Game Development Giant

This question is fascinating.

How to use a designer's method to save development funds as much as possible.

If you look at this sentence from another angle, it will become like this - this is another investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars for your project.

Because you save part of the expenses, you can naturally apply this part of the savings to other aspects to make other aspects of the game, or details or other places, better.

For example, if the company only invests one million US dollars in a game, that is to say, you need to use this million to complete the development of the game. You think this number is very tight, but you don’t want to. To make this game unfinished, so to speak, you must learn to make reasonable use of your abilities to save costs for the game.

This is basically the basic skill of a game developer.

So how are we going to do it? Jester said while looking around the scene. This question is purely an empirical question. Even if you personally participate in the development of a game and face this problem , is also not enough.

He must personally lead a complete development team and be responsible for the development of an entire game, from the beginning of the game project to the completion of game development.

And, not once.

It takes many times.

Jester didn't expect these people who had not left campus and had no such front-line development experience to answer his question, so he just paused for a moment and continued.

Designing a 3A-level game, in addition to certain limitations of technical accumulation, is mainly to try to use the player's own imagination. Yes, you heard it right. As a designer, you have to learn. When designing, When designing a game, we make full use of the players' own imagination to design the game. No matter how exquisite and detailed the picture quality of the game is, the players' imagination will definitely be more vivid. Everything we do is to impress the players' imagination. force.

And a lot of times we don't have to show everything in the game. If players can imagine what Napoleon is doing when he's not on the screen, we designers can save a lot of money by not having to create that content.

You may not understand this very well, so I'll use the example in Civilization as an example.

There is an example in Civilization. There will be a prompt like this in the game: The ruler of a foreign country seeks your favor. The Sultan of Alexandria sent a caravan of treasures, including seven dancing bears. Now. I want to ask you a question, why does such a paragraph appear? When we were designing, why did we design such a paragraph?

Jester continued to ask first.

However, he quickly said: You don't need to answer. You just need to answer it in your own heart. You don't need to say it out loud. I can tell you now the purpose of our design.

It's very simple. The principle of designing this prompt is to take advantage of the situation - if the player is already inclined to believe in certain things, it is easier to create these things in his imagination. In other words, when we design the game , to bring it in, it must be designed with a player’s mentality. What is the player’s mentality at this time?”

That's how I brought it in. If I were a player, after such a paragraph appeared, my first reaction deep in my heart would be like this - 'Yes. The rulers of foreign countries should have sought me out in the first place. As a tribute to the seven dancing bears, they have good intentions.' As I said before, this is an irrational arrogance that players have when playing games.

“What am I trying to say with this?”

Actually, it is. We did not make dancing bears in the game, nor did we make Alexander's sultans or chariots. By following the trend, we saved millions of dollars in modeling and texturing costs, because players were already willing to Believe us, all we have to do is write a text box, and we can use the time and energy saved to convince the player of other things that are not easy to believe.”

Jester finished speaking with a smile. Many of the people listening below, probably students from the game design department, were already taking notes.

They even looked serious, as if they were taking a lesson that was important to them.

This is of course a very important lesson. After all, they can study here for twenty or thirty periods in Sid Meier's class, but in Jester's class, they may have only one chance.

There is another way that can effectively save a lot of game development time, which is to learn to use the knowledge that players already know to design games... This may be a little difficult to understand what I said, but it doesn't matter, I will explain it in detail. Explanation. After Jester finished speaking, he was silent for a moment, seeming to be thinking about some wording issues.

The audience in the audience were also very patient and waiting silently.

This is the conclusion we came to after long-term testing and research. In fact, players already have a lot of information when they start the game. Designers do not need to reinforce this information. For example, if the player sees a man with a black mustache, A swordsman will take this person as a bad guy and be ready to fight with him. The designer does not have to design a background story for this person or create a set of childhood experiences for him. The black mustache is the symbol of the bad guy. After adopting these technologies, you can focus your time and energy on the real selling points of the game. The content automatically provided by players through their imagination is a great help for game designers. Such characteristic things are generally accepted by players. Very, very much.”

This is a big treasure. Every designer has to dig out and use it, and what you get from it will definitely not let you down.

After saying this, Jester clapped his hands.

That's probably all I have to talk about today... After finishing speaking, many people in the audience looked disappointed. They had just been fascinated by what they were listening to. They didn't expect that they would finish talking this time, but Jester looked at it. After looking at his watch, he paused briefly.

Then he said.

I looked at the time and found that it was still a little early. Let's use the remaining half an hour as a time to ask questions. If any of you have any questions that you are interested in, as long as they are related to game development. , you can consult me, I can guarantee that as long as I know, I will tell you everything.

Jester said this with a smile. (To be continued...)