写一个一级棒的策划书(译文)

Creating a Great Design Document
写一个一级棒的策划书
必须拿出一个产品。在这种压力下，我的头都快被屏幕射线击碎了。如果这时有一个老铜灯里面钻出来的神魔，要我说出三个愿望，那我一点也不会犹豫地说：我要……I’ve got to get product out. In the panic and dizziness, my head smashes against the CRT and next thing I know this genie whiffs up out of a virtual bronze-texture-mapped lamp and offers me three wishes. Without missing a beat, I answer, ‘I need…

一队天才的、高超的、敢拼命的工程师和艺术家，彼此密切配合。（还得有一个非常懂事的妻子）（快客说: me too ,sir !）。
足够的钱和时间，可以随便用。
一个一流的设计文档。
A great team of talented, skilled, and dedicated engineers and artists (including a very understanding wife) with strong interpersonal skills.
Enough time and money to allow for a mess-up or two.
A first class design document.
以前，一个程序（或美工）做一个游戏的时候，自己干自己的，没必要编策划，现在不同了。
Once upon a time, when coding a game involved one programmer (and maybe an artist) with a take-it-as-you-go budget and a loose deadline, documentation didn’t need to be taken so seriously. You knew what you wanted to make and you made it. If there were a few major changes along the way, the only one to complain was you. Nowadays, a thorough and readable document can mean the difference between a swift descent to budgetless Hell and a smooth ride to shrinked-wrapped Nirvana.
How the System Works
系统是怎样工作的
大部分游戏要经过三个开发阶段：灵感、纸、和苦行。
Most games go through three development stages, from concept to design to production. Think of them as ‘flash,’ ‘paper,’ and ‘grind.’
在第一阶段，纸有两个用处–记下你的创意，免得你往了。还有做为一个工具，向可以帮你把游戏市场化的人，提供参考。这个时候最好有个小演示，可以验证和修改你的想法。
In the first stage, the concept paper acts both as a letter to yourself – setting out your goals clearly so you won’t lose sight of them – and as a sales tool for whomever takes the product to market down the road. Sometimes, this stage involves a working mini-prototype as well, which gives you a chance to experiment and revise your ideas.
下中间的阶段就是去吵架（快客说：对，我们现在就在吵架。），和美工、和动画、和音乐、和程序，去吵。把东西整出来，找到一个途径组织和落实你的想法。
The intermediate stage of design involves a lot of discussions with artists, animators, musicians, and engineers – trying things out, and finding ways to organize and set down your ideas.
最后的阶段，制片过来实施计划。这时，有组织能力的策划可以做团队的中心，但是多数情况下–特别是大公司，策划成了旁观的顾问。
In the final stage, production management is often left up to some expert in moving trains and tracks without major collisions. The original designer may be an integral part of the team, but in many cases – especially in large companies – the designer ends up as a kind of outside consultant.

毫无疑问，策划书是一个项目的原型，对今后的小贝贝的成长有极大的影响力。至于你–策划师（快客：这是说阵雨），就算你兼任项目经理，也别以为你已经控制了整个局势。一个复杂的项目涉及到很多天才少年，有能力的程序和美工都有自己的想法（快客：嘿嘿，你怎么知道的这么清楚？）你想搞一匹马，美工肯定给你画一头独角兽，到程序哪里，独角兽肯定会变成一头高清晰度的骆驼。（快客：嘿嘿）
好的策划书，必须保证每个人做出一样的东西。让所有的人对你的精神都能吃透。就像一个爵士乐队指挥，把所有人的想法拢到一起，做出明星级的表演。
Without question, the design document is where the original parent of the project exercises the most influence on how this little baby is going to grow up. Even if you, the designer, have decided to double as project manager, don’t delude yourself into thinking that you hold all the reins. A complex project involves many talented people. Skilled programmers and artists tend to have minds of their own. While you intend to create a horse, the artist may be envisioning a unicorn and the programmer a highly efficient camel. A good document ensures that you are all planning to make the same thing. A great document ensures you all have the same feel for the inner soul of this thing. Think of it as a big band jazz score – it puts everybody’s mind in the same place, even when there’s still plenty of room for the stars to improvise.
你的策划是现实与你的思想之间的桥梁，必须保证你想的，在现实中有依据，还有你最后得到的东西，是你心里想的东西。
Your document is a sort of intermediary between your mind and the real world. It ensures that what you have in mind is something that the real world is able to handle, and that what you end up with will be what you originally had in mind.
最后，记住一句谚语：艺术在于细节。（快客：下面一句不懂。）
Finally, remember the adage to which any salty gamer will attest: ‘Great art is in the details.’ Brilliant details flow naturally from the general gestalt as though they were present in that first flash of inspiration. But once you get into the hands-on implementation, it’s easy to lose that spark.
The Challenge
挑战

Prototyping parts of the project yourself is definitely a good idea – make whatever rough sketches you can. But again, it’s those details that count. The more details your imagination can hold, the greater a masterpiece your work will be.

做一个精彩的游戏，本身就很精彩。最好的想法往往在最后的交稿期的一分钟出现（Working from a document has a flip side, as well. Developing an exciting game has to be exciting. Some of the best parts of many projects were discovered in the heat of last-minute deadline panic. True, the pressures of time and cost budgeting don’t allow for perpetual reiteration of concept, but you simply cannot expect a killer game to come out of dry, predictable work. The challenge is to create a design document that will allow your project to tolerate surprise adaptations without losing the integrity of its original direction and scope.

Table 1. The three stages of documentation.
策划的三个步骤
Contents Purpose
1. Concept Paper Genre;
一般概念阶段
目标顾客、说明、特征、市场情况 投资和时间表。定义游戏的概念、范围、价值和可行性。（快客：这个就是现在我们要搞的东西）target audience; description; most compelling features; market information; cost and time to develop. It defines the concept, scope, worthiness and feasibility; sells the idea to your client, publisher, employer, and venture capitalist.
2. Design Document
设计文档阶段
说明项目所有的细节，所有组成部分的实现方法。
Description of the body and soul of the entire project, with all the details, and the method by which each element will be implemented. It ensures that what is produced is what you want to produce.
3. Production Documents
产品文档阶段
时间表（甘特图、PERT图等等）任务、预算、技术 。 Time-management charts (Gantt, PERT, and so on); task database; budget spreadsheet; technical specifications; Q/A database. It implements the design document on time and within budget.
Ten Points for a Successful Design Document好策划十要点

1. DESCRIBE NOT JUST THE BODY, BUT THE SOUL.
说明身体、更要说明灵魂（创意优先）。如果做游戏仅仅是一个简单的I/O系统–比如写代码并预言它如何运行，–那么你可以凑合一个干巴巴的、描述性的东西。但实际情况是：开发活动是很多人，很多有创造力的人，一起做的，每个人都有他的思想，都想在任何他们做过的事情上打下印迹。 If game development was just an automated input/output issue – something like writing code and being able to predict how it’s going to work – you could get by with a dry, descriptive document. The reality is that development is done by people, many of them creative people, who have their own minds; most will want to leave a stamp of that mind on everything they do.
可能会是这样：你拿一个说明给美工，和他讨论怎么做。你找程序给他看说明。小组的每个人都对你说的任何东西点头。（快客：啊，真的？）
It works like this: You provide specs to the artists and discuss with them what to do. You then visit the programmers and go over their specs. Both groups nod to everything you say.
当晚半夜两点，当C＋＋星在西方升起，正出在“中年心理危机”的程序（快客：谁？我？）开始想：“怎么？就做这么个破程序了此一生？这是我妈妈希望我做的？为什么？我也可以向某人一样策划，比他还棒。”想着，手里还打着键盘。
That night, around 2AM, just as the constellation of C++ is rising in the west, the programmer reaches a mid-life crisis and begins to think, ‘What, a geek programmer the rest of my life? Is this what my mother expected from me? Why, I can design a game just as well as anybody else!’ And the hands keep typing code.
同时，美工刚刚在他机器前醒过来，因为等一个非常费时的3D渲染，他刚才睡着了。（快客：佩雷斯将来可能就这样。）不清楚他是否还在做梦，也许已经醒了，在艺术想像的旷野和现实的梦境中，混沌着一切。惊奇的造物以从未想像的方式凝结了。
Around the same time, the artist has just woken up before his machine, having fallen into a deep stupor while waiting for a complex 3D rendering to finish. Unsure and not really caring whether he’s dreaming or is actually getting paid for all this, immersed in that wild world of artistic genius where fantasy and reality blend as one, the phosphors come together in ways previously unimagined – certainly not by you.
第二天，你的马变成了一个有两个峰的骆驼。
对有思想的人，灌输是没有用的，你还要激励。
By the next morning, your horse has become a unicorn with two humps. With creative people, instructing is not good enough. You need to inspire.



在设计中，不要满足与你对所有美学和细节的说明。费点时间说明游戏应该传达的感觉，每个部分后面应该表达的目标。以及所有你能描述的，游戏的各方面的精神。
In your design document, don’t satisfy yourself with a detailed description of every article and nuance. Take time to describe the feel that the game should have, the purpose behind each element, the experience each user will have, and any other aspects of the game’s soul you can envision and describe.
例如：设计了一个枪手，你想在实际操练前，让你的玩家练练。所以你在这里降低了难度。你得向每个团队里面的人解释为什么这些东西在这儿、为什么这些东西这样运行。到你的团队的人不看你的“纸”也清楚的时候，你兴许可以期待出来的东西与你想的近似或者–更好。
For example, say you’re designing a shooter. You want to train your players to deal with certain challenges before they actually meet them, so you place less lethal mini-challenges a few steps in advance. You’re going to have to explain that to everybody on the development team, so they’ll understand why certain things are where they are and why they work the way they do. That way, even if (read: when) your team toys with and mangles your ideas as they exist on paper, you can still harbor hopes that the outcome will have the same or similar overall effect. Or maybe even better.
2. MAKE IT READABLE.
注意可读性，整齐漂亮。 Go ahead, provide your people with full pages of 10-point, sans serif, 80-characters-per-line text, and demand that they read it. You may want to bundle Advil in the package – for those who actually take the pains to obey orders.
I try to follow at least some of the guidelines of good page layout.
Plenty of white space
Serif font for body text
Bold headers
Spaces between paragraphs
Short lines of text
Direct the eye towards important material
Use a hierarchical, ’2D’ format (see what I wrote about outliners in the ‘Design Documentation Tools’ sidebar)
Many instances call for a table, spreadsheet, or chart. Use them and make them sensibly attractive.
3. PRIORITIZE.
注意优先考虑的东西。（快客：看不懂）
Now that you realize that you’re working with other conscious egos, you’ll appreciate the urgency of tagging certain game elements as sacred. True, there are no guarantees, but if you use the tag sparsely enough, it may get some respect. But don’t stop there. As long as you’re tagging ideas, you’ll also want to distinguish between things that you intend to do and things that you’d like to do if time, budget, skill sets, and technicalities permit.
Then there’s the trash bin – things that sounded great, but were trashed for good reason. Refer to them explicitly and explain the reason that they were trashed. If you don’t, I can almost guarantee that they will be resurrected. Here’s your list of tags:


Indispensable
Important
If Possible
Rejected
You may wish to use visual symbols to represent these. Don’t rely on color, since documents aren’t always printed in color.
4. GET INTO THE DETAILS.
没有细节的文档是没有用的。
当你说实际的细节时，适当地给出一些例子。
A document without details is useless. Generalities can be interpreted by anybody in any way that they like. ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ meant one thing to Moses and another to a Spanish conquistador. Detailing whom you shouldn’t kill and under which circumstances would have been more helpful. The same holds true for your document: Once you’ve described some practical details and given some examples, your idea becomes more concrete – and harder to shove around.
比如说：青铜鸟无敌。还要精确地说出在各种被打击的情况下，这个东东会怎样反应，还有怎样回复原状。如果动画和美工不高兴，你可能不会从他们哪里得到你想要的东西，但是，他至少已经对你的想法有清晰的概念，他所做的修改不会损坏游戏的整体。
For example, don’t just say, ‘Bronze bird is invincible.’ Describe exactly what happens to this creature in each possible instance of its being hit, and how it recovers afterward. True, if the animator has any spunk and artistic dignity, you can rest assured that he won’t follow your specifications. But at least he’ll have a clear idea of what you want to achieve, and his modifications won’t seriously alter the related portions of the game.
别说：这时，用户必须按“跳”和方向键，爬上这堵墙。说明如果用户做其它所有尝试时，如何回应。解释为什么你认为用户会使用你说的那个组合键，还有当时环境中为什么可以爬这墙。
Don’t just say, ‘At this point, users will have to press the jump key with the arrow key to climb the wall.’ Describe what will happen if a player tries anything else. Explain why you think users will be able to figure out the combination that you’ve provided. Explain what about the environment suggests that it’s possible to climb this wall.
可能，你的美工提出一个更好的方案，可能比你原来想的更符合你的要求，这太好了。你的人对你的理解已经超出了你写在纸上的东西。但是记住：如果你没有在一开始把你的意图写清楚，这种事不会发生。
Again, your artist will come up with something else, perhaps something even more suitable than what you originally conceived. That’s real success: When your developers’ results come out even closer to your original flash of conception than what you were able to describe on paper. But this won’t happen unless you first lucidly describe your concept.
不要说：大人比小孩壮，但小孩比大人反应快。用一个表，说明各个角色的属性值。
Don’t just say, ‘Bongo Man is stronger than Bongo Boy, but Boy has faster reflexes.’ Use tables, spreadsheets, and charts to assign real values to the character’s speed of movement, how many hits the character can take, how much damage the character’s hits do, how many cels it takes to animate a hit, and so on. This sort of spreadsheet is invaluable in the Q/A and tweaking stages of production.


同样，用图表预测产品的接受程度。
Don’t just say, ‘Most people will figure out the whole game in a few days.’ Make a chart of predicted product life in different households, indicating at which points in time you expect various features to be discovered. User testing will later provide valuable feedback for designing your next game.
5. SOME THINGS MUST BE DEMONSTRATED.

有时一个粗线条就可以。但如果一个东西对你的项目的概念非常重要的话。你可能会做一个动画；有时一个东西不好说清楚，你可能做一个模型。
Sometimes a few rough sketches are enough, but if the idea is truly important to your concept of the project, you may want to make a rough animation yourself. When behaviors of elements become too complex and ambiguous to describe on paper, you’ll want to make a prototype. A side benefit of prototyping is that this practice often leads to a simpler, more elegant solution.

用动画加主题词的方法最好。（快客：太难了）
Even when you provide animations and prototypes, put the concept in words as well. True, an animation is worth a gigabyte of words, but words can communicate in ways that animations can’t. Words also clearly spell out the vital nuances that may be missed when watching the animation.
6. NOT JUST ‘WHAT’ BUT ‘HOW.’
不仅说“做什么”，还说出“怎样做”。（快客：你尽力吧。）
In the real world, the ‘how’ determines the ‘what.’ For example, suppose you’ve opted for claymation. Work out the process of how the images will be captured and document everything. What material and what color should the backdrop be? What camera should be used and why? What are the steps for processing the captured frames? And on and on. If you’ve tried it, you’ll know that any one of these factors can have a serious impact on the end result.
比如一个摩托车游戏，你说出摩托必须马力与制动平衡，你拿一张表说明如何平衡，你可能还想要有反作用力，说明编程思路（快客：不必、不必，但能否实现应该问问。）给出键盘的映射表（map）。
Or suppose you’re working on a motorcycle racing game. You state that the motorbikes must be balanced by their differing pros and cons. You even provide a chart that shows how balanced they are. Then you state that tweaking will be necessary. State how you plan to tweak – what is the process? Suppose the main character in your game is the Phantom of the Opera. Describe how the player’s keyboard is mapped as a pipe organ. Provide a map of each key. Specify how many channels of sound will be available. Talk it over with your programmer and work out every detail of how. Then document it. Two different ‘hows’ can mean two very different results.
7. PROVIDE ALTERNATIVES.
提供备选方案
项目经理在甘特图和PERT上费了很多时间，我没法说这对游戏开发有什么用（快客：还是有用的，甚至很有用）。主要原因是未来的不可知性，如果你想让你的人按时到达你指定的地点，最好让他们有更多的路径可以选择。
Project managers spend a lot of time with their Gantts and PERTs. Personally, I can’t really say that this stuff is effective for game development – principally because there are just so many unknowables. The more radical and pioneering your game technology, the less predictable the development stream is going to be. The best thing you can do to ensure that your team reaches your milestones on schedule is to provide more than one way of doing things.

比如上面的例子里，你的工程师可能耗费大量的时间，用你的不太好的办法到达你的目标。不如提一个目标，让他自己选路径。（快客：与上面的说法是有矛盾，策划是繁还是简确实要足够的经验才能把握。）
Lets go back to the keyboard as pipe organ example. Your engineer describes to you the ultimate method of getting awesome and funky results with tremendous power and depth to the user – at a cost of about 50 person-hours to implement. As with everything else we’ve discussed, you document the whole thing.
You can’t stop there. You’ve got to ask, ‘What would it take if we just wanted a trimmed-down, eight-channel pipe-organ? And what will we need to achieve the bare minimum? And what if we just had some assistant doing this?’ And then you document all that as well. When the FedEx truck is on its way over for the final daily pickup, you’ll be able to save your skin with a simple, ‘OK, do Plan C.’
向程序询问时：答：没问题或不可能。都没有太大意义。最好能得到这样的回答：“这个我可以这样做，但是要化两星期，或者我在这里改一点，但是化5小时”。
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in product design is asking engineers, ‘Can it be done?’ Unless you’re asking a first-class programmer, the question is useless. More specifically, responses fall into one of three categories:
(Lousy programmer) ‘Sure, that’s no problem.’
(Mediocre programmer) ‘Nope. Can’t be done.’
(First-class programmer) ‘I could do it like this and it’ll take two weeks. Or I could make a slight modification like this and it’ll take five hours.’
多问，以得到尽量接近事实的情报。
Always ask for more than one alternative and an estimate of how long each will take. Then indicate your preference – do this is if we have time, or this if we don’t.

8. GIVE IT A LIFE.
我警告你：不要被灵感或看着某个东西在你手里变成现实的快乐，以及由兴奋带来的自发的创造性等等刺激的东西所憋死。
你必须允许你的文档被修改，——被你自己修改，被别人修改。
I’ve already warned you against strangling the inspiration and spontaneous creativity that comes with the excitement and fun of seeing ideas become living objects in your hands. You’ve got to allow your document to tolerate change – by you or by (hopefully intelligent) others.
I first learned this lesson as a music composition major at the University of British Columbia. With much toil, I had written a neo-renaissance brass quintet of which I was quite proud. My professor liked it, too. When we brought it to the college’s star brass quintet for rehearsal, however, I passed through several stages of horror, disbelief, indignation, and clinical depression within ten seconds. The quintet began to play, then stopped on signal from the tuba player. The fellow took out his pencil and began to change a few notes, and then everyone continued. It happened more than once.


我在大学写一个乐曲时学到这一课。当时评审的时候，从一个家伙开始，他们都在我们乐谱上改起来。
我的教授，注意到我突然停止呼吸,昏过去了。他弄醒我，说：“别在意，他们对莫扎特也这样改，而且他们总是改得更好。”（快客：将来我们也会遇到的）
My professor, noting my sudden faint state of health, turned to me and commented, ‘Don’t worry, they did that to Mozart as well. And they’re usually right.’
The fact is, no matter how good something looks on paper, the greatest expert still modifies things when it enters the concrete world of objective perception. Nevertheless, you don’t want to witness the ruthless rape of your design and dreams. Rather, you’re hoping for a kind of organic growth – ideas growing naturally out of the seeds you’ve planted without needing foreign limbs and bodies grafted onto them.
Here are some tips for creating a document that can tolerate change without corrupting the original idea or sabotaging the development process:
注意你的“灵魂”，主题要表达清晰，主题要让每个人都能领会到，这样就可以了。
还有，改动不能改主题。
Make certain to engrave in stone those aspects that are so essential to the game concept that they must not be changed.
Make certain everybody understands the feel that the game is supposed to have and the purpose of each of its details.
If information is repeated, it must be cross-referenced. Otherwise, if there are changes, you can end up with contradictory instructions.
And here are some tips for the actual implementation stage:
When a change is suggested, check back in your design document and see if it is in concordance with the ‘soul’ of your game.
Check whether this is just an isolated change, or it’s of major global ecological impact (see ‘The Ecology of Improvement’). If it’s the latter, save it for your next project.
Update the design document and include the reasons for the change. Or if you didn’t make the change, say so and explain why it was rejected.
Changes, deletions, and rejected ideas should be retained in a master document to avoid discussing the same thing twice.
Everyone must be working from the same version. Past versions should be destroyed.
Crucial, Vital, and Urgent: The design document must be maintained under one person’s supervision only.
9. NOBODY SHOULD BE ABLE TO SAY, ‘I DID IT THAT WAY BECAUSE I COULDN’T FIND ANY REFERENCE TO IT IN THE DOCUMENT.’
不能让人说：我这样做是因为文档里没有这方面的参考。
要有清楚的页码，标题和页眉页脚，清晰地指出各个要点。让人好找。
I’ve seen documents that didn’t even have the pages numbered. And then they complain that people didn’t follow instructions. Every good word processor will auto-number pages and print the date and title in the header or footer of every page. Some will even allow you to change the header at new chapters. Use bold text to direct attention to important material. Repeat yourself in different parts of the document as much as you like, as long as you cross-reference so you can update everything together as well. Make a thorough Table of Contents.
You may wish to write your document using HTML and provide hot links. Some progressive word processors provide hot link capabilities without HTML. But remember that more often than not, people prefer to work from a hard copy. (That way there’s something to read while rebooting after the hourly system crash.)


10. DELIVER IT IN GOOD CONDITION.
完整地递上去。指：装订好递上去。
After all this, you need to do whatever you can to facilitate everyone actually reading and using the thing. A pile of papers doesn’t get read – it doesn’t look important enough. Only things with hard covers look important.

Create a list of everyone who is supposed to have a copy. Keep the list. Print out the whole thing with the date in the header of each page. Have holes made and put it in binders. Label the spine and cover of each binder. When there are updates, provide everyone with the revised pages. At some points, you may need to provide new books and throw out the old ones.
In Sum Check…
Movie makers use move scripts. Architects use blueprints. Musicians use a score. According to ancient hearsay evidence, even the Cosmic Creator created a design document – which He later let a few prophets take a peek at – before the primal ‘Let there be light!’ So game developers, following their Supernal Role Model, can certainly do the same. Do it right and it’s smooth sailing the rest of the way.
Tzvi Freeman teaches Game Design and Documentation at Digipen School of Computer Gaming in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He has designed several commercial games and has acted as a consultant on many others. He can be reached at TzviF@aol.com.
总之：清晰地表达游戏的精髓——主题“灵魂”“Soul”。让人接受是策划的最终目的。

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