is to make games that matter. And we are still on our way towards that goal. I don’t do innovation just for the sake of being innovative, but with all the inspiration outside the game industry, I am not able to merely copy formulas, since I always get sidetracked with too many external influences.

Ever contemplated doing something more, well, traditional or are you confident that an artistic vision is worth pursuing?

When I teach composition, my students sometimes ask me such questions. My opinion is that you should be your own person. Surely you have to borrow inspiration from games as well as from other places you encounter in your life, but copying some existing formulas sounds more like factory work to me. Moreover with such limited budgets we operate on we can’t compete with the big guys. So we just do what we love and put everything we have into finish each game.

What are your plans for the future?

We are currently prototyping something really special based upon an idea of Lukas. I am doing lots and lots of research and I have to say that it’s an entirely original, unique and fascinating world I got myself into. Without telling too much, it once again is a strongly story-based game with a lot of mysticism involved, but also some rather modern aspects.

But enough with the teasing! It all depends on the success of Vampires! There are a few possibilities, one of them is using the finished prototype in the form of a playable demo for an IndieGoGo campaign, but my fear is that we are not that famous and we would probably fail even if the prototype starts looking absolutely amazing. Besides the crowdfunders are a bit tired from their investments and they need to get some real games first to support the idea. Let’s hope the current generation won’t kill the idea by not delivering what was promised.

There’s another thing – in 2002 we’ve started working with Laura MacDonald and Lukas on a huge adventure game called Destinies. It’s been ten years already and the game still hasn’t been made, even after the enormous effort we’ve put in. With our current skills and technology it could now be a fantastic game. Of course we wouldn’t be able to do such a thing without a budget, but if I had to choose one single game to do, it would have to be Destinies.(source:indiegame)