Text / Liang Lotian & repair

In the cold winter of the industry, Grape Jun has lost count of how many times he has said this word.

On the one hand, the industry is currently like a besieged city, and the people in it are facing unemployment, and they are either submitting resumes or on the way to submitting resumes, and some people even take the initiative to leave the industry and look for new opportunities; Outside, those fresh graduates who want to join the industry, have not had time to step into half a foot, and they have already found that there are fewer and fewer pits and higher requirements.

On the other hand, large companies continue to reduce costs and increase efficiency, while they are laying off employees, closing services, and cutting projects, they also find that it is more common to lack creativity, find no new directions, and come up with good ideas, so it is difficult to attract and recruit the right talent.

Big factories are having a hard time, small team? will only die more.

Image source network

In four words: it's harder.

Funding is difficult to raise. Rich buddies are gone, war investment and funds just want to invest less and occupy more, as for VC, they would rather give money to AI or Web 3 than invest in games for charity;

Releases are hard to find. chatted with a smile and grin, and when it came to money, it hurt feelings;

The channel is difficult to access. The traffic is expensive, the division is high, there are many rules, and the competition is large;

Talent is hard to find. Powerful people are expensive, the cost can't be burned, and the students who have just graduated are cheap, and the team can't afford to wait.

Image source network

But even so, there are always people who want to make games.

Some time ago, the "2024 Tencent Game Creation Competition" held by Tencent Game Academy came to an end in Wuhan. According to official statistics, the competition received more than 7,400 entries from 72 countries and regions around the world. On the day of the finals, more than a dozen industry track teams came to the scene and showed their works on the spot.

Taking this opportunity, Grape Jun chatted with the four small teams that made it to the finals, hoping to hear their stories about the problems they faced and the reasons for their participation in this competition.

Among them, there are old teams that have won awards and have been established for nearly 10 years, and there are also new teams that participated in the competition for the first time and were formed more than 1 year ago; There are 30 members, a large collective with a clear division of labor, and there are also fledgling all-rounders who become an army by one person; There are lucky people who have received millions of investments, and there are also those who are cleaner than their faces and insist on generating electricity with love......

01

wet behind the ears

Seija is 28 years old, but has been in the industry for five or six years, and after graduating, he joined a large factory as a planner in a stand-alone ARPG project.

He is full of passion for making games, and he participates in Game Jams almost every year, trying out meat pigeons, strategy cards, platform jumping, click-to-decryption, and so on, and the competition rankings are also good. And his most well-known game is probably the game Root Inside, which won the Game Jam championship.

As a Cthulhu theme, it is a strategy card game that integrates elements such as simulation management, meat pigeon, and running a group, whether it is the art concept or the interactive form of gameplay, it is eye-catching. The game later successfully stood out in the BOOOM riot campaign, and was signed by the core of the machine on the condition of "quite sincere" distribution rights.

Seija felt that the time might be ripe, so he persuaded the other core members to leave their respective factories and start their own businesses together. "At that time, everyone was more uncomfortable at work, not only 996, but from January to October last year, the whole industry was not good, and the pressure from the top would affect the lower level."

This is Seija's first venture, and the whole development process is quite unsmooth, full of pitfalls. "Because the starting point of the game was too based on some ideas from the Game Jam era, there were design conflicts during the development process." Seija is often a little anxious because of this, "We do it in our spare time in a big factory, and the development time is actually unlimited, but after it comes out, everything becomes limited. ”

The biggest design contradiction of the game is that "the interactive form is too new". Players have to explore the setting through the connections between the cards. But it doesn't have a so-called master goal, that is, a point for the player to focus, more like a god's perspective.

The team thought of doing it in a simpler way, such as switching to turn-based, or simply changing the presentation and making it a more short-term loop-oriented game, like Vampire Survivors.

The team discussed this decision for two or three months, and the final choice was "not to solve": keep the top-down level design of the game to reflect a sense of control over the whole situation, and abandon some of the sense of substitution and focus.

"Although games like "Vampire Survivors" are very popular in the market, it makes no sense for us to do market-oriented products at this stage, the competitiveness is too weak, and it is more advantageous to do what we are best at."

Seija isn't the kind of indie developer who is completely self-conscious, he takes into account the preferences of the players and the trends of the market. He believes that all games will have a part to cater to, but to a different audience. "As long as it doesn't affect the core design of the game and makes players have more fun, there is no problem, and the game is not for you to play."

But at the same time, he's not so utilitarian. Seija told me that when the team first met, they had already set their "original intention": to have fun playing games for the rest of their lives.

Since it is a lifetime, Seija hopes that the success or failure of a product does not mean anything to them - becoming a product does not mean that they are better than others, and failing does not mean that they are weaker than others.

Of course, he also knows that this is idealistic, and on a realistic economic level, success or failure still means a lot of things. "If you lose, you may have to borrow money to make a game, but if you succeed, you don't need it."

This time, they came to the Tencent Game Creation Contest mainly from a realistic level. "Increasing exposure and getting bonuses has helped our product a lot. At the same time, the judges can also give us some perspectives and opinions that we don't usually see. ”

After chatting with Seija, I feel that the "indie game" industry is really mature, and it is getting closer and closer to the overseas operation mode. Everyone has not shied away from talking about money, talking about publicity and other more direct but real things, and they have also thought more clearly about the gameplay design and market competition.

Even the cutting-edge team with the same enthusiasm is less idealistic and more down-to-earth than in the past.

02

Far from the center of the industry,

How are you going to make the game?

Unlike Seija, who participated in the Tencent Game Creation Contest for the first time, BY, the producer of the Chinese-style horror text puzzle game "Baihe Village", has participated in many competitions, and basically did not fall short, and won the Best PC Gold Award in 2020 for the plot-oriented puzzle game "Public Enemy of the Whole Network".

"In the past, the prize of the Tencent Game Creation Contest was easier to win than now, because there were fewer participants at that time, and the big guys had not yet reacted, so we let small shrimp toss in it, and accidentally took the prize."

He told me that the competition is much more competitive now than it used to be. This year, for example, the main competition area of the Tencent Game Creation Contest alone received 1,163 applications and 838 entries. Among them, the overseas track is particularly prominent, with the number of entries reaching 576, an increase of 40% compared to 2023, and attracting the participation of a number of internationally renowned teams.

It is worth noting that the entry "White River Village" brought by BY this time was not developed by him himself, but was produced by Triangle Game, a new team they established in March last year. This new team was founded to develop team members and incubate new projects.

In his opinion, as a game studio based in Qingdao, Shandong Province, they can be regarded as far away from the center of the industry. Not only is there a limited understanding of the local game industry, but local game companies rarely take the initiative to participate in industry gatherings or communicate with other developers.

Based on this closedness, perhaps out of the practical need to expand the team and find a new direction, or perhaps out of the idealism that they have been drenched in the rain and want to give others an umbrella, they decided to cultivate new talents, incubate projects, and give new beginners a chance.

BY says it's not about what you want to do, it's about what you can do. Their goal is to help young, talented, creative colleagues realize their ideas and succeed, thereby building confidence and allowing them to continue in the industry.

Therefore, considering the team's existing capabilities and interests, the content characteristics of different tracks, the difficulty of technical implementation, and the support that the old team can provide, they finally believe that the Chinese-style horror text decryption game is a relatively safe choice.

But the problem is that many publishers are not optimistic about this track.

At that time, "Hong Kong Strange Record" and "Fireworks" had been released for many years, and the craze for domestic Chinese-style horror games had receded, and the market sales were very average. His publishing friends have advised him not to make Chinese-style horror games, mainly because the theme is difficult to obtain a version number, which limits the domestic market and the porting of mobile games, which may lead to not many publishers willing to take over.

However, BY still has confidence in their gameplay and team. In addition to continuing to communicate with the publisher on the one hand, they also arranged for the game to be reinforced, and continued to increase the budget to improve the quality. At the beginning, they expected to spend five or six hundred thousand, but what they didn't expect was that the cost of the game ended up running to one or two million.

In March of this year, the game was re-launched and a new demo was made. After its improved quality and gameplay, it has won the recognition and signing intention of many publishers, and has successfully opened up the situation. In the community, players' feedback on PV and demo is not bad.

Just last week, "White River Village" was officially launched on Steam. In BY's view, after more than a year of running-in, the team's growth has basically met expectations.

As it turns out, players still have a passion for Chinese genres. This passion is also reflected in the content creation of developers. It can be seen from this Tencent Game Creation Contest that more than 30% of the finalists in the industry track in the main competition area contain Chinese elements.

On the day of the launch of "White River Village", the studio also went online

A free-to-play linkage game "Public Enemy of the Whole Network: Strange Village"

Talking about this, I also asked BY a more realistic question: will the newcomers they have invested time, energy and resources to train choose to stand on their own after completing their studies, and there is a feeling of "teaching apprentices and starving masters".

He told me that this is actually quite common. At first, he felt a little lost, not because of money or resources, but because he thought in his heart that this young man was really talented and promising, and that he would be able to work with the team to create something amazing in the future.

But then he figured it out too. They nurture young people, not only so that there are people available for the company to grow in the long term, but also to help them grow and give them the ability to start their own businesses. "If they were free, they might have done better."

In my opinion, Tencent Game Academy, and their original intention of holding the Tencent Game Creation Competition, may be somewhat similar to BY. In a sense, they may have built a platform to share development knowledge out of a desire to get more people involved in the industry and promote the development of the local and even the entire Chinese game industry.

As a veteran player, BY revealed to me that even if a contestant's work wins an award in the competition, Tencent Game Academy will not ask for binding and standing in line, or even handing over the distribution rights, as some teams that have not participated in the competition are concerned about. Instead, they will provide pro bono help and matchmaking if the team needs it.

For small teams, this pragmatic support is perhaps even more important. After all, in BY's view, only by letting the team survive can there really be a chance to make good works.

03

What if you don't have money?

Among all the finalists, the HelloMeow studio where the slag is located has had a bumpy experience. When asked why she participated in the competition, she replied with only one sentence: "I heard that there is money to take." ”

She told me that at that time, when she searched for "how to make money" on the Internet, the Tencent Game Creation Contest jumped out. The total prize money of this competition is as high as 3 million, and in the industry track in the main competition area alone, the gold, silver and bronze award winners can receive cash prizes of 150,000 yuan (1 place), 100,000 yuan (2 winners) and 80,000 yuan (3 winners) respectively.

In fact, this is not the first time that Grape Jun has met Xiao Scum. More than 3 years ago, at the game creation competition also held by Tencent Game Academy, Grape Jun had already communicated with her.

At that time, her experience in the industry could be regarded as a protagonist template: she entered the industry with her childhood ideals in her second year, and got an offer from a company in the industry in her sophomore year; Investors will be invested as soon as they graduate, with up to 17 team members; The games developed are not only on the iOS best-selling list and have a stable income, but also meet players in the subway, and the sense of accomplishment is overwhelming.

Now, they have quit the studio due to various practical problems and laid off most of the members. But even so, there are still some friends who advance and retreat with her and generate electricity with love.

And the little scum himself, in order to make money, has participated in the creation of film and television scripts; In order to find the meaning of "game life", he has also stepped into the ring several times.

A fight match this month

Xiao Jie also brought the promotional materials of the game to the scene

When it comes to the origin of the dilemma, she told me that "the situation is very complicated", and one of the main reasons is that there is too long a wait for the edition. "If a lot of things had been earlier, it would have been different."

For example, "Scrapwood Story", which was recommended by Apple Today, was forced to be removed from the shelves because it did not have a version number, which led to a contract dispute with the publisher and was required to return the prepaid royalty. Until the release team was disbanded, they did not wait for the news of the approval of the version number.

When the version of another AVG game, "Anonymous Lover", was approved, the production team no longer had the funds to support its launch and operation.

"The edition number has come down, but the money is gone, I really don't know if this is happy or worried."

The entry "Spy: Stinging" brought by Xiao Zum this time is adapted from the spy war novel "Sting" by Hai Fei, the winner of the People's Literature Award. It will lead players to shuttle between Chongqing and Shanghai, the "isolated island" during the Japanese occupation, and observe and weave a "memoir of the Anti-Japanese War" of the player through the perspectives of many characters with different identities.

It is worth mentioning that this work is not the first time to appear in the competition, as early as 2020, its mobile version won the silver medal in the mobile game division of the Tencent Game Creation Competition, and was affirmed in the AVG track.

Nowadays, the platform of the game has changed from the mobile version to the PC version, and the consideration of the small scum is very practical. She believes that the channels in the mobile game market are very complex, and the team does not have the extra energy to deal with things other than creation.

After several years of polishing, "Spy: Sting" has undergone "earth-shaking changes" in terms of script, art, mechanics and completion. Talking about the origin of this change, Xiaozha said, "The production process of a game is also a life process. ”

After working from home, the work desk of the small scum

In fact, in the process of chatting, Grape Jun also felt that this studio seemed to be a bit "Buddha" - neither anxious about the progress of the version, nor nervous about economic embarrassment, but more of a rare relaxation.

"There is not much to be anxious about, because after a lot of experience, I understand that people should do what they should do, and they can only do what they should do. Everything will flow where it belongs. ”

Perhaps it is the real return from entrepreneurship to creation, although the team is facing many practical problems, but the development enthusiasm of the members is getting higher and higher. In the words of the little scumbag, "people are poor, but inspiration comes", which seems somewhat "abnormal".

According to the team's original plan, they intended to minimize changes and just tweak the story and UI to bring the game to life. But now, not only have they reworked the gameplay mechanics, but they have also iterated on all the scenes and characters - even the more than 50 mini-endings of the story are illustrated, and even the characters with only one line have their own standing art.

In addition, for the sake of historical research and material shooting, they not only devoted themselves to the pile of old papers, but also visited Shanghai, Chongqing and many film and television cities. During this period, Xiao Zum also used the accumulated materials to create a novella "The Island of Chunqin", which was published and reprinted by the "Novel Monthly".

The interface of Spy: Sting

Ultimately, the PC version of the game now inherits less than 10% of the original content compared to the mobile version. "It's us who updated it, not the game. Perhaps, the meaning of creation is life itself. ”

At present, "Spy: Sting" is optimizing the ending, and it is expected to be launched on Steam early next year.

04

After success

For a small team, it is of course very difficult to win their first success like the scum HelloMeow studio, but what is even more difficult than this is the second success.

At the same time, when they find that they may not be as strong as they think, how to deal with a failure after success?

In the circle of domestic independent games, "Lost Castle" is the first batch to succeed: college roommates teamed up, started in 2015, launched in 2016, sold 2 million sets, and was later released by Thunder Agency to launch a mobile game version, which scored 8.5 points and 8.2 points respectively on TapTap and Haoyou Kuaibang, and has exceeded 10 million downloads so far, and is also called "the light of domestic production" by many people.

This success has allowed them to expand from a small team of three people to more than forty employees, working on two projects in parallel at Hunter's Studio.

But their sequel to the series "Lost Castle 2", which was launched after 8 years, has recently been deflated. Compared with the original generation, the game has been comprehensively upgraded in terms of gameplay and graphics, but players still gave "mixed" evaluations: small content, bugs, network vulnerabilities, and server problems......

The game has sold 270,000 units so far, and the word-of-mouth has slowly rebounded to most of the praise with the update, which is a good result in a solo game, but in fact, the project has not yet returned to its original cost. Considering the accumulation of the previous work, it is inevitable that there will be a gap in everyone's hearts.

Producer Chen Weichen told me that he was somewhat mentally prepared for this achievement. "This time we have adopted a new development framework, which has made development more efficient, but has more coupling problems. By the time this problem was discovered in the second half of the project, too much time had already been wasted. ”

The original idea of "Lost Castle 2" was very simple, which was to make a comprehensive upgrade on the basis of the original generation, and it is expected to be developed for two years. But they found that the difference between "making" and "doing" things was bigger than they thought, "the latter may take twice as long as the former, and a lot of things are accumulated by stepping on pits." ”

For example, the original program framework was not very good, so if you want to make a more general and perfect framework in the future, you have to start over, but this has a big impact on the project schedule, and also buries some technical hidden dangers.

After the success of the first product, using more resources to make a better new project is the path that many teams will choose. But the reality is that the more you invest, the better the product will be, and it may not even be as good as it used to be, especially for indie teams that don't manage well.

Chen Weichen said that when the team expanded to more than 10 people, he felt the need for new communication and workflows. "When we talked, we felt like we were together, but when it came time to actually do it, it didn't seem to be together at all. Everyone seems to think that a small team should communicate well and be able to make things quickly, but in fact, the small teams that can really do this are already the best. ”

At the beginning of the project, Chen Weichen wanted an open and relaxed working atmosphere, but later felt that the team was a bit scattered, so he slowly centralized power. He once thought about whether to do a KPI-like assessment mechanism, but in the end he felt that the small team was still not suitable for this set of management methods that were a bit on the line.

Chen Weichen also doesn't think that with fewer team members, "Lost Castle 2" can be completed faster and better. "A large number of people can raise the upper limit of many results to a certain extent, and a small number of people will definitely have to compromise a lot of things at a certain stage."

The reason why he didn't give more time to the project is that Chen Weichen feels that everyone needs to have such a process to accumulate experience, and at the same time, it is time to re-understand the market - there has been no game launched for 8 years, and everyone may not have enough perception of the changes in the outside world.

Although Hunter Studio has been established for almost ten years and can be called a solo veteran in China, Chen Weichen still feels that he is a little irresponsible to give any advice to young people, because they still have to face a lot of messy problems.

"The only thing I can say is to get out and see more, participate in some competitions, and get to know other development teams. At that time, the three of us developed it all the way, and the start-up capital was the prize money from the competition. For example, when we participated in the Tencent Game Creation Contest held by the Tencent Game Academy, we also wanted more exposure, and if we won the award, it would also be an incentive for the team's morale. ”

05

epilogue

After listening to the four stories, I believe that many people have the same feeling as me, that is, it is not easy for everyone: no experience for the first time, no resources for those with experience, difficulty for success with resources, and difficulty for replication of success.

And this difficulty is not only reflected in the small team, but also in the process of Tencent Game Academy holding the Tencent Game Creation Competition.

When the industry is on fire, many large manufacturers want to hold game competitions to show their support for the industry and highlight the social effect; After the industry cooled down, Tencent continued to hold the competition for nine years, and even increased its investment this year.

At the awards ceremony, in addition to the excellent works in the industry track, such as the gold award-winning "Tide Scar" and other games, you can also see "Proton & Electron", "PlayDead Play Dead", "The Great Hero" and other entries from university teams.

Many people around me sighed when they saw these award-winning students on stage: they really have light in their eyes and represent the future of this industry.

Of course, some people may think that Tencent has a big business, and holding games every year is just a drop in the bucket. But thinking about it the other way, it is not easy to live in a big country, and it is indeed a bit thankless to do something that cannot see the actual effect in the short term, not only can not make money, but also have to pay money out.

I don't deny that they may have a long-term view of the Tencent Game Creation Contest in terms of long-term strategy. But it should not be overlooked that they are still willing to do such things. This persistence may be even more commendable in the current environment.

This article is from Xinzhi self-media and does not represent the views and positions of Business Xinzhi.If there is any suspicion of infringement, please contact the administrator of the Business News Platform.Contact: system@shangyexinzhi.com