Citations

Failure! On to the next failure!

At this very moment, a large number of game development teams are heading for failure. Close your eyes and imagine this scene, then open your eyes and look around. Is it happening around you?

In 2006, more than 60 domestically developed online games were launched in China, but no more than 15 survived and were able to make a profit. There is no doubt about this: more than 75% of the projects failed directly or fell far short of expectations! In the increasingly competitive Chinese online game market, this proportion is even increasing. The newly released and still hot games, before they can wait for large-scale publicity, are silently poured into the swill bucket in various levels of internal testing. What about the rest? You try to recall the name of the domestic masterpiece that was announced on 17173 last month with great fanfare and attracted a large number of people to the public beta, but you can't remember it. "A flash in the pan" is not an exaggeration to describe most of today's new online games.

What went wrong?

Who murdered our game?

Why do I see only bloody finished products everywhere I look?

Has the gold industry that “printed money while sleeping” four years ago disappeared?

How come the lovely players suddenly became so evil and ruthless?

This article is not intended to analyze the external environment, market competition, cultural accumulation, user psychology, game content or various character issues, but just wants to look at the reasons for the failure of independent game development from a small aspect within the game developer - that is, the perspective of game planning, which I am engaged in. This article is not a guide on how to be a good planner, but just expresses the author's personal views in a more emotional way and lists the practical lessons related to this, hoping to serve as a warning to those projects that have not yet completely failed.

Dead baby

After ten months of pregnancy, the fetus died in the womb.

This statement is a bit cruel, but if you have ever been in a game project team that had to be disbanded in the end, you should understand that this metaphor is appropriate. Many games show this amazing similarity: they are developed for about a year, and then quickly die before most players see them. This is related to the investors' eagerness for quick success, and it can also be related to wrong decisions, chaotic management, changes in market tastes, lack of team experience, or the Indonesian tsunami. But we can't determine the most fundamental reason: Is it because the sperm is not active enough? Is it because the pregnancy time is not long enough? Is it because the nutrition is not enough? Is it because the doctor who performs the caesarean section is of poor quality? Why can't we always produce healthy babies (products) smoothly?

One thing that is often overlooked about successful games is that the reason they survived is not because they consumed more resources or took longer than most of their dead compatriots. People always like to unconsciously exaggerate the "elitism", "hard work" and "procrastination" in the development of games (or other products). They cite many examples, such as "programmers discussed the improvement of the physics engine all night long", "artists used a 256-color palette to try and finally adjust the realistic tail flame", "planning rejected nearly 30 different BOSS plans", "managers tried their best to persuade the board of directors to postpone the release for another year", etc. to prove these views.

Is this really the case?

It is undeniable that work attitude and external environment play a key role in the final success, but if everyone focuses on the few great works that take ten years to make, it will form a kind of avoidance, an avoidance of comprehensive self-examination. The result of this is the emergence of a "big methodology" on how to make good games. Making games is regarded as a propositional essay. All discussions in the company about how to do it well have evolved into seminars on how to get closer to this "big methodology". In my opinion, this stereotyped single interpretation of successful people is really ill-intentioned. It offsets the doubts about the fundamental qualities of game makers themselves to a certain extent. Without doubts, there will be no reflection and improvement.

Back to reality, let's look at the games that are making a lot of money on the market. They are all copied from the same template. Street Basketball is a good example. This game is a masterpiece created in one year. A team without much experience (their first work even failed) completed it in a hurry. Later, it became the sports online game with the highest market share. This is enough to remind us to look for something different from "outstanding leaders + elites gathering + years of hard work", something related to the gamers themselves.

Well, let's recall what the planners did before the final tragic failure.

The cursed team

I always wonder if some failed projects failed at the very beginning. If we focus this question on game planning, we can easily find that some things have sprouted in some people's minds since the beginning of a game. We can describe it as a psychological suggestion that becomes stronger and stronger.

"I had such a profound insight into its inherent flaws that I could already foresee its ultimate and inevitable failure."

Once your planner thinks this way, unfortunately, the team is cursed by this invincible prophecy.

Please expand your memory again. This time the scene includes many screens - yes, the colorful monitors of your colleagues in their spare time. You should be able to quickly conjure up some images in your mind: overlapping chat windows, 18+ pictures, new American TV series, old works of Blizzard or Valve...

Have you seen the game the project team is testing? No.

Pay more attention next time. If this is really the case, this is the most typical manifestation of being cursed.

Why not play your own game?

"Why don't we play our own game?"

Ask your colleagues this question one by one. Most people will probably laugh at you and not bother to answer; or someone may tell you honestly: "What's the fun in this? You work this every day, aren't you bored?" If this comes from programmers and artists, you can ignore it. Even if they don't like playing their own games, they can still do their jobs well, but they are not excellent enough. But if similar answers come from project planners, creative directors, planning supervisors, etc., then unfortunately, perhaps the worst case scenario has happened:

If the project planner, especially the main planner, is not keen on playing his own game, it is an extremely dangerous sign in game development.

This statement may sound like a cliché, like a replica of "If you don't like the game you made, don't expect others to do it", but for planners, I think this experience is worth mentioning frequently. Because more often than not, everyone has already turned a blind eye to it.

My previous company had developed an interesting small elimination game. Almost everyone, not just the developers, became loyal players during the game testing period. We enthusiastically formed teams to compete after get off work, and were proud of our victories and new level titles in the game. I was in charge of its sound effects at the time, and for this I made 3 different sets of sound effects for a different experience, including a set of black rap-style sound effects, just for my own fun. After the game was officially launched, its online population quickly exceeded our expectations.

——yocar

Keep two things in mind:

First, enthusiasm is not liking. No one will force you to like something, and there are always some people who don't like their ideas to become reality. The problem is, if the planner doesn't even have the patience to invest a lot of spare time in his own game (this is called enthusiasm), how can he find the real playability of this game? How can he understand those players who enjoy playing this game? How can he know what to do next to satisfy the users?

Second, a good game is worth playing at any time. If the planner uses "I'm tired of playing" as an excuse, he is equivalent to saying, I have given up, I don't see any place that can make me excited (even though I haven't played it much), God! Don't let me continue to experience this crappy thing, I'm hurting my head every day, don't I know better than you? There is no way to improve it, not at all!

Think about it carefully, don't you feel frustrated? When the core members of the project team, those "prophets" who are responsible for thinking about the gameplay, constantly discovering new fun in the game, and formulating the future development direction of the game, seem to have received divine revelation and saw the bleak ending of their future works when the project has not failed at all, and then feel hopelessly depressed and decide not to touch their own games anymore, and even start to hate it for bringing them so much frustration. It's like when the soldiers still have hope for the prospects of the war, the commanders are secretly preparing to surrender. What could be worse?

During an observation of the group members playing their own games, I noticed that the average game level of the planners was not higher than that of the programmers and artists. The character experience points, kills, and game rounds of the planner with the highest score were less than 1/5 of the client programmer with the highest score. And the person with the highest score in art had a game score that was roughly equivalent to the sum of the scores of all planners.

——yocar

Another scary fact is that most planners think that this emotion will not be noticed by others - yes, it seems that they have been working overtime, following up on every task in detail, running around actively communicating with multiple parties, and making humorless jokes with others. But the truth is often so simple and embarrassing:

They really, really rarely play their own game.

So don't hide it anymore. When the planner expresses pessimism about the game project he is working on, this attitude will sneak into everyone's heart like spring rain and quickly spread throughout the team. Even the most slow-witted members will soon be infected by this emotion, and then you will see the situation mentioned above: fewer and fewer colleagues are playing this game.

Negative planning is so destructive to the team, and the despair it brings to the team is so profound. They should have been the most motivated, enthusiastic and proactive people, but now the most proactive work has become a passive behavior forced by the environment; they were the leaders who promoted change, but they have lost the most basic courage; they are no longer willing to explore what else is playable in this game, and they are afraid of any major changes; they have no ambition, no confidence, not to mention planning a vision and drawing a blueprint for "our baby"; they will blame the failures at each stage on various "correct reasons", but will never mention how they destroyed the spiritual foundation of a game development team - we are making fun games.

If you look carefully into their eyes, you may understand it all. It is a stagnant pool, and there is no burning flame of idealism in it at all.

The closer you are to the planner, the further away you are from the players

Do you want to treat players as animals?

Don't be scared. In the domestic (online game) planning circle, discussions on similar topics are commonplace. If I have to put it in a milder way, I can describe it as: the damn online game industry has spawned a bunch of idiots like me who think about the following five propositions every day:

1. How to keep players addicted

2. How to get players to spit out more RMB

3. How to get players to form gangs

4. How to make players hate each other

5. How to implement hidden cash gambling and gold coin transactions

Please believe me, almost all companies doing online game development will require planners to design a large number of functional modules to achieve the above 5 points. The standard for measuring whether a planner, especially a numerical planner, is excellent is to see whether the above points are thoroughly implemented in the actual operation of the game. Of course, different types of games will have different focuses.

As a result, in a considerable number of game development teams, the focus of planning work is not on studying how to make the game more fun and richer, but on studying how to make players addicted, making them accustomed to ganging up on others, verbally abusing and killing others, and engaging in safer online cash activities (gambling, virtual item trading, etc.).

As a matter of course, many unique things have emerged in online games: first, there was a steady stream of new maps/new monsters/new levels/new equipment, then there was reincarnation and ascension; followed by double experience, family system, trumpet, PK list, right to kick people, right to prevent kicking people; there were also lottery cards, gold coin areas, 10x gold coin areas, 50x gold coin areas... Compared with those outdated, traditional stand-alone elements, these new things have achieved obvious, even unprecedented success in economic benefits.

So we celebrated, applauded our own creativity, and danced with joy for exploring a prosperous path for the online gaming industry with Chinese characteristics.

This is truly the most peculiar phenomenon in the online game development community: we have become mathematicians who spend all day analyzing whether the general term of a series is reasonable, and constantly doing curve integration to solve differential equations; we have become professional doctors who study how to increase patients' drug dependence and continuously improve the drug purification process; we have become professional agitators and weapons providers who encourage people to ignore the rules of reality, vent their personal emotions at will, and intensify all kinds of contradictions; we have become dealers in underground casinos and middlemen in various black market transactions.

We became experienced game planners.

The main planner of my last project was a person who was extremely obsessed with numbers. He was good at reshaping all the places related to the game that contained numbers, including game scores, power parameters, reward ratios for an event, etc. He was always able to keenly discover every inappropriateness, and then re-compile a new magical formula to improve these inappropriateness, and spent a lot of time testing and perfecting it. However, every time he was obsessed with these so-called "balance" and "reasonableness", players quietly lost because of the lack of game content and the monotony of gameplay.

——yocar

Interlude: Starting from Anti-addiction

It is not new that China is going to release an "online game anti-addiction system". But why doesn't Japan, South Korea, Europe have one? Even the United States, which has the highest Internet penetration rate, only uses a game rating system instead of a rigid method of forcing a time limit to control the audience?

Why is China the only country that has introduced regulations that appear to severely harm emerging markets?

Someone will definitely say: "China's policy-making has always been so rough."

I can only say that you are too naive, too simple, too young!

It is because national conditions determine everything. Only in China, there are so many "disappointed people" that when the market itself can no longer make correct adjustments, the state needs to use administrative means to correct the chaos.

What is a frustrated group? My definition is a group of people who cannot get enough sense of achievement in reality, feel lost in the current education system, and feel uneasy and lost in the fierce social competition. The characteristics of frustrated people determine that they are the best natural users of the Internet. In this country with an extremely overpopulated population and a society in transition, the huge number of this group of people has directly led to China becoming the largest country in terms of Internet users and Internet games in just a few years. It is not difficult to understand this point if you recall how Internet cafes blossomed in the streets and alleys overnight and how Internet addiction became a well-known social nuisance.

What does it mean that the market itself cannot be properly regulated? A British economist said something we are all familiar with:

“Capital fears no profit or too little profit, just as nature fears a vacuum. Once there is an appropriate profit, capital becomes bold. If there is a 10% profit, it will be used everywhere; with a 20% profit, it will become active; with a 50% profit, it will take risks; with a 100% profit, it will dare to trample on all human laws; with a 300% profit, it will dare to commit any crime, even at the risk of being hanged. If unrest and disputes can bring profits, it will dare to encourage unrest and war.”

What is behind online game operators? Capital.

What is the essence of online games? It is the virtual sense of existence and achievement.

What do the huge number of frustrated people in China look like in the eyes of capital? They are the best and most delicious flock of sheep waiting to be slaughtered; they are super gold mines that cannot be found anywhere else in the world; they are perfect, uncultivated, and the most fertile virgin land.

Now we can change the classic quote slightly:

"Online game operators are afraid of no profit or too little profit, just like their servers are afraid of power outages in the computer room. Once there is a proper profit, online game operators forget the original sin of the game. If there is a 10% profit, it will ensure that it is advertised everywhere; with a 20% profit, it will start to lie about its own goodness and the many benefits of playing online games; with a 50% profit, it will take risks and play with the weaknesses of human nature, just to make users addicted to its products; with a 100% profit, it will dare to produce any illegal content and trample on all the rules of reality, even if there is public resentment; with a 300% profit, it will dare to instigate players to do the most perverted and crazy things, and even risk being banned. If the collapse of a generation can bring profits, it will dare to encourage them to collapse."

How can we expect this "invisible hand" to implement effective regulation under such national conditions? If the country does not stop it, how crazy will it be? Please remember that in the eyes of capital, it will never see those crying parents and players who died suddenly. Corpses are its delicacies, tears are its condiments, it lives on them and never tires of them.

So, don’t really believe what you hear about a few big online game companies making a “Beijing Declaration” in Beijing, saying that they firmly support anti-addiction and that it will not affect online game revenues. That is a typical Chinese farce of “government sets the stage, companies perform”. Once the “Online Game Anti-Addiction System” is implemented tomorrow, I guarantee that several CEOs will burst into tears at midnight:)

Dark Side of the Force

In Star Wars, the Force is the most powerful energy in the universe that can be controlled by life. It is divided into two sides, the light side and the dark side, just like light and shadow. The light side gave birth to the Jedi Knights, and the dark side created the Darth Vader. The Jedi Knights use their power to defend justice and the equal rights of all life, while the Darth Vader will do anything to satisfy his own desires.

If we compare the Force to today's online games, the bright side of the Force is the healthy fun that players get from the game, and the dark side of the Force is the boundless greed of the capital behind the game operators. Then our game planners are like the young Anakin Skywalker, whose Force is so powerful - if he is firm in his beliefs, the Force in the world can maintain balance and stability; if he is corrupted, the entire galaxy will fall into ruin.

To understand if your project planner has strayed into the dark side of the force, ask him this question right away: "Of all the work you've done, how much of it actually improved the gameplay, and how much of it was done just to make money and not have anything to do with the fun of the game?"

A cunning planner will teach you that any work that seems unrelated to gameplay will actually increase the player's fun to a certain extent.

Unfortunately, he has been too deeply corrupted by the dark force. Never believe such lies, just like online game operators will never admit that "the more you stay at home, the more useless you are, and the happier I am."

Back to the previous topic, through a simple criticism of the entire industry, we should be able to preliminarily explain why planners are getting further and further away from players. The most fundamental reason is that capital has alienated the original intention of making online games. Online games are first positioned as a service business that can continue to make money. All work is required to revolve around "continuous profitability" and "letting users stay in it for hundreds or thousands of hours." The original intention was just to "create interesting things."

This is not to excuse the planners. The deeper reason why online games have become the target of public criticism is indeed the dark power of capital. I just want to remind you of another danger: under the influence of such a powerful dark force, the weak planners have begun to show a trend of overall degeneration. We are gradually forming a new guiding ideology for game planning. Its core is not about how to make "interesting games that make players happy", but has evolved into how to design a successful Internet trap. What's more serious is that a considerable number of excellent planners in China have already stood on this dark side and fueled it. They are constantly and diligently supplementing a large amount of experience from practice, and using knowledge of psychology and statistics to sublimate it into various laws and theories.

What characteristics can show this tendency to degenerate? Please check whether your project team meets the following eight points:

  • The innovation of the original model of the game has been compressed to almost zero;

  • Planners rarely do forward-looking thinking, they are more likely to do analogies, embellishments and plagiarism;

  • As components of stand-alone games, online games have significantly lower requirements for completion, such as character emotions, world view, mission plot, and music and sound effects;

  • Players are treated as mathematical models, and the feelings of individual players can be completely ignored in all decisions;

  • The planners generally have a mentality of putting themselves above the players, and they have no piety towards the "God" who loves their games;

  • If it is not a job requirement, planners are generally unwilling to actively, directly, and frequently communicate with players, and they are even more unwilling to have them interfere with their personal time;

  • The criterion for senior (numerical) designers is to design a system that is highly addictive, and they take pride in this;

  • What the bosses often say is "I only care about whether it can make money for me."

Please pay attention to this prediction. Not only because of the greedy nature of capital, but also because my country happens to be in such a deformed ecology where there is a lack of single-player game culture and the online game market is dominant. In such an environment, any spark of quick success and instant benefits is more likely to spread like wildfire than at other times!

Maybe one day there will really be—

Online games at that time were no longer games, they were conspiracies made up of gorgeous graphics and well-refined numerical systems.

Online game players at that time were no longer gamers in the traditional sense; they were no different from drug addicts.

Welcome to NHK!

In the first half of 2006, I took over a task aimed at diversifying the pursuits of players in the game. For this purpose, I inspected several stand-alone games and analyzed how they increased the replay rate. During the inspection, I made a lot of records of settings such as special honors and additional rewards. Finally, I wrote a complicated and lengthy special medal table for our game. One consequence of this work is that my perspective on stand-alone games has changed unconsciously. Every time I come into contact with a new game, I can always keenly find out what they have done to allow players to continue playing for a longer time after completing the game. But I must have forgotten that those things are just embellishments and easter eggs, not the reason for their popularity.

——yocar

From capital origin to conspiracy, an online game can be said to have completely gone bad. It is no longer an ice cream made to bring happiness to players, but a sugar-coated bullet tailor-made and precisely guided, with a pure and cruel mission - to drain all their money, even if it means destroying their will and body.

Although this article focuses on exploring the responsibility of planners for the failure of games, I have to point out pessimistically here: although most "pure profit"-oriented online games were quickly exposed and criticized; although mature players with thinking ability and responsible media were keenly aware of the danger; although games that do not treat players as human beings in the current market have very little chance of survival.

but.

Those self-proclaimed smart, sophisticated, and evil game planners have not awakened to this, and they are still quietly brewing more conspiracies. They are a group of black warriors who truly believe that "online games can only make money by being addicted" and "making online games is like making electronic opium". They are the industry elites highly respected by capital. They have experienced many battles and have strong wills. They account for the majority. Even I am just one of the juniors whose conscience has not yet been swallowed up by the darkness.

In early 2006, when "Zhengtu" had just come to prominence, someone started an internal discussion group in the company, where planners had a heated debate on a series of "evil ways" in "Zhengtu", such as charging for equipment and leveling puppets, and whether Shi Yuzhu had made a lot of money by making games. There were various different opinions at the beginning, but in the end, the topic of discussion became "Should we also be as shady as Zhengtu?"

——yocar

My dear players, I heard your miserable cries behind you, but capital always smiled charmingly at me from the front.

The embarrassment of operational planning

"Are you planners all idiots? Only idiots would participate in such a stupid event!"

You might feel wronged when you hear this. Isn't the event calendar on the official website full? Today is the siege, tomorrow is the lottery, the weekend is double experience, and next week there will be the "XX Angel" selection finals and the voting will officially start. But those unsatisfied guys don't give any mercy on the forum, always complaining endlessly that the current activities are all the same and have no novelty.

"Online Game Development" pointed out that half of online games are services. This service, when implemented in the planning, is basically equivalent to the work of operation planning. Don't underestimate their influence on the success or failure of the game. If the early game planning determines who will play, then the later operation planning determines how many players will stay.

Looking through the recruitment advertisements of major online game companies, it is not difficult to find that the requirements for operations planning are significantly lower than those for other planning positions. The requirements for operations planning are usually "beautiful writing skills, able to withstand pressure, hard work, and experience in more than one online game", while the requirements for game planning are "familiar with history; proficient in fantasy literature, AD&D system; in-depth understanding of similar products in the market; good at writing and expression".

One is physical labor and the other is mental labor!

The original reason for this difference may be some inferiority in human subconsciousness - we stubbornly believe that the original thinkers and creators are better than the producers and operators who continue to develop on this basis. In the stand-alone era, there was no concept of operation planning in the team. Since then, we have gradually developed a habit of believing that the success of a game is due to great game planning, but never mentioning excellent operation planning.

Can we understand online games, a new thing, so simply?

When I first joined the game company, I was working as an operations planner for an MMORPG that was in operation. The first task I received was to "write an event within three months." Later, this requirement gradually changed to "small events continuously, and one big event per month," so I had to make some templates to cope with so many requirements. I never asked why I had to write so many events. No one ever asked me what I thought about the next version of the game.

——yocar

At least what I know is that the task of operations planning can be simply described as "don't let the players idle" most of the time. In most cases, planning supervisors will not ask their operations planners to predict and analyze the sensitive groups involved in each activity proposal, input-output, possible risks, long-term impact and other factors; nor will they summarize the effects, record gains and losses, and make horizontal comparisons of the activities that have ended. In the long run, due to the lack of effective references and systematic standards, whether any activity will be launched depends only on the decision maker's perceptual feasibility or infeasibility.

Operation planners are supposed to be the ones who understand players' needs best, but the reality is that they are far from the "core planners" who can really improve the gameplay. They did organize activities that won the players' praise under bad conditions, but because their opinions were ignored for a long time and there were many and boring requirements, more activities became stereotyped, sloppy and irresponsible.

Being meticulous about the damage value of a skill in the game, but turning a blind eye to the obvious inaccuracy and unfairness of a certain activity. This kind of thinking that emphasizes design over operation in planning, and this "non-planning-level" requirement for operation planning, is undoubtedly a hidden time bomb for online games, especially an online game that has been operating and has a certain number of players.

I can't help but try to find out some immature and emotional operational planning experiences, for reference only.

Which activities caused players to complain afterwards?

  • Activities that require players to spend money

  • Activities that may lead to cheating or scoring

  • Activities where the final ownership of prizes is determined by black box operations

  • Activities that are difficult to register for and have a cumbersome process

  • Too simple and crude gift activities

  • Monotonous, repetitive, and long-term activities

  • Activities that do not provide fair treatment to all players

  • Activities that are likely to cause conflicts between players

Which activities are likely to be popular among players?

  • Free, convenient, easy-to-attend event

  • Activities that reflect the technical content of games

  • Activities that promote teamwork among players

  • Events that offer super special rewards

  • Events that provide new game content

  • Activities that encourage players to interact with each other

  • The system automatically refreshes the winning results of the event

  • Players participate in activities that build the game world

  • Activities with realistic festival themes

  • Rich and diverse tasks

  • Activities closely linked to the new version of the game

  • Activities targeting player hot spots

  • Activities to declare war on malicious behavior in games

  • Activities that are significantly different from the main goal of the game (such as mini-games, quizzes, etc.)

  • Gender-themed activities

Which activities should be held with caution?

  • Offline competition activities with huge expenses

  • Various nondescript sponsorship activities

  • Activities that require a lot of human supervision

  • Research activities that are not given enough attention

  • Charter activities that are not adequately prepared in advance

  • Charitable activities combined with social welfare

  • An open talent show to select star players

Why bother planning?

Having said so many bad things about the planner, I would like to speak up for him in the end. I have no intention of overturning the verdict.

Let me first point out a fact: even in Europe and the United States, where we always think that creativity is valued, programmers/programming supervisors still earn nearly 30% more than planners/chief planners of the same level, and artists earn about 5% to 10% more. This may be different from the advertising industry. In the game industry, products must go through programming before they can be truly produced.

The reason is simple:

The program requires creativity as well as professional skills.

Art requires creativity as well as professional skills.

Planning requires creativity, a keen sense of smell, rich experience, and good expression skills, but no one regards these as professions.

If the program is missing, product = 0.

If there is a lack of art, the product will be terrible.

If there is a lack of planning, the product can still be successfully launched.

Programmers' understanding of usability is not necessarily worse than that of planners.

Art may not be worse than planning in expressing a sense of excitement.

The planner said, I have a deep understanding of gameplay, and then the programmers and artists all laughed.

I admit that great games always come from great ideas, and great ideas usually come from great game designers. But the era when technology determines games has not completely passed. The endless stream of FPS and new hardware technologies at the E3 show every year is a good example. After the gameplay has accumulated a thick layer of basic rules, the level of technology is still the decisive factor affecting whether a game is a hot seller.

Besides, no one believes you can design a "great game".

So in fact, the difference in the importance of programming and art planning is so obvious that it is everywhere. Perhaps only Japanese "game producers" are an exception, but Shigeru Miyamoto and others have more than 20 years of game production experience. They are the enlighteners of the entire game industry. Only this accumulation has allowed them to gain a higher existence beyond the general division of labor.

At this point, let's go back to the title of this section - if you are always actively writing documents and designing values, others will think you are qualified and respect you, but they will never think that you can get the same or even higher salary as them. If you can make a prototype in 7 days, can propose a more efficient algorithm to solve the current problem, can directly design and produce a certain UI effect map, others will respect and admire you.

In my short working experience, I can basically prove that the above words are true.

Don't forget, we are planners, and our boss expects us to surpass others in creativity/experience/copywriting/vision/interests/communication/foreign languages, etc.

It seems that although many people think that planning is easy to get into, in terms of future development, it is indeed not a career suitable for many people.

Suddenly I remembered that in the first season of CSI, the boss Gil said, your sadness is that you treat it as a job.

The road is still long, the wind is still strong, and the evil spirit is rising to the sky.

Yocar

February 8, 2007, Shenzhen