作者：Mike Rose

许多工作室现在正打算针对手机和PC平台制作和发布游戏，但可以说许多人的这一过程并不顺利。

不管是各个版本所采用的商业模式，有所区别的目标用户，还是不适用于目标平台的控制方式，创造兼容手机和PC平台的完美游戏都是一个棘手目标。

Kitfox Games就是这种以roguelike游戏《Shattered Planet》实现了这一目标的工作室。该游戏于今年初以免费模式在手机平台发布，本月初又以付费游戏的身份登陆PC平台。同一款游戏却采用了截然不同的商业模式。

他们究竟是如何做到的呢，其结果是否与预期一致？该工作室创意总监Tanya X.Short在本文讲述了其中的经历，并为打算开发手机/PC跨平台游戏的工作室提供了5点建议。

1.在动手前确定你的目标，将其作为指南针。

我是一名设计师。我不喜欢思考商业运营方面的事情。

我们在共同合作之前都是陌生人——我们喜欢彼此的作品集，我们也曾经愉快地喝过一次咖啡，之后我们突然就在一起制作游戏了。在第三周时，我们自问：我们可以从中获得什么？除了只是“完成一款游戏”之外？

我们的首要目标就是获是许多下载量（或人气）吗？

还是说赚到一定数量的钱（或者实现经济上的自给自足）？

还是获得较高的评价得分（或者广泛赞誉）？

shattered planet(from gamasutra)

这些对我们来说都很重要，而在确定要制作一款免费手机版本之时：下载量的重要性超越一切。我们想让人们知道Kitfox，也想提高自己的收入，并以此赢得一些好评。我们未来游戏的目标可能与此不同，现在我们觉得自己聚集了一个小型但忠诚的用户群体（Kitfox有许多成员还负有债务，无法在零报酬的情况下工作，所以我们必须能够自给自足）。

确定这些对我们来说极为重要，尤其是在我们开发半途过程中开始怀疑自己的方向之时。团队多数人并不是太赞成大多数免费游戏的盈利模式，并且还有不少自我标榜为“硬核”玩家的群体一向以憎恶所有并非出自Valve或Riot公司之手的免费游戏为豪。

最终，我们决定厚着脸皮，走自己的路，让憎恨者去憎恨吧。但我不知道我们是否能够遵从计划行事，以及我们是否确定自己的项目首要任务。在最激烈的时刻，风险似乎显得更为紧迫了。

2.尽早和及时进行玩法测试。

我们一直测试到觉得可以将游戏展示给任何人看为止。作为无名的独立开发者，创造糟糕的第一印象这种感觉太可怕了——即使是一点糟糕的口碑都可能被无限放大。

但一定要勇敢！这值得一试！事实上，我相似如果没有测试我们根本不可能做出《Shattered Planet》。只要进行足够的润色（在你90％的功能投入开发之前），玩家就可以在未告知如何操作的情况下自己琢磨出怎么控制游戏。然后你只需坐在一边观察他们玩游戏即可。

我们在《Shattered Planet》还只有一个小人在方块上行走之时就开始测试了。这个小人能够击打和杀死一个敌人，但除此之外什么都没有了——游戏中只有一个关卡（没有程序生成关卡），没有装备，没有升级，什么都没有！我们从测试中学到许多知识，我们必须每隔数周就进行一次测试。我们针对手机版本进行内部事后分析时，甚至希望我们进行更多次测试。

作为题外话，我们过后还会让人们填一份标准化表格，这样有利于搜集更多普遍意见（例如“你对游戏不满的地方是什么？”），这也有利于我们用统计特征的方法将玩家的表现与反馈对应起来。鉴别出3号测试者只在移动设备上玩免费游戏对我们来说是个很有帮助的信息，因为这类玩家的游戏习惯与仅体验付费Steam游戏的用户并不相同。

3.做好大调整的准备。留有余地，以免措手不及。

这是之前两个要点的结合。

如果你有一个明确的目标，你也测试了，你就会看到自己并没有正确朝目标迈进。例如，游戏的易用性很糟糕。如果核心玩法正如你所预期的那样，偏偏辅助功能却会出差错。

这当然是你的制作人大脑（及时交付任务）以及你的设计师大脑（让游戏更棒）之间的权衡，并且会根据你的项目目标来决定谁会占上风。我们已经在计划中添加了一个月的润色期，但我们过后却将其挪用了，就是为了在手机版本发布前添加一个更为健全的进程系统……之后我们意识到这对游戏成功影响甚大。

你游戏的特定要求可能有所不同，但其潜在问题（某些缺失/错误）和解决方案（根本上改变某些东西）也很可能一样。另一方面，我们还可以用这些目标来选择需要取舍的功能。

4.优化。

我们过去一直面向PC平台来创建游戏。我们主要在PC上进行测试。作为游戏玩家，开发团队主要在PC上玩游戏。当我们在iOS和Android平台测试游戏时，我们就使用了iPad 4、iPad Mini、Nexus 7和三星Tab 2，外加其他一些新款手机。现在的移动硬件更加出色了，我们的独立游戏并不是特别繁琐，我们当时认为要创造这种游戏简单易如反掌。

之后我们发布了《Shattered Planet》并且结果令我们大吃一惊！它在低端设备上的运行情况很垃圾，这花费了我们更多时间和精力来运行其破损的控制方式。我们并没有预留足够的时间来优化游戏。我们一直在说“等我们完成主要的漏洞修复后，自然会做这些非必要的优化……”但实际上漏洞修复永无止境，尤其是在你优化得还不够的时候。

在此我个人要向在自己的低端手机上遭遇了崩溃、延迟等游戏问题的玩家致歉！

5.考虑首先在Steam发布？

我们的策略一直很管用，我们今晨跻身Steam畅销榜单第28名，这对于没有营销预算的无名小卒来说已经是很棒的成绩了。当然那3万次移动版本的下载量也发挥了作用，我们做到了！

但是，我们还是得忍受一些针对免费模式的粗鲁评价，以及无端鄙视游戏或开发团队的批评（“这不过是一款手机游戏”，“手机移植版本”）。主机和PC玩家中的确存在一些势利刻薄之人。如果我们的目标就是“发布自己的游戏”，也许刚开始针对Steam创造游戏，之后再向移动平台进军更适合我们。

我们的下款游戏《Moon Hunters》是针对桌面和主机平台而开发，也许会推出一个仅含核心系统的“预览应用”。如果这样，我们可能会放弃免费盈利模式，完全免费开放。（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）

5 tips for making a cross-platform game for mobile and PC Exclusive

By Mike Rose

Many studios right now are attempting to build and release games for both mobile and PC platforms, and it’s fair to say that many such attempts aren’t going off without a hitch.

Whether it’s the business model injected into each version of the game, the separate intended audiences, or simply the control scheme not being great for either platform, it can be a tricky goal to build the perfect game for both mobile and PC.

Kitfox Games is one such studio that attempted this feat with its roguelike Shattered Planet. The game launched on mobile earlier this year as a free-to-play game, and earlier this month launched on PC as a premium game with no in-app purchases. Same game, completely different business model.

How did they pull this off then, and did it go as expected? I talked to creative director Tanya X. Short about the experience, and she offered five tips for studios planning to attempt the mobile/PC cross-platform angle themselves.

1. Define your goals before-hand. Use them as a compass during the storms.

I’m a designer. I don’t like thinking about business stuff.

But it turned out to be important that we did. We were all strangers before working together – we liked each others’ portfolios and we had a nice coffee together once, and then suddenly there we were, making a game. In week three, we asked ourselves: what do we want to get out of this? Other than just ‘finish a game’?

Is our number one goal to get lots of downloads (aka popularity)?

Or is it to make a certain amount of money (aka be financially sustainable)?

Or get good review scores (aka critical acclaim)?

Those were in order of importance for us, when deciding to make the free-to-play mobile version: downloads above all else. We wanted to get the word out about Kitfox, and we were willing to take a hit to our income and review scores in exchange. Our goals are likely to be different for future games, now that we feel we’ve gathered a small but loyal fanbase. (And in case you’re curious, multiple members of Kitfox are in debt and can’t afford to go to $0, so we have to become sustainable somehow.)

Shattered Planet

It was extremely important that we defined those, especially when half-way through development we started doubting our direction. Most of the team isn’t comfortable with the monetization of most free-to-play games, and we knew a vocal portion of self-labelled ‘hardcore’ gamers are loud and proud about hating all free-to-play that isn’t made by Valve or Riot.

In the end, we decided to thicken our skin. Haters gonna hate. But I don’t know if we would have been able to follow through with the plan, if we weren’t certain of our business priorities, as a team. The risks seem much more imminent when you’re in the thick of it.

2. Playtest early and often. Playtest now.

We playtested way before we were comfortable showing it to anyone. For unknown indies, it can feel especially terrifying to make a bad first impression – even one bad bit of word-of-mouth can feel disproportionately powerful in a vacuum.

But be brave! It’s worth it! In fact, it’s so essential, I’m confident we couldn’t have made Shattered Planet at all without it. Put in just enough polish (yes, before 90 percent of your features are working) that players can figure out what to do without telling them the controls, and step back. Watch what happens.

We did this back when Shattered Planet was really just a little man walking on cubes. He could technically punch and kill one enemy, but there was nothing else — there was only one level (no procedural generation), no equipment, no leveling up, nothing! And we learned so much, we had to keep doing it every few weeks. In our internal post-mortem on the mobile version, we actually wish we had done it more.

As a side-note, we also had a standardised form for people to fill out afterwards, which would not only collect more general opinions (“What did you dislike about the game?” etc), but it also helped us match their performance/feedback with a demographic. Being able to identify that Tester #3 was someone who plays only free-to-play games on mobile was helpful, since they tend to play differently than someone who plays only premium Steam games.

3. Be ready to make deep cuts and/or big changes. Protect your buffer, so you can eat it.

This is a natural result of the previous two. Tip 1 + Tip 2 = Tip 3.

If you have a clear direction, and you playtest, you’ll see that you’re not on track to meet your goals, for whatever reason. Usability will be terrible. If the core gameplay works like you imagined (congratulations), the auxiliary features will get in the way.

This, of course, is a negotiation between your Producer brain (Deliver on time!) and your Designer brain (Make it better!), and depending on your business goals, one or the other must win. We had padded a month of polish into our schedule, which we then devoured in order to add a more robust progression system before mobile release… and later we realised that was a huge part of the game’s success.

The specifics will be something different with your game, but the underlying problem (something missing/wrong) and solution (change something fundamental) is likely to be the same. On the other side of the coin, we could also use those goals to choose which features to cut (most of them) and which to keep.

4. Optimise. No, really, optimise.

We built our game always intending to release on PC. We primarily tested on PC. As gamers, the dev team primarily play on PC for fun. When we tested on iOS and Android, we used an iPad 4, iPad Mini, Nexus 7, and Samsung Tab 2, plus a couple of (newish) phones. Mobile hardware is getting pretty great, and our little indie game wasn’t anything particularly taxing; we thought it’d be a cakewalk.

Then we released Shattered Planet, and surprise! It ran like garbage on lower-end devices. That probably cost us more time and energy running damage control than it needed to. We didn’t set aside nearly enough time for optimisation. We kept saying “Yeah, we’ll do those non-essential optimisations after we finish major bugfixing” … which basically never stops, especially if you haven’t optimised enough. “Is that crash from logic or memory?” shouldn’t be a catch-phrase.

My personal apologies to all of you who suffered lag, crashes, and overheating on your poor little phones!

5. Consider going to Steam first?

So, this might be a little tongue-in-cheek, since our strategy looks to be working for us. We peaked at the 28th top seller on Steam this morning, which is great for some nobodies without a marketing budget! Surely those 300,000 mobile downloads helped! We did it!

But.

We have had to endure some brutal reviews that clearly had a grudge against free-to-play, and dozens of critics dismissing either the game or the dev team out of hand (“just a mobile game”, “mobile port”, “mobile studio pfft”). There is some serious snobbery among console and PC gamers. If the goal really was to ‘get our name out there’, maybe building for Steam from the outset and then going to mobile would have been better for our image. I genuinely don’t know.

For our next game Moon Hunters, we’re building towards desktop and console, with a potential for a “preview app” with just the core systems. If so, we’ll probably just do away with free-to-play monetization altogether and release it completely free. But hey, maybe by then premium mobile games will be back in style… （source：gamasutra）