独立游戏开发蕴藏金矿

    现在索尼公司（Sony）触角所及之处主要是通过索尼“Pub基金”来进行投资。“Pub基金”会预先向开发者支付版税，让他们能有钱开发。作为回报，索尼将获得这些游戏的独家发行权，要么是完整发行权，要么是一定周期内的发行权。而这些从索尼拿钱的独立开发者仍将保持独立性，他们只会一个接一个开发游戏，绝不签什么长期合同。

    一些独立开发者还是宁愿特立独行，享受这种完全不受游戏巨头干扰的创业激情和自由创作的感觉。Double Fine和inXile这类公司会通过众筹网站Kickstarter筹资开发，而像The Fulbright这类公司则主要靠自己的钱，小本投入，努力实现愿景。

    The Fulbright在俄勒冈州波特兰市的一个地下室打造出了自己那款年度人气最旺的独立游戏之一——《回家》（Gone Home）。这是一个紧张的、注重营造氛围的探险类游戏，场景设置在20世纪90年代某个时期的一间古怪的空屋子里。开发者打造的是一个90年代西北太平洋某个地区的生活环境，主人公乘坐时间机器回到了那里，叛逆女孩（Riot Grrl）这首背景音乐贯穿游戏始终。在游戏中，玩家的任务是在屋子里到处探险，努力弄清事实的真相。它没有暴力因素，充满互动，玩起来很有意思。

    这款游戏是斯蒂夫•盖纳的杰作。他曾是《生化奇兵》（BioShock Infinite）的高级设计师，但后来他离职在波特兰创办了一个独立工作室。他的联合创始人是程序员乔纳曼•诺德哈根，还有号称“无所不能的”卡拉•兹莫加。他曾和盖纳在2K Marin公司联手为《生化奇兵2》（BioShock 2）开发了广受好评的《女神的巢穴》（Minerva's Den）下载包。

    他们一起租了个房子，在地下室里搭建了工作室，开始专心开发他们的最爱——有故事情节的游戏。对开发者来说，裁员会让他们颇为震惊。最近在接受《财富》杂志（Fortune）专访时盖纳说：“我们以前开发《生化奇兵2》时，共有80到100人。开发过一个投资高达4亿美元的游戏时，你可以慢慢学会如何才能不犯错误。但对于《回家》这样的小制作来说，我们希望一次成功，因为我们别无选择。”

    要做到这一点，就要几个月都泡在这间屋子里，埋头苦干、不断测试。盖纳说：“我们以前共事过，彼此都很信任。（这个游戏）必须建立非常真实的场景，不过它确实做得很不错。”

    “确实很不错”或许只是种保守的说法。盖纳很低调地补充说：“头12个小时里我们就收回成本了。要盈亏平衡并不容易，不过我们确保了自己的成本和开发预算都控制在很低的水平。”

    为了打造自己理想的游戏，但同时又要注意有限预算的制约，他们不得不打破常规，在这款游戏里甚至不用任何可见的角色。盖纳称：“《回家》就没有什么角色。这一点我们一开始就很明白，因为我们当中没有几个美术设计师，所以必须考虑这个问题。我们只有一个程序员、一个设计师和一位美术设计师，在这种情况下，我们该怎么办？另一方面，我们也没呆坐着，不切实际地空想什么，噢，真希望我们能为这款游戏开发几个角色。”财务上的考虑可能是他们决策的基础，但没有角色却也让这款游戏对玩家来说更加个人化了，让他们真正融入了自主探险的情节中。

    一炮走红后，Fulbright公司现在已经开始考虑下一部游戏。钱对于对创业公司来说依然是头等大事。盖纳耐人寻味地自问道：“继续发展的大问题在于，下一部游戏我们要挣多少钱？钱一直是个问题，不过下一个项目还会有各种新问题。”

    但毫无疑问的是，那些游戏巨头们都会密切关注这些独立开发者的一举一动。（财富中文网）

    译者：清远   

    Sony is putting its money where its mouth is via the Sony Pub Fund. The Pub Fund gives indie game developers royalties up front so that they can fund their games. In return, Sony (SNE) gets exclusive rights to distribute the game, either fully or for a set period of time. Indie developers who get funds from Sony are still independent, and they only work from one game to the next, avoiding any long-term contracts.

    Still, some indie developers prefer to go their own way and enjoy the entrepreneurial and creative freedom that comes from working completely separately from the big gaming corporations. While some companies like Double Fine and inXile are funding their ventures through Kickstarter, others like The Fulbright Company work on a shoestring budget, out of its own pocket, to make its vision a reality.

    Working out of a basement in Portland, Ore., The Fulbright Company created one of the buzziest indie videogames of the year, Gone Home. It's an intense and atmospheric exploration-based game set in an eerily empty house sometime in the 1990s. The environment the developers created is a time machine to life in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s complete with Riot Grrl soundtrack. In the game, players are tasked with making their way around the house, trying to piece together what happened. It's nonviolent, interactive, and fun to play.

    The game came from the mind of Steve Gaynor, who was a senior level designer on BioShock Infinite, but left his job to start an independent studio in Portland, bringing co-founders Johnneman Nordhagen, a programmer, and Karla Zimonja, a "jack of all trades" who collaborated with Gaynor at 2K Marin on the acclaimed Minerva's Den DLC for BioShock 2.

    They rented a house together and set up shop in the basement, where they could focus on what they loved to do most -- develop story-driven games. Downsizing was a bit of a shock for the developers. "I went from working on Bioshock 2 with 80 or 100 people on it," said Gaynor in a recent interview with Fortune. "When you work on a $400 million game, you learn how to do things right. On Gone Home, we knew that we wanted to do it right the first time. We had to."

    To do that involved months of work and testing all while living and working in the same house. "We had worked together before and trusted each other," Gaynor said. "The real-world set up was necessity. But it worked out really well."

    "Worked out really well" is, perhaps, an understatement. "We made back our costs in the first 12 hours," Gaynor noted, humbly adding, "Breaking even is a huge, but we made sure to keep our costs and our development budget were really low."

    In order to create the game that they wanted, but being mindful of budget restrictions, they had to think outside of the box going so far as to eschew any visible actors in the game. "Gone Home doesn't have any characters," Gaynor said. "We knew that in advance, because we didn't have the artists on board for that, so we had to think, What can we do with a programmer, designer, and artist? On the other hand we weren't sitting there thinking, Oh I wish we could have characters." While financial considerations may have been the basis for the decision, the absence of characters results in a game that is even more personal for players, truly putting them in the seat of the choose-your-own-adventure action.

    With its first venture under its belt, Fulbright Company is looking to what's next. As with any startup, money is still a consideration. "The big question going forward is how much do we have to make our next game?" Gaynor asked rhetorically. "There are always money problems, but the next project will have new problems."

    There's little doubt that the corporate gaming world will be watching.