Chapter 417 It can go faster!
Finally the last piece of the puzzle was put together. Lilith felt refreshed and couldn't be happier.
Finally I feel confident again!
Gu Fan looked at her and couldn't help but sigh, does this hell demon have a good psychological quality? No matter what kind of setbacks you have encountered before, as long as you find a new direction, you will immediately put all the previous unhappiness behind and continue to move forward with all your strength.
If this was a normal human being, he might have been discouraged long ago.
Well, this indomitable spirit is indeed worth learning.
Lilith sorted out all the current game mechanics and quickly wrote them down. Then, she looked around at everyone and made the final arrangements.
"Okay, then the mechanics of the game "Blood of Lies" have been finalized! Next, Zhou Yang and Wei Chengjie, each of you will be responsible for half of the design draft and complete it as soon as possible!
“This time we are going to do something big and invest all of our company’s current excess R&D funds into it!
“By the way, by the way, Gu Fan, how much money does our company have now?”
Lilith obviously didn't pay much attention to money. For her, she had no intention of making money when opening the company Nitiantian. Even if she lost money, she could make up for it with other businesses.
I just didn’t expect that Nitiantian would continue to make money, and there was no need to make up for it from other businesses. Even the newly developed physical industry was very successful.
Lilith gets annoyed when she thinks about making money against Heaven, so she rarely pays attention to how much money the company makes.
Gu Fan was silent for a moment: "I'm not sure about this either. I'll ask the finance department later."
Lilith looked suspicious: "You don't know either?"
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You know, Ni Tiantang's net income will be distributed to Gu Fan as a bonus according to a percentage. He should allocate it to himself as soon as he makes money. How could he not be clear about it?
Gu Fan coughed twice and said, "I'm so focused on the game that I'm so busy writing code that I don't have time to pay attention to these things.
"Besides, I don't have money either. Time spent. ”
Lilith was doubtful.
But considering that she made surprise inspections every now and then, Gu Fan did spend most of his time in the villa thinking about the game. He really didn’t have much money to spend, so For the time being, I reluctantly believed half of it.
"In short, spend money! I want to see "Blood of Lies" developed as quickly as possible! I want to use the best skin to deceive all the players, oh no, attract them!"
Lily Si couldn't wait to put her hands on her hips, her expression was very proud.
But at this moment Zhou Yang poured cold water on her at the right time: "But Mr. Li... games are not something that can be made faster by spending money...
" It doesn’t mean that it takes 3 months for 100 people to develop a project, but it can be shortened to one and a half months for 200 people. It cannot be calculated like this..."
Games are indeed a labor-intensive industry. Basically, most of the expenses are It’s all about labor costs. Generally speaking, the more people there are on the project team, the faster the game development will be.
But there is a limit to this kind of thing, and it cannot be piled up without limit.
Because whether it is games, movies, or other similar industries, the more people there are, the more complicated the division of labor required, and the difficulty of controlling the entire project will increase exponentially.
Just like some big-budget movies, there may be thousands of people working on set at the same time. Let’s not talk about letting these thousands of people perform their own duties. Just providing them with food is enough for the director to drink a pot. of.
The same goes for games.
To produce large-scale games, the more manpower the better. However, with more manpower, the number of middle-level personnel required for coordination and management will also increase exponentially, and even the number of upper-level personnel who manage middle-level personnel will also increase exponentially.
The more people there are, the more serious the internal friction will be at the management level, and the more people there will be, the code or art level will be uneven and difficult to unify. The energy consumed in standardization may even exceed the serious work itself.
Therefore, there is an upper limit to the increase in personnel, and currently Nitiantian has basically reached this upper limit.
So far, Nitiantian can be roughly divided into two production teams, headed by Zhou Yang and Wei Chengjie respectively.
After continuous poaching and recruitment, the number of these two production teams has reached a team size of nearly 200 people.
The entire Nitiantian staff has reached more than 400 people.
This is already quite a high number.
Because Nitiantian’s game production is actually a flat structure, the number of people between various departments is quite unbalanced.
Since Lilith can provide art resources and music resources directly from hell, Nitian does not need to maintain a large art team at all, but only needs to adjust the 3D art and motion art of model details. .
In addition, Nitiantian does not need a dedicated operations team. After all, Nitiantian’s games are all directly thrown onto the official game platform, and there is no problem with subsequent operations.
After cutting off these irrelevant personnel, Nitiantian's employees are still mainly focused on the three departments of planning, programming, and testing. Basically, all the good steel is used on the blade.
For the previous games, when almost every game was developed, the project team would recruit 20 to 30% of new people.
This has almost reached the limit that the company can bear. If there is more, I am afraid that there will be problems with the management of the entire project team. It is possible that new employees will be completely idle and cannot be effectively utilized.
Lilith actually wants to speed up the progress of the game by throwing money. I am afraid it is a daydream.
However, Gu Fan shook his head slightly: "It is not completely impossible to speed up the development of the game by spending money.
"The method is simple: outsourcing. ”
Zhou Yang was stunned for a moment, but quickly shook his head: "No, Mr. Gu? If we outsource, how can we guarantee the quality of the game?"
Lilith's eyes immediately lit up: "No guarantee!"
Gu Fan was silent for a moment: "No, we still have to guarantee it, otherwise we can't guarantee whether the outsourced part of the code will have some magical bugs."
Lilith instantly shrank: "Also What do you mean about outsourcing? "
Gu Fan explained: "It's very simple. We just need to ensure the quality of development as much as possible while outsourcing. This may take a certain amount of time. It will take two or three projects to work on, but once successful, the speed of game development can be further accelerated." Zhou Yang and Wei Chengjie both felt a little incredible when they heard this.
Outsourcing, as the name suggests, is when a company entrusts non-core business to external professional companies in order to reduce operating costs and concentrate resources.
An outsourcing company is a company that focuses on a specific field and provides industry services to many other companies at the same time.
In human terms, it means spending money to find other companies in the market to help share the work.
For example, some entrepreneurial game companies will basically outsource art directly.
Because in the process of game development, it is very wasteful to directly support an entire art team. After all the art resources of the game are developed, the art team will have nothing to do, and the company will have to spend money to support it. But if it is an outsourcing company, after the art resources for this project are released, they can continue to release the art resources for the next project, which can be perfectly connected and can be regarded as optimizing resource allocation.
But outsourcing is not a panacea, for the same reason as before: the company's organizational structure has limits.
If the company's organizational structure is unreasonable, it will need to spend more resources on internal coordination and unification of rules, which will increase new workload and cause more losses than gains.
Based on the current situation of Nitiantian, the art resources that are most in need of outsourcing are not the biggest problem.
Although the bigger the game, the longer it takes Hell's art team to produce art resources, but in general, no matter how big the game is, the time it takes Hell's art team to produce resources is still shorter than program development.
In this case, there is actually not much need to outsource art. The whole process is stuck in the program.
As for the program, it happens to be a part that is not suitable for outsourcing.
Because art standards are easier to establish and online communication is more convenient, but procedures require constant coordination and online communication is inconvenient. It is best to communicate offline and unify standards. If you find any problems or bugs, it’s best to solve them as soon as possible.
What's more, once something goes wrong with the program, it will be a big deal. Most game companies don't like to outsource such an important thing.
Of course, there are also some amazing European and American game companies that will outsource their programs to Asan programmers in order to save money, and the final results are without exception disastrous.
Although Lilith does not care about the quality of the program, the various wonderful bugs in the past have turned her into a frightened bird and no longer accepts the emergence of any bugs.
After being chased and intercepted, accidents happened frequently. If you let yourself go, wouldn't it mean that "Ascension" would reappear? That's absolutely not possible!
Gu Fan explained: "My idea is very simple, exponential growth!
"So far, all the programmers in our Nitiantian combined, there are about 300 people, and Among them, there are about 240 reliable senior programmers who are familiar with the work process.
“We selected about 100 people from these 240 people to form about 10 groups.
“Each team is directly stationed in an outsourcing studio to be responsible for part of the development work.
“And for the remaining 140 people, we directly recruit almost the same number of programmers and let them work together. Complete development tasks. "
Zhou Yang was a little surprised: "Mr. Gu, are you saying that 140 will become 280 and then 560? Such exponential growth?
“But I’m afraid that’s not possible, because the process of an old employee leading a new employee will also seriously reduce his work efficiency. In this way, two people developing programs together may not necessarily be faster than an old employee alone.”
Gu Fan nodded: "In the short term, that is true, but in the long term?
"As long as they have experienced one or two projects, the 140 newly recruited employees can almost grow into senior programmers. They are already familiar with our internal development process and can continue to expand.
"Then Among the previous employees, another group can be sent to various outsourcing studios.
“The outsourcing studio is the main part of our efficiency improvement.
“As for the establishment of the program framework and various co-ordination work, it is left to me, Brother Dahui and Liu Liu. All key programmers in the company are responsible. "
Zhou Yang was even more confused: "Is this... possible? ”
It all feels so unreliable.
Wei Chengjie pondered for a moment and then nodded slightly: "Theoretically speaking, it can barely be established. After all, those top large companies basically use similar methods to expand their headcount, which is through mentoring within the company.
“But there are several big drawbacks to doing this.
“The first is the outsourcing company.
“The outsourcing company must not only connect with our company. Even if we send ten people, they are willing to use all the company’s resources to Do we use it and fully cooperate with it?
"Even if we can throw money at them in the short term so that they can't refuse, what about the gap period in game development? They will still have to develop other games.
"Unless we can ensure that future games Development is non-stop, with no gaps at all, and the money we provide is far higher than other companies, so we can gradually turn these outsourcing companies into our own use.
“Secondly, whether it is outsourcing or internal one-on-one training, it will actually bring huge financial pressure.
“For a long time, the cost we invested may be more than before Three times or even five times the amount, the output will be almost the same, but the time will probably not be shortened by half.
“This is still an optimistic situation.
"If we are not optimistic, we may invest five times the cost, but the output of the game will shrink, and the time will only be shortened to 70-80% of the original time. Wouldn't that be too cost-effective?
"I'm afraid it's a toss-up. In the end, even the cost of the game could not be recovered.
“Of course, the only advantage of doing this is that maybe after a few games, when this model gradually matures, we can indeed further compress the development time of the game, but compared to the risks of doing so , I always feel that a small gain is a big gain..."
However, Lilith didn't care at all: "It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter at all!"
Obviously, money or not does not matter to her at all. It’s not a big problem. It doesn’t matter if the game shrinks a little. On the contrary, it may increase players’ negative emotions.
All she wants now is speed! The sooner the better!
As long as the games are released quickly enough, there will always be those treasure games that make people contribute a lot of negative emotions. The little adds up to a lot!
"Very good, then you should proceed with this matter immediately and run forward, fast!"
(End of this chapter)