Gorogoa开发者Jason Roberts谈产品制作五年才发行的挑战

原作者：Dean Takahashi 译者：Willow Wu

你可以说Gorogoa这款艺术解谜游戏的成品效果是完美的，引用创作者Jason Roberts的话来说是“介于成功和大热门之间”，它耗费了五年多的时间才得以发行。

这是一款非常独具匠心的游戏，感觉就像是和很多精美的手绘图互动。这是Roberts的第一个游戏，没有人教他如何开发，全靠自学。除了声音和音效，游戏的绝大部分内容的都是他负责的，包括所有的手绘图。

Gorogoa于2017年12月在PC、任天堂Switch、安卓和iOS平台发行。虽然游戏流程不算长，但它确实称得上是一个艺术之作，还给人们留下了一个烧脑的结局。

对于从未做过游戏的Roberts来说，Gorogoa的成功无疑是给了他很大鼓励，而且能够保证他经济独立，继续做游戏。但是游戏的销量并没有让他产生成立一个10人游戏工作室的念头。这就意味着Roberts不会放弃追求他自己的艺术理想。

许多开发者在扩大工作室规模、拥有更多资源之后多少都会放弃自己之前亲力亲为的工作方式，在某种意义上说也是牺牲掉自己的个人艺术追求。Roberts认为他的下一个游戏应该会和其他几位开发者一起合作，但同时也会继续坚持自己的创作道路。他参加了今年6月底在巴塞罗那举行的Gamelab大会，发表了一篇关于Gorogoa的演讲，后续我请他做了一次采访。

整理后的对话记录如下:

GamesBeat: 在演讲中，哪个点是你认为很重要、希望大家都能明白的？

Jason Roberts: 我讲到了很多关于游戏早期阶段的一些决策，它们让我的生活越来越艰难，游戏设计难度也越来越大。整个开发过程对我来说是举步维艰的，但是这些难题是跟游戏的独创性相关的。如果你的作品经历了一段难以想象的坎坷制作过程，它自然会多一些神奇色彩，令人们惊叹。

GamesBeat: 所以你从混乱中得到了收获？

Roberts: 是的，没错。关于这些设计方案我讲了很多，还有它们难在哪里。人们可以从谈话中得到他们想要的东西——他们可以接受我的教导，或者听完我做的事然后总结出他们不应该按我的方法来。

GamesBeat: 很多事情你必须自己做。游戏基本上都靠你一个人，对吧？

Roberts: 其实怎么做都是不容易的。在演讲中我尝试着跟听众分享另一种可能用于Gorogoa的设计方案——它更简单，艺术风格也没有那么特别。但是游戏能加入更多谜题，开发时间也能缩短一些。

GamesBeat: 整个开发过程你必须自学是吗？

Roberts: 是的。我应该在游戏开发之前阅读更多关于设计的资料。我当时想着无论如何我都会使用这种艺术风格，因为在我看来这是项目中非常重要的一部分。我喜欢用铅笔画画。手绘画是我对游戏项目的要求之一，这跟游戏本身的玩法设计并没有关系。

GamesBeat: 游戏机制的创意非常独特。你在一开始就想出来了吗？

Roberts: 是的，这个想法已经有一段时间了。在更早的时候，我甚至有设计出一个游戏，也是用差不多的机制，但是剧情和Gorogoa完全不同。我对这类设计很感兴趣。我喜欢意象，还有就是运用视觉方面的技巧，制造错觉。这个机制就包含了这些东西。

GamesBeat: 你的灵感来源是什么？M.C.埃舍尔是其中之一吗？

Roberts: 每次人们要我列出灵感来源时，我总是记不全。但是埃舍尔，是的，绝对是。我要特别提一下艺术家Christopher Manson，我最喜欢他的经典益智解谜书《迷宫》（游戏邦注Maze）。书的每一页都是迷宫的一小个房间，你得探索出哪条才是走出迷宫的最短路径，解决谜题。

还有一群古时候的画家。Gustav Dore和David Roberts在19世纪周游世界，留下了很多素描和油画。另外还有建筑，观察废墟的角度以及各种神秘结构。这些都是设计的灵感来源。

GamesBeat: 你觉得游戏成品怎么样？

Roberts: 挺不错的。我猜可以说是介于成功和大热门之间吧？我认为小团队是成功的原因之一。Gorogoa对我来说就是一个成功的游戏。在收益相同情况下，如果这是由10个全职开发人员来做那就不会有今天这样的效果，这是可以肯定的。因此对我来说，保持精简，最多和一两个人一起工作这样是最好的。从各种意义上来说，扩大团队规模、成立工作室确实很让人兴奋，但我觉得那样会限制我的优势发挥。

GamesBeat: 我不知道你昨天有没有听Amy Hennig的演讲，关于如何成为一位优秀的创意总监。

Roberts: 嗯，有听到一部分炉边谈话。

GamesBeat: 她把这件事跟养孩子作比较。你给出一个方向，希望他们能往正确的路走。作为一个创意总监，你可以说“我想要的画风是这样”，但实际操作的是艺术总监和画师们。这就是一种控制权的丧失，即使你是这个大型游戏的“总监”。

Roberts: 对于大型游戏来说的确如此，你必须把工作分派给下级。Gorogoa的声音和音效部分就是这样的，我放手让其他人去做。我的合作伙伴有音效师Eduardo Ortiz以及作曲家Joel Corelitz。我尽量不去干涉他们那边的事情。不然的话，他们的创作就会偏离轨道。

GamesBeat: 在这个过程中你有学习到什么管理技能吗？

Roberts: 我不知道，我并不想成为一个管理者。这就是为什么我更愿意把其他人当成是合作伙伴而不是下属。也许我学到的是合作方面的知识。下个项目我会和更多人一起合作，现在还说不准。我希望我能和一个动画师合作。至少也得有一个音效师，一个作曲家，可能还会有另一个画师。

GamesBeat: Gorogoa真的非常特别，你似乎因为这个游戏得到了不少关注，也遇到了不少人。

Roberts: 到处旅行，没错，感觉特别棒。关注是有所增加，但是没有到一个非常吓人的地步。

GamesBeat: 关于Annapurna，我们之前有讨论了一下。跟他们的合作是怎样的？

Roberts: 感觉特别棒。他们人很好，很耐心，就像是一个小家庭。他们指派了一个人来找我，以类似制作人的身份帮助我，多亏了他们我才能够更加顺畅地组织好游戏的各个部分，完成了整个游戏。他们帮我完善了很多细节。最重要的是，他们跟另一位工程师合作搞定了所有的跨平台移植工作。

GamesBeat: 他们主要是出资呢还是派帮手加入你们的开发工作，还是其它什么的？

Roberts: 嗯，都有吧。他们为游戏提供了资金，你可以自己去找合作伙伴。但如果你愿意的话，他们也会安排其他人和你一起工作。

GamesBeat: 我想起了微软和《茶杯头》开发团队的合作，开发者们在那时把房子都抵押出去了，或者是通过其它办法寻求资金，好在后来微软提供了合作机会。但如果只是扔给他们一笔钱，《茶杯头》也不会有今天的成绩。

Roberts: 大部分的开发预算还是我自己出的。但是其它部分我就无能为力了，比如说营销预算。Annapurna想要在营销以及PR方面投入更多，光凭我一个人是无法办到的。他们有自己的营销策略，有独立的PR公司一起合作。所以我就让他们去处理，大多数事情都是他们直接做决定，因为我实在是没有PR和营销头脑。

GamesBeat: Gorogoa的扩散速度比市面上的很多游戏都快啊。

Roberts: 是的，这就是制作不寻常游戏的讨论点之一了。奇特的游戏可能会比优秀的游戏挣得更多口碑。有时候优秀的游戏，甚至是上乘之作，给人的惊喜可能没有那么多。而且这两者的制作复杂程度或许没有什么差别。

GamesBeat: 回顾过去，你觉得最让你痛苦的是什么？

Roberts: 财务困境。我把所有的钱都花光了。前几年我发行了demo，获得了很多积极的反馈，但是也有另一些人指出了游戏设计、谜题设计的一些问题，有时候我甚至会觉得整个游戏都做错了。我并不确定我到底知不知道要如何把这个demo扩展成一个完整的游戏。这就是我最缺乏信心的时候，大概是2013年。

到最后，我成功解决了大部分问题。游戏中的一些早期内容从2012年开始就没有做过什么大变动，但是它们的呈现效果还是挺好的。在此之前我一直都是秘密地做游戏。

GamesBeat: 你有为游戏准备一份精彩的电梯演讲（用极具吸引力的方式简明扼要地介绍产品）吗？

Roberts: 其实到现在也没有。这是一个手绘风格的解谜游戏：游戏界面划分为四个方格，每个方格都是一个独立、可交互的场景，你可以通过交换方格、移动、放大、缩小各个场景来探索谜题，就像是一个第一人称冒险游戏。解开谜题的主要方式是通过剥离、重新叠加，将多个场景连接起来，组成新的交互场景。

GamesBeat: 这介绍感觉还不错？

Roberts: 但只有当你看到游戏的时候才明白这段话在说什么。我就证明了有的游戏是无法单凭口述来进行推广的。我之前都不知道电梯演说是什么意思，也从没有把Gorogoa当成是一个游戏概念去推广。就是这么做出来了。我也看过其他人，比如评论人员、网友想通过文字来推荐这款游戏，但他们也做不到。我想你只要看个10秒钟的演示视频就明白这个游戏的魅力了。这就是唯一的办法。

GamesBeat: 如果你能回到过去，哪些事情你会采取不一样的做法？

Roberts: 现在我知道了游戏测试其实用不到那么多画，前几年我画得太多太快了。我也花了些时间来学习验证有效内容的重要性——我做的是一个兼具叙事和解谜元素的游戏，我之前为谜题做了一些跟剧情无关的场景，这是没有意义的，

这是很久之后我才意识到的。到最后我剔除了一大堆没用的场景。我现在变得聪明一些了，会提前考虑跟玩法无关的内容。如果我需要界面中的所有内容、所有场景组成一段剧情，同时也是谜题的一部分，那我只能通过迭代来完成谜题，但我最好确保它与游戏其它部分不会产生矛盾。

GamesBeat: 所以在这五年期间，你花了些时间把事情重做一遍？

Roberts: 没错，可能有至少60%的原内容都被我淘汰重做了。

GamesBeat: 你似乎跟其他游戏创作者很不一样，他们都选择将美术工作外包出去。而对你来说，画画是最重要的工作，每张图都是你亲手画的。

Roberts: 在这个项目的早期概念阶段，我差不多是把这个游戏当作是视觉艺术项目来做。所以画面效果对我来说是很重要的，必须亲自来做。

GamesBeat: 所以重点就是美术创作，然后你再去思考如何在此基础上设计玩法？

Roberts: 是的。这就是为什么早期的demo主题不明确，缺乏组织性。我画了一堆我想要的图，这对我来说是很有意思的。我创造了一堆意象，但又没有仔细思考要赋予它们什么意义。我有时会沉浸于绘画之中，越画越起劲儿，以至于偏离了做游戏的正确轨道。这种情况时常发生。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

You could say that Gorogoa, an artistic puzzle game mostly created by a single developer over five years, had the perfect outcome because it was “in between a success and a hit,” according to creator Jason Roberts.

It was a very unique game that made you feel like you were interacting with beautiful hand-drawn paintings. Working on his first game, Roberts taught himself game development. And he created all of the paintings and most of the game on his own, except for the sound and music.

The title came out in December on the PC, Nintendo Switch, Android, and iOS. The game turned about to be relatively short, but it was like a work of art, with a puzzling ending.

It was successful enough to encourage Roberts, who had never made a game before, to stay financially independent and to continue making video games. But it wasn’t a big enough hit to justify starting a 10-person studio. That means that Roberts will continue making games, but he won’t give up control of his artistic vision.

Many developers cross that bridge when they ride the success of a game to a bigger studio with more resources. But Roberts feels like he will collaborate with just a few developers on his next game and stay true to the awkwardness of finding his way on his own. He gave a talk about making Gorogoa at the Gamelab 2018 event in Barcelona last week, and I caught up with him for an interview.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

GamesBeat: Was there a highlight in the talk you wanted to drive home for the people here?

Jason Roberts: Well, the talk was about how a lot of the decisions I made on how to approach the game early on turned out to make my life very difficult and make the design constantly challenging. Each step was a struggle, finishing the game, but that awkwardness of making the game is connected to why it’s unique and special. If you make something through an unlikely, inefficient process, it will seem more magical, naturally.

GamesBeat: You get something out of the chaos there?

Roberts: Yeah, exactly. I discussed a lot of design decisions and why they were challenging. People can take what they want from the talk. They can accept my moral or look at what I did and conclude that they should not follow in my footsteps.

GamesBeat: You had to do a lot of things by necessity. You were by yourself, right?

Roberts: It would have been challenging anyway, but I tried to show, in the talk, another way I might have approached making Gorogoa with simpler and more regular art. It would have allowed more puzzles, and might have allowed me to finish the game sooner while putting more gameplay in it.

GamesBeat: You had to teach yourself the whole process, right?

Roberts: Yeah, I did. I should have read more about design beforehand. I think I would have gone with the art style regardless, because that was such an important part of the project for me. I like drawing in pencil. That was a requirement for the project that had nothing to do with game design.

GamesBeat: The idea, the mechanic, was unique. Was that there at the beginning?

Roberts: Yeah, that’s been around for a while. I even had another game that I designed earlier that had almost the same mechanic, but a completely different story. It’s the kind of thing that appeals to me. I like imagery and I like visual tricks and illusions. This has that quality.

GamesBeat: Was the inspiration that M.C. Escher kind of composition?

Roberts: Every time people ask me to list inspirations, I always forget some. But Escher, yeah, definitely. Especially this artist Christopher Manson, who made these books — my favorite is called Maze, a puzzle book, where each page is a room of the maze and you have to explore the maze. You figure out the shortest path through the maze and solve a riddle.

A bunch of illustrators of antiquity. Gustav Dore and David Roberts, who traveled the world in the 19th century and did sketches and drawing. Architecture and that way of looking at ruins and mysterious structures. That informed the design.

GamesBeat: What’s the outcome been like for you?

Roberts: It’s done well. It’s in between a success and a hit, I guess? But it helps that it’s a small team. It was successful for me. If it had taken 10 full-time people to make it would not have been as successful, that’s for sure, at the same revenue level. That’s an indicator to me that it might be a good idea to stay lean and work with, at most, one or two other people, as opposed to expanding to start a studio. That’s exciting in a lot of ways, but I feel like I would be giving up my advantage.

GamesBeat: I don’t know if you heard Amy Hennig talk yesterday about being a creative director.

Roberts: I heard part of the fireside, yeah.

GamesBeat: She compared it to raising kids. You give them direction and hope they go the right way. As a creative director you can say, “I want the art to be like this,” but the art director and the artists create it. There’s a loss of control, even though you’re the “director” on this massive game.

Roberts: That’s certainly true on a big game, where you have to delegate. I had that experience with sound design and music, where I just let go. Those aspects of the project, I gave my collaborators — Eduardo Ortiz Frau, my sound designer, and Joel Corelitz, the composer — I tried to limit my role to vetoing certain things or insisting on certain specific things here and there. Otherwise, they had their creative leeway.

GamesBeat: Was there some sort of managerial skill you picked up during this?

Roberts: I don’t know. I tried not to be a manager. That’s why I was more comfortable treating them as collaborators. Maybe some collaboration skill is what I developed. In the next project I’ll work with more people. Well, I don’t know about that. I expect I’ll work with an animator, at the very least, a sound designer, a composer, and possibly another artist.

GamesBeat: You seem to have gotten a lot of attention for this game, because it was so unique. You seem to have been able to meet a lot of people.

Roberts: And travel around, yeah. It’s been great. It’s attention, but not a scary amount of attention.

GamesBeat: We talked a bit about Annapurna. What’s that relationship been like?

Roberts: It’s been great. They’re very nice, patient people. They’re like a little family. They assigned someone to me to act as a kind of producer, and that helped me a lot with getting thing organized and getting things done. They took over a lot of details. For the most part, they handled working with another engineer to do the ports.

GamesBeat: Was it more that they funded you, or finding people to join you, or…?

Roberts: Well, both. They fund the game, and you can find your own people, but they’ll also put you together with people if that’s what you’d prefer.

GamesBeat: I thought it was interesting when Microsoft worked with the Cuphead folks, that they were still on the hook to mortgage their homes and things like that. They had a relationship with Microsoft, but it wasn’t if there was just a big bag of money that showed up.

Roberts: I funded the majority of development myself. But I didn’t have a marketing budget, for example. They wanted to put more money into marketing and PR than I ever would have been able to. Annapurna has their own marketing strategy, their own PR company that they work with. I let them manage that process for the most part, since I don’t have a good instinct for PR or marketing myself.

GamesBeat: It seemed like it was more viral than a lot of other games that you see out there.

Roberts: That’s true. That’s another argument for making something weird. Something that’s remarkable generates more word of mouth than something that’s good. Something that’s good or even excellent, but in a less surprising way. It might have just as much craft put into it, but if you have very little to spend on marketing–

GamesBeat: Looking back, what was the most painful part for you?

Roberts: The financial situation was distressing. I spent all my money. I guess there was a point where I released the demo out into the world early on, and I got a lot of positive feedback, but I also got another round of feedback about issues with the game design and the puzzle design, and there was a moment when I felt like I was doing it all wrong. I wasn’t sure I knew how to extend the demo I released into a full-length game. That was probably my moment of lowest confidence, which was pretty early on. That would have been back in 2013.

A lot of it, I did ultimately deal with it. There’s still stuff in the early part of the game that hasn’t changed a lot since 2012. But I was able to respond to that. It was just the first time I’d decided to—I worked on the game all by myself in secret before then.

GamesBeat: Did you ever come up with a good elevator pitch for the game?

Roberts: I still don’t really have one. It’s a hand-illustrated puzzle game where you arrange tiles on a grid, and each tile is a separate interactive scene that you can move around inside, like a first-person adventure game. But you solve puzzles by connecting tiles together, or stacking them, so the images inside them combine to form new images.

GamesBeat: That’s pretty good?

Roberts: But it only works as a description if you’ve seen the game. I proved that you can make a game that’s unpitchable. I’ve never known what the elevator pitch is and never pitched it as a concept. I just made it. I’ve seen other people — reviewers, people online — try to describe it online and they can’t either. I think once you see 10 seconds of video, you get what it’s about. That’s the saving grace.

GamesBeat: Are there things you would go back and do differently, now that you know?

Roberts: I learned exactly how much I had to finish the art to test ideas. Early on I finished too much art too soon. I also took a while to learn the importance of justifying — I’m making something that’s both a narrative and a puzzle game, and I was putting in scenes to make puzzles work that had no part in the story, that had no meaning.

It took me a long time to recognize that, and eventually kill a big chunk of gameplay because it didn’t make sense. I’d be wiser now about thinking in advance around the non-gameplay implications. If I need everything, every scene in the game, to work as a narrative scene and work as a part of the puzzle, I can only work the puzzle part out through iteration, but I’d better make sure it’s compatible with what I’m trying to do elsewhere.

GamesBeat: Part of the five years was going back and redoing some things, then?

Roberts: Oh, yeah. A lot. Probably at least 60 percent of the material in the game was thrown out and rebuilt.

GamesBeat: You seem unusual in that a lot of people who are game creators, they’re outsourcing all their art. Here, the art is the central thing you’re doing. You’re creating all of it.

Roberts: In the early concept of the project, I was looking as much for a visual art project to work on as I was looking to make a game. That was essential for me on this project.

GamesBeat: Was it almost about creating art, and then figuring out what to do with it?

Roberts: Right. That’s why the earliest version of the game was thematically messy and disorganized. I just drew a bunch of pictures that I wanted to draw, that were fun to draw. I came up with a bunch of imagery and didn’t think through what it meant. The drawing part was so exciting sometimes that it would lure me off the path of making a good game. That happened a lot.（source：venturebeat.com ）