作者：Iain Hunter

我在手机游戏工作室工作差不多6个月了。尽管工作紧张，我们才推出第一款游戏。我作为制作人，有幸出现在工作人员名单中。在游戏发布的24小时内，就获得了500次下载量，我感到非常高兴。

我希望工作室里的那些行业经验有限的人能越做越好。

我希望在精神崩溃以前写下我们在开发过程中吸取的教训。

技术行业吸引了大量聪明人，当你刚入行时，你可能会为人才之众感到相当震惊。我们怎么跟EA竞争，我们怎么跟微软拼命，但你可以的——只要你始终保持迅速前进，尽量把产品投入市场。

以下是新工作室在行业竞争中求生的10条原则：

start-up(from under30ceo.com)

1、坚持计划：团队每天至少会说一次“坚持计划”。只有当你明确方向时，你才能快速前进。计划必须足够详尽，这样当情况有偏差时你才能有所察觉。当新工作室高速运作时，会面临各种各样的变数。而如果你已计划好一切，你就可以轻易地对变动说“不”——我们坚持按计划进行。

2、反应：“坚持计划”的推论就是——不要总是坚持计划。最终，你必然会发现你的计划赶不上变化：某功能崩溃了、某成员无法完成某任务等。根据这些迹象改变你的计划，使计划更好地指导工作。

3、保持有序和混乱之间的界线：推论的推论就是，保持敏感，在你的限度内放纵。不要一次改变所有东西，按优先顺序处理问题，学会适应变数。

4、第一次不成功是正常的：大多数新工作室可能只有3年或更少的时间来证明自己的赢利能力，所以越早把握市场动向越好。新工作室花两年时间搞开发是一个大风险，最好能在两年内发布4-6款MVP产品（游戏邦注：MVP产品是指Minimum Viable Product，即“最小可行产品”，是一种用于对产品或产品特征进行迅速的和量化的市场测试的策略，广泛运用于应用开发）或对已有产品进行重大更新。

5、有疑问时选择最简单的：当面临选择时，最安全的赌注就是选择最简单的解决方案。如果你错了，至少你能更快发觉。以我的经验，十有八九最简单的就是最好的。估计得太多和复杂的解决办法通常风险也大。

6、尽快交付产品：我们花了数周时间开发的某个特征还是被苹果否决了。所以，如果我们不尽早交付，我们就有可能浪费更多人力和时间在一种我们不得不放弃的功能上。

7、过份追求完美是大敌：优化功能、解决漏洞、再花几天做QA等，都会让你觉得更稳妥。但如果你的产品已经足够好了，那就发布吧，让真正的数据说话，而不是反复猜想。虽然我们知道应用中存在20个问题，但那些都是我们可以忍受的问题。如果没有人下载你的应用，你最好3个月后就知道问题所在，而不是6个月后，因为你可以把另外的3个月用于做其他事。

8、扬长避短：你必须了解自己的团队的优势和弱势是什么。但是，随着团队发展，可能之前你认为是优势的东西会变成劣势，所以你要相应地改变计划。如果你需要更多人力或合作者，尽量寻找自由职业者，除非你发现你确实有必要/有财力雇用全职员工。

9、不要奢望你不具备条件拥有的东西：不要浪费时间在跟风上。如果你有一支PHP程序员团队，那就好好用PHP，不要指望做更时髦的Ruby（游戏邦注：这是一种简单快捷的面向对象程序设计的脚本语言）。（参见第8条）

10、粗糙的网站得到3万浏览量：我们做的第一件事就是发布网站，我们并不是冲着任何设计奖项去的。然而，我们做了一些设计更新，弥补了之前存在的缺陷。在第一个版本中，游客人数达到30000，注册量达到3000，也就是说转化率为10%。我们有了一些信心，因为这个比例说明我们有市场。如果我们一直等到一切问题都解决了，我们就不可能有信心或得到这么高的转化率（参见第7条）。

10.1、给投资者信心：如果你可以向你的投资者展示一些有形的、可操作的东西，他们的投资信心和意愿就会增加。他们不可能带着燃尽图 （游戏邦注：燃尽图，即burndown chart，是在项目完成之前，对需要完成的工作的一种可视化表示）去银行的。

总之，尽早交付产品，保持敏锐，不断努力。（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）

Startups: the importance of momentum

By Iain Hunter

I’ve been working in my present job in a mobile games studio for about 6 months.  It’s been pretty intense, but we just shipped our first game.  I produced it, I’ve got my name in the credits, and it got 500 downloads within 24 hours of being launched, so I’m very pleased, and I expect things to only get better   Not bad for a bunch of guys with limited experience in the gaming industry.

I wanted to blog some thoughts about lessons I’ve drawn as we’ve gone along, before the nervous breakdown hits.  First up – The Importance of Momentum.

The technology industry attracts a lot of smart people, which can be pretty intimidating when you’re starting out.  How can we compete with EA, how can we compete with Microsoft, but you can – as long as you keep moving quickly and get your products into the marketplace.

Here’s the top 10 ways and rationale for acting like a shark, and keeping on swimming:

1.  Stick to the Plan – At least once a day one of the team will say “Stick to the Plan”.  You can only move fast if you have a good idea of where you’re heading.  Plans need enough detail so you can spot when things are starting to wobble.  When things are moving at 90 miles per hour, as they do in a startup, there are all sorts of variables that will be thrown at you.  If you have a plan you can easily say No – we’re sticking to the plan.

2.  React – The corollary to Stick to the Plan is – don’t always stick to the plan.  Over time you’ll inevitably be presented with evidence that your plan isn’t working.  Feature X is bogged down, Team Member Y is struggling with task Z etc etc.  React to this evidence and change your plan, make a new better plan and hit the accelerator again.

3.  There’s a fine line between order and chaos – The corollary to the corollary is being sensible enough to hit the brakes and drive within your limits (to push the metaphor).  Don’t change everything at once, prioritise problems and learn to live with uncertainty.

4.  You ain’t going to get it right first time – Most startups will probably have 3 years, or less, to demonstrate they can make money, so the earlier you can get some traction in the marketplace the better.  Spending 2 years in development, is a big risk, much better to ship 4-6 products or significant updates in that time (see the MVP).

5.  If in doubt, keep it simple – When faced with a choice, the safest bet is to go for the simplest solution.  If you’re wrong at least you’ll find out sooner, and in my experience simplest is best 9 times out of 10.  Large estimates and complex solutions have red flags all over them. (see YAGNI)

6.  Shipping teaches tough lessons – A feature we spent a number of weeks developing was rejected by Apple.  If we hadn’t shipped early we’d have wasted additional man-hours on a feature that we had to remove.

7.  Perfect is the enemy of good-enough – It’s comforting to gold-plate features, nail another bug, spend another few days in QA, optimise a bit more.  But if your product is good-enough, ship it, then react to real-world data, rather than second guess.  We went live with 20 known issues, but they were all issues we could live with.  If no-one downloads it, you’re much better to know after 3 months, rather than 6, as you could have spent the previous 3 months doing something different.

8.  Play to your strengths – It’s important to recognise where the strengths and weaknesses of your team lie.  Over time what you thought was a strength may prove to be a weakness, so change your plan.  Where you have gaps, either hire, or better, partner and use freelance resource until you can demonstrate you have the need/resource for a full time employee.

9.  Don’t wish for what you don’t have – Don’t waste time on toying with the latest fads.  If you have a team of PHP programmers just write PHP as much as you might wish for a team of hipster Rubyists (see play to your strengths).

10.  My rushed site got 30,000 views – One of the first things we did was launch a website which we’d be the first to admit isn’t going to win any design awards.  However, we’re working on an updated design that addresses some of the original’s shortcomings.  In the time version 1’s been live we got 30,000 visitors and 3000 sign-ups, a 10% conversion rate that gave us some confidence we had a market.  If we’d waited until everything was addressed we wouldn’t have the confidence or the numbers (see perfect is the enemy of good enough).

10.1 Investors like momentum – If you can show your investors something tangible that they can see and play with, their confidence and happiness will increase (and you WANT happy/confident investors).  They can’t take a burndown chart to the bank.

So in summary, ship early, be agile in the truest sense, and keep moving.(source:gamesbrief)