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开发者分享关于优化游戏工作室合作过程的建议

发布时间:2020-12-25 08:38:34 Tags:,

开发者分享关于优化游戏工作室合作过程的建议

原作者:Tom Pedalino 译者:Willow Wu

(本文作者是Double Eleven的资深游戏设计师。他在这个行业已经工作十年了,参与过很多不同类型的游戏项目,比如《小小大星球Vita》《我的世界:地下城》,独立游戏《监狱建筑师》、Songbringer。)

Double Eleven最为人熟知的业务就是游戏移植,《地狱边境》《小小大星球》《模拟山羊》PixelJunk系列都是由我们移植的。

四年之前,我们把《监狱建筑师》移植到主机上,并开始为这一系列开发原创内容。同期进行的还有《除暴战警3》的相关开发支持工作。微软看到了我们的能力,就给了我们机会合作开发《我的世界:地下城》,这也是迄今为止我们最具雄心的开发项目了,Jungle Awakens和Creeping Winter扩展包都是由我们创作。

说到移植方面,我们会遇到很多创意方面的小挑战,还需要针对不同硬件做优化、操控设计和UI的调整,让平台的玩家最终能够获得更顺畅的游戏体验。创造全新的游戏内容用到的还是平常工作时的那些技能,但值得一提的是我们拥有了更多的创作自由,随之而来的当然就是更大的责任,尤其是考虑到你手上的是世界上最受欢迎的系列IP之一。

值得庆幸的是,Mojang Studios与我们的合作非常成功,由此,我们想分享一些关于合作过程的建议。

1.信任你的合作伙伴

首先我要说的是,信任是极其重要的。Mojang并不是简单地作为高层下达命令,而是给了我们完全的创意掌控权。从一开始,Mojang与我们就更像是亲密的合作伙伴,而不是一个工作室把工作外包给另一个工作室这样简单的关系。

他们放心地把IP交给我们,让我们近距离地接触,而不是只向我们展示冰山一角,然后要求我们一起做这个项目。当然,Mojang有告诉我们游戏看起来、感受起来应该是怎样的,确保开发内容能够忠于品牌。这让我们斗志昂扬,因为我们觉得自己得到了一个机会,能以一种前所未有的方式参与塑造这个重磅IP的未来。

foxholes(from gamasutra)

foxholes(from gamasutra)

当我们在进行头脑风暴的时候,我们会把原版的《我的世界》作为出发点,试着去想象在这里会发生什么样的故事,以及地形会如何影响这些故事的发展。然后我们把这些想法推介给Mojang,听他们说说最喜欢的是哪些部分,然后我们在此基础上继续扩展,不断来回奔波、迭代优化,一直到正式发行。

我想你是听过不少关于工作室外包游戏DLC或多人模式的警示故事,这些外包内容往往会让人觉得跟游戏的其它部分搭不上,这就是因为两个团队之间缺乏沟通。

单单是确保一个工作室内大家能达成共识可能就相当费力了,更别说还要牵扯到另一个工作室。但我们这边的情况并不是这样的,对Mojang而言,我们更像是合作开发者或者合作伙伴,确保我们始终能够意见一致。

2.建立关系时不要犹豫不决

另一个关键就是尽早建立合作关系。主游戏《我的世界:地下城》的开发尚未完成,我们就已经开始制作Jungle Awakens和Creeping Winter了。因为从代码层面来看,游戏一旦发行了你就很难去做什么更改了。而从创作的角度来看,这样做的好处是我们能够早早地看到游戏的核心部分在最终阶段的表现。

从一开始,Mojang Studios就能引导我们去关注游戏的亮点,在制作扩展包的时候我们也会特别注意它们。我们可以消化吸收这些信息,花时间想出新的点子,然后再跟Mojang交流。这一切在很大程度上都要归功于双方的尽早接触。

我知道这听起来可能就像是陈词滥调,但要为一个深受大家喜爱的品牌创造新内容,有很多重要的主题、背景知识和细节问题需要探究,我们需要时间去犯错误、偏离轨道、重头再来。这意味着除了这一个扩展包,未来我们能够凭借着对这一大堆相关的概念的充分了解,在更短的时间内继续制作多个扩展包,也就是说,《我的世界:地下城》可以实现Minecraft品牌对于live service产品的期望。

3.面对面的互动非常关键

另一件在促成合作上发挥很大帮助作用的是跟Mojang团队的面对面交谈(那时候人们还能这么做),了解他们的创作愿景以及他们希望《我的世界:地下城》怎么忠实于Minecraft品牌,表现出原来的哪些特色。

在我们合作的最初阶段,我们还花时间进行团建和Fika——这是瑞典的传统,在白天的休息时间中与同事社交,喝喝咖啡,吃些甜点。参观工作室、记住人们的名字与面孔,了解他们的环境和工作场所文化,在这个过程中你就得到很多收获。

我甚至都数不清有多少人因为沟通时缺乏语境而变得很苦恼或者是倍感压力。当批评的对象是他们全身心投入创造的东西时,人们往往会觉得很难接受。

当你在为另一个开发商的项目工作时,“冒充者综合症”会在项目进行期间时不时地发作,这可能会使上述情况进一步恶化。然而,如果你面对面接触过发送信息的人,跟对方一起喝咖啡,聊聊爱好、家庭,甚至是狠狠地吐槽美国蓝莓,这些糟糕的情况就会减少很多。

所以,你最终会得到一些建设性的批评,而不是一直在焦虑自己做错了什么,你会意识到大家都是友善的。这样人们就会更倾向于抱着善意去交流,不会觉得这是在针对自己,以一种轻松的状态继续合作。

遗憾的是,当下COVID-19疫情无疑是给我们增加了难度,为了防止失去这种重要的非语言沟通,虚拟会议是必要的。在当下这种特殊时期,不少人都会觉得很孤独,我们都需要一些亲密时刻来加强彼此之间的联系。我们建议每天都安排远程Fika活动。

4.患难与共的团队会成为加分项

Mojang之所以这么信任我们,其中一个原因就是我们能够在人事变更率极低的情况下发行这么多游戏。所以说,我们团队中的大多数成员不仅仅是经验丰富的开发者,还是一起工作过很久的伙伴。虽然要打造一份令人印象深刻的作品集是没有什么捷径的(所以新工作室只能随着时间的推移慢慢填充作品库),但保持低人事变更率是可以立即开始着手的。

Double Eleven把员工的福祉放在了首位,学到了很多经验知识。一旦有人加入Double Eleven团队,他们往往会呆很长时间。

我们刚跟Mojang达成合作的时候,有个团建活动就是让大家按照发行作品数量的多少站成一排,排在前面的都是Double Eleven的成员。当你的合作伙伴了解到你有这么多员工一起完成过那么多个作品,彼此之间有很多共同的难忘经历,这会让他们觉得特别安心。

为别人的游戏做扩展包——而且还是那种家喻户晓的大IP,这是既令人兴奋又让人恐惧的。尽早与我们接触、全心全意地信赖我们、对我们的技术充满信心,还邀请我们去他们的工作室,分享他们的公司文化,这让我们产生了一种归属感。我们认为这种密切的合作关系是会从工作中体现出来的——那些没有关注游戏开发的玩家应该不会注意到扩展包是由不同的工作室开发的。

本文由游戏邦编译,转载请注明来源,或咨询微信zhengjintiao

(Tom Pedalino is senior designer at Double Eleven. He has been in the industry for ten years working on a wide variety of titles like LittleBigPlanet Vita and Minecraft Dungeons to indie hits like Songbringer and Prison Architect.)

Double Eleven is mostly known for porting games to consoles, working on such titles as Limbo, LittleBigPlanet, the PixelJunk series, and Goat Simulator.

Four years ago, we brought Prison Architect to console and started developing original content for the franchise. This coincided with the work we did to support the development of Crackdown 3. Microsoft saw what we could offer, opening up the opportunity to co-develop Minecraft Dungeons and our most ambitious development duty yet, with the creation of its Jungle Awakens and Creeping Winter expansions.

When it comes to ports, there’s a huge host of small scale creative challenges that come with optimizing for different hardware, control schemes and UI, to ultimately make the game suitable for a platform’s playerbase. Creating entirely original content utilises a lot of the same skills, but offers a greater degree of creative freedom. With that freedom comes great creative responsibility, especially when you’re helming the expansion of one of the world’s most popular franchises.

Thankfully, Mojang Studios did an exceptional job of collaborating with us to make this as smooth a transition as possible, and we’d like to offer some of our key takeaways about how this process was handled.

1.Trust your collaborators with your studio’s secrets

First off: trust is vital. Mojang didn’t simply cast down orders from on high, but rather gave us full creative control over these expansions. It was clear from the beginning that this was going to be more of a partnership than one studio outsourcing to another.

They trusted us with their IP, letting us peek behind the curtain, rather than only showing us the tip of the iceberg and asking us to work with that. Of course Mojang offered us guidance here and there on how things should look or feel to stay true to the brand overall. This was great for morale, as we felt like we were given a chance to really shape the future of this colossal brand in ways we’d never experienced before.

When brainstorming ideas we’d look at the original Minecraft as a launching point, trying to imagine what kind of stories could have taken place here, and how the terrain would affect how those stories play out. We’d then pitch them to Mojang and they’d tell us what they’re most excited about and we’d build upon that, constantly going back and forth, refining with each iteration, until launch.

You hear plenty of horror stories about studios getting contracted out to make a game’s DLC or a multiplayer mode, and these often end up feeling at odds with the rest of the game because of communication breakdowns with the outsourced team.

It can be a herculean effort just to make sure one studio is all on the same page. Getting a second studio to also be in sync with the primary developer can be a logistical nightmare. That wasn’t the case here at all, as Mojang treated us more like co-developers or partners, ensuring that we were always on the same page.

2.Don’t dally on bringing your collaborators into the fold

Another key takeaway is to start your collaborations early. We started building Jungle Awakens and Creeping Winter midway through the parent game’s development. From a code perspective, it can be very difficult doing anything with a game once it has shipped. And from a creative perspective, by starting when we did we had the benefit of seeing what the base game was doing in the final levels.

Right from the start, Mojang Studios was able to guide us on what they felt were the stronger points of the game as a whole, which we could then focus on when creating the expansions. We could process this information, spend time coming up with ideas and then pitch them to Mojang. This process benefited heavily from onboarding us early.

It can sound cliché, but there are so many overarching themes, lore, and nuance that go into creating something new within a beloved brand that we needed the time to make mistakes, to be way off base and start again from scratch. This meant that not only would we make one expansion pack, but that we would have enough of an understanding of this crazy smorgasbord of ideas that we could continue to make multiple expansions in a shorter amount of time, meaning Minecraft Dungeons could meet the live service title expectations of the Minecraft brand.

3.Face-to-face interactions are vital to team building

Another thing that helped immeasurably in facilitating this collaboration was being able to meet the team at Mojang face to face (back when you could meet people face to face) to get an understanding of their creative vision and how they wished for Minecraft Dungeons to be a faithful representation of the Minecraft brand.

During the initial stage of our collaboration we also spent time on team building exercises and Fika, the Swedish tradition of taking a break during the day to socialise with your colleagues over coffee and cake. There is so much to be gained by just visiting a studio, putting names to faces, and understanding the environment and workplace culture.

I can’t even begin to count the number of times where a message has been received, context has been lost, and the recipient has become upset or stressed because of it. It’s easily done and people tend to take it hardest when the subject of the critique is something creative that they’ve poured their heart and soul into.

This can be exacerbated even further by the fact that when working on another developer’s property, our good friend imposter syndrome will regularly set up shop at the back of your mind for the duration of the project. However, these instances are greatly reduced when you’ve met the person sending the message, when you’ve had chats over coffee about hobbies, your families, or a deep-seated hatred of American blueberries.

So when you eventually get some constructive criticism, rather than focus on the worries about what you did wrong, you’ll understand that we’re all friends here. This makes it easier to respond in good faith, not take it personally, and move on stress-free.

Sadly this has become more difficult in the age of COVID-19, so virtual meetings have had to step up to prevent the loss of that vital nonverbal communication. In these times, where many of us are feeling very isolated, we all need those personal moments where we can bond. We’d suggest making Virtual Fika a regular practice!

4.A team that stays together slays together

One reason Mojang trusted us so much was because we’ve shipped many a title with extremely low staff turnover, so the vast majority of our team are not just experienced developers, but experienced developers with a history of working together. While there are no shortcuts to building an impressive portfolio (so newer studios will just have to grow their pedigree over time), low turnover is something that other studios can start to address immediately.

Double Eleven accumulated so much knowledge by putting employees’ wellbeing at the forefront of our studio’s values. Once someone starts at Double Eleven, they tend to stay for a good, long while.

In fact, one of the team building exercises we did when we first collaborated with Mojang was to make everyone stand in a line in order of most titles shipped. The front of the line firmly consisted of Double Eleven staff. It’s reassuring to a partner to know that so many of your staff have shipped so many titles as a team, sticking together throughout the entire odyssey.

Developing an expansion to someone else’s game — and one that’s part of a blockbuster franchise at that — was equal parts exciting and daunting. By bringing us in early, trusting us wholeheartedly, relying on our expertise, and inviting us to the studio to share their company culture with us, we became part of the team. We think this more intimate fraternisation came through in the work, to the point that players who don’t follow game development wouldn’t notice that the expansions are developed by a different studio.

(source: gamesindustry.biz )


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