作者：Erik Pojar

不要因为任何人的只言片语而认为游戏开发者都是一群懒惰的人。这群人是真正凭借着对待生活的热情而生存着，并且通常是以牺牲家庭，美食和睡眠时间为代价。

在Socialspiel，我们刚于8月1日面向世界市场发行了《Legacy Quest》，所以我们仍然希望并期待着玩家可以注意到这个大型项目。我们同时也松了一口气。因为这一切进展的比我们想象中的顺利。虽然我们还是未实现我们所希望的成功，但我们的团队却不需要再疯狂地熬夜并将每个周末都投入于游戏创造中了。

这能帮助我们的所有开发者拥有与像Rockstar Game和Facebook等技术巨头合作的经验。我们已经发行过一款备受赞赏的游戏《Asterix & Friends》。不过最重要的还是我们与免费在线游戏中的一大佼佼者Nexon Co.Ltd拥有合作关系。

但不管怎样我们仍然是一家独立工作室，即我们仍是那些白手起家创建起Socialspiel的开发者。我们并未将雇员禁锢于他们所创造的幻想世界中，我们也并未将其限制在有限的工作周期内。这便是我们从AAA级游戏世界所获得的集体经验，并且这能够真正造福于我们的团队合作过程并优化我们的生产流程。

legacy quest(from gamasutra)

少回头

比起许多独立工作室会从估算要加多少班才能完成项目而开始，我们选择专注于压缩周转时间。这主要也多亏于我们的数据导向型游戏设计方法。

例如当开发者想要改变游戏中的一个组件时，他们便可以在谷歌的电子表格中快速编辑或添加公式去判断全新参数是否合理。如果一切进展顺利的话他们便可以将表格输出到JSON文件中并重新创造新的游戏组件。为此开发者能够节省下一个半小时的时间并且不需要再向应用商店提交重新创建的内容，从而能够有效避免惹恼玩家。也就是开发者可以直接将改变后的内容上传到游戏中。

利用科技

你可以说我们是奇葩，但是当我们真正被说服去做某些重复且单调的事时，我们都会想尽办法去应对它们。我们会不断修补技术直至这种无聊变成一种机械化。这也是提高生产力并缩短返工次数的关键部分。我们也会承诺提供给每个做出贡献的成员他们需要去完成自己工作的工具。

程序员通常都会接受这样情况，而相比之下设计师和美术师则需要想办法去适应这种情况。所以我们会鼓励他们去搞清楚程序员是如何自动执行那些可能阻碍创造性发挥的讨厌且重复的任务。反过来我门也会让程序员去划分那些要求的先后次序。一旦所有人都拥有最佳状态，我们的开发速度也会随之提高。

关于这点的一个例子便是我们的关卡编辑者。即比起反复设计同样的内容，他们整个团队创造出了一个Unity附加组件并让美术师能够快速创造出房间的布局。一旦有人想出一个基本的房间架构，他们便可以有效地改变房间的风格与设置。

或许在我们公司最常使用的工具要数版本控制了，即我们使用了Perforce服务器和版本引擎去强化自动架构和持续交付过程。而为了做到这点我们为开发架构分段架构和实时架构分配了不同的服务器。当我们每天在运行自动架构时，它们将直接进入Perfoce资源库和每日开发架构中并与主线实现同步，最终为每个平台创造出最新的游戏版本。如果我们想要运行一个分段架构或实时架构，我们便会让架构部分使用来自Perfoece中的各种组件去自动执行，发送并完成架构。而如果我们不能为不同架构创造不同服务器，团队成员就不得不每次都回顾之前的某些内容，并因此对剩下的开发过程造成不好的影响。

这是个陷阱！

有不少独立工作室都拥有程序设计能够加速关卡设计的错误想法，但我们必须提醒这些工作室们，在丢弃手动设计系统前必须三思。依赖于程序设计的最糟糕的情况便是可能导致玩家进程出现一些大问题，即甚至可能创造出一些不可游戏的世界。这是我们所获取的经验教训，但所幸我们也快速意识到自己并不想要依赖于程序设计的随机性去创造核心的游戏空间元素。而这并不是说程序设计便毫无用武之处，相反地，如果你拥有足够的经费去做好它你便能够从中获得一些真正的价值。

创造出好的第一印象是很困难的

你必须成为你们游戏最大的批评家，但同时你也可能是你们游戏最忠实的粉丝。手机游戏产业中的现实就是，你不可能拥有几个小时的时间去吸引玩家的注意，通常你只有几秒钟的时间，或者足够幸运的你能够拥有几分钟的时间。在《Legacy Quest》的测试过程中，因为玩家提供了许多有关游戏概念，美感和游戏玩法的正面反馈，所以我们便对游戏发行和下载量充满信心。但最终我们却发现许多玩家在我们所谓的非常标准化的教程最后选择了退出游戏。如果人们对你的游戏的第一印象不怎么样，你便很难再获得第二次机会了。

legacy quest(from gamasutra)

结论

5年半前，5个前Rockstar Games的工作人员走到了一起并创建起了Socialspiel。那时候的我们体会到了最痛苦的工作经历，而我们仅剩的优势便是我们都理解创造真正高质量游戏所具有的挑战。我们将自己从AAA级游戏产业中所学到的一切应用于此并努力去灵活地应对各种改变。

如今的游戏产业正在经历着一场重要的变革，即现在的游戏正在便得更加复杂，即使是来自手机平台上的游戏。现在的你也不再需要AAA级游戏预算才能创造出一款成功的游戏，但同时独立游戏创造也绝非儿戏，这是一项真正的业务。如果独立工作室可以执行最佳敏捷开发并适应游戏周期循环去做出改变，他们便有可能在市场中找到自己的立足地并成为那个被幸运所眷顾的对象。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Bringing High-Budget Game Development Best Practices to Your Indie Studio

by Erik Pojar

Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking game developers are a lazy bunch. These are the folks — we are the folks — that live and breath our life’s passion, often sacrificing family, food, and sleep in the process.

Because we at Socialspiel just launched “Legacy Quest” worldwide on August 1, we’re still riding out that giddy feeling of hope and anticipation you get at the end of a big project. And we’re still letting out a sigh of relief. As in, that went much smoother than it could have. We still haven’t achieved the level of world dominance we had hoped for, but our team didn’t have to pull any crazy all-nighters or give up all of their hard-earned weekends to fulfill our vision for the game.

It helps that almost all of our developers came to us with extensive experience working at tech giants like Rockstar Games and Facebook. We had already released an award-winning title, “Asterix & Friends.” Most importantly, we had an amazing partnership with one of the industry’s leaders in free-to-play online games, Nexon Co. Ltd. (Nexon).

But at our core, we’re still an indie studio, developers who built Socialspiel from the ground up. We didn’t lock our employees in a dungeon befit for the fantasy world they were creating or leave them to suffer through grueling crunch cycles. This is how we used our collective experience in the triple-A gaming world to continually evaluate our team processes and optimize our production pipeline.

Turn Around

Instead of starting a project by calculating crunch into the schedule like many indie studios, we focus on shortening turnaround cycles. This is possible thanks to our data-oriented approach to game design.

For example, when developers want to make a change to a bundle, or component of the game, they can quickly edit or add formulas in a Google spreadsheet to determine if the new parameters make sense. If all goes well, they export the spreadsheet to a JSON document and rebuild the asset bundle. Developers save up to an hour and a half in the process and don’t have to submit another rebuild to the app store, annoying players in the process. Instead, they upload changes directly into the live game.

Tap into Tech

Call us geeks, but when we get roped into doing something repetitive and monotonous, we usually figure out a way to get around doing it ourselves. We tinker with technology until boring equals automated. It’s also another key component to enhancing productivity and shortening turnaround times. We commit to getting each and every contributor the tools they need to fulfill their jobs.

Programmers don’t usually seem to have any trouble with this one, however designers and artists usually need a little coaxing to get used to the idea. We encourage them to be on the lookout for ways that programmers can automate pesky, repetitive tasks that keep them from fully unleashing their creativity. In turn, programmers are asked to prioritize those requests. Once everyone gets into that mindset, the pace picks up.

One example of this is our level editor. Instead of painfully redesigning the same things over and over again, the team created an add-on to Unity so that artists could quickly create the layout of a room. Once someone brings up a basic room structure, they can seamlessly change its style and settings.

Perhaps the single most-used tool in our company is version control, and for that we use the Perforce server and versioning engine almost religiously to power automated builds and continuous delivery. To do that, we have separate servers for our development builds, staging builds, and live builds. When we run daily automated builds, those hook directly into the Perforce repository and the daily development build to sync with the mainline and build the latest version of the game for each platform. If we want to run a staging build or a live build, we simply tell the build parts to take various pieces from Perforce and everything else just automatically executes, sends, and completes the builds. If we didn’t have separate servers for different builds, every time someone from the team needed to review something, they would either fail miserably or wreak havoc on the rest of development.

It’s a Trap!

More than one indie studio has fallen into the trap of thinking that procedural design will speed up level design, but we caution studios to think twice before ditching manually-designed systems. At its worst, relying on procedural design can cause major issues in player progression, even generating unplayable worlds. It’s a lesson we learned the hard way, but we quickly came to realize that we don’t want to rely on the randomness of procedural design to create core game space elements. That’s not to say that there isn’t a time or a place to use procedural design, just that the only way you’ll see any value from it is if you have the overhead to do it extremely well.

First Impressions Are Harder Than They Look

You might be your own biggest critic, but you’re probably also your biggest fan. The reality of the mobile gaming industry is that you don’t get hours to grab someone’s attention, you get seconds, minutes if you’re lucky. During the playtesting of “Legacy Quest”, players had overwhelmingly positive feedback surrounding its concept, aesthetic and gameplay, so we were confident that we would release the game and the downloads would roll in as players got hooked. We were definitely surprised to see high numbers of people dropping out of the game by the end of what we thought was a fairly standard tutorial. If people don’t like the first impression of your game, you probably won’t get a second chance. Ultimately, we went back in and gave “Legacy Quest” a little extra TLC, paying particular attention to the first 30 minutes of game play.

Conclusion

Five and a half years ago, five former Rockstar Games colleagues got together and started Socialspiel. It could have been a nightmarish experience full of harried crunch cycles, beleaguered and bitter employees, or even bankruptcy, but I think our saving grace was that we understood the challenges of creating high-quality games for corporate studios. We simply applied what the triple-A gaming industry had taught us as we completed our first projects and tried to stay flexible to change.

The gaming industry is undergoing a major transition as games become more sophisticated and complex, even on mobile devices. You no longer need a triple-A budget to create a successful game, but indie gaming creation is not a hobby, it’s a business. If independent studios can embrace agile development best practices and change throughout the game’s lifecycle, there is still room for success on the market and you might just be one of the lucky ones.（source：Gamasutra）