Chapter 417 It can go any faster!
Having finally put together the last piece of the puzzle, Lilith felt refreshed and couldn''t be happier.
Finally become full of confidence again!
??Gu Fan looked at her and couldn''t help but sigh, is this **** demon''s psychological quality quite good? 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 organized 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, 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 industries were also very successful.
Lilith gets annoyed when she thinks about making money against Heaven, so she seldom 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?"
You must know that Nitiantian’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 this.
“Besides, I don’t have time to spend money.”
Lilith was doubtful.
??But considering that he made surprise inspections every now and then, Gu Fan indeed spent most of his time in the villa thinking about the game, and there was really no place to spend money, so he reluctantly believed half of it for the time being.
"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!"
?Lilith could not wait to put her hands on her hips, her expression 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 100 people to develop a project for 3 months, but 200 people can shorten it to one and a half months. It cannot be calculated like this..."
? It is true that games are a labor-intensive industry. Basically, most of the expenses are in labor costs. Generally speaking, the more people on the project team, the faster the game development speed.
But this kind of thing also has a limit, 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 complex the division of labor required, and the difficulty of managing the entire project will increase exponentially.
Just like some large-scale movies, there may be thousands of people working on set at the same time. Not to mention letting these thousands of people perform their own duties, just providing them with food is enough for the director to drink a pot.
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 upper-level personnel required to 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. If there are too many people, the level of code or art will be uneven and difficult to unify. The energy consumed in standardization may even exceed the serious work itself.
Hence, there is an upper limit to the increase in personnel, and 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 staff of Nitian has reached more than 400 people.
This is already quite a high number.
Because the game production of Nitiantian 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 launched on 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 cutting edge.
In the past few 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. There may be a situation where new employees are completely idle and cannot be effectively utilized.
Lilith actually wants to speed up the progress of the game by throwing money. I''m afraid it''s 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 solution is simple: outsource.”
Zhou Yang was stunned for a moment, but quickly shook his head: "No way, Mr. Gu? If we outsource it, how can we ensure the quality of the game?"
Lilith’s eyes immediately lit up: “No need to guarantee it!”
?Gu Fan was silent for a moment: "No, we still have to guarantee it, otherwise we cannot guarantee whether there will be some magical bugs in the outsourced part of the code."
Lilith instantly shrank: "That''s right... So what do you say 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 will take a certain amount of time and may require the running-in of two or three projects. However, once successful, we can further accelerate game development. The speed.” Zhou Yang and Wei Chengjie felt a little incredible when they heard it.
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 during the game development process, 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 its 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.
?Judging from 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, while 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, if 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 magical 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 often happened. If you let yourself go, wouldn''t it be like "Ascension" reappeared? That''s absolutely not possible!
??Gu Fan explained: “My idea is very simple, exponential growth!
“So far, the total number of programmers in Nitiantian is about 300, 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 will directly recruit almost the same number of programmers and let them complete the development tasks one by one.”
Zhou Yang was a little surprised: "Mr. Gu, are you saying that 140 will change to 280, and then to 560? Such an exponential growth?"
“But I’m afraid that’s not possible, because the process of bringing an old employee up to new people will also seriously reduce his work efficiency. In this way, two people working together to develop a program may not necessarily be faster than an old employee alone.”
?Gu Fan nodded: "In the short term, that''s 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, and are already familiar with our internal development process, so they can continue to expand.
“Then we can send another group of the previous employees to various outsourcing studios.
“The outsourcing studio is the main part of our efficiency improvement.
“As for the construction of the program framework and various co-ordination work, it is the responsibility of me and Brother Dahui as well as all the key programmers who remain in the company.”
Zhou Yang was even more confused: "Is this... possible?"
It feels very unreliable no matter what.
Wei Chengjie pondered for a moment and then nodded slightly: "Theoretically speaking, it can barely be established. After all, the 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 just connect with our company. Even if we send ten people, will they be willing to use all the company’s resources for us and fully cooperate?
“Even if we can make them unable to refuse by throwing money at us in the short term, what about the gap period in game development? They will still have to develop other games.
“Unless we can ensure that future game development is non-stop, without any gaps at all, and the money we give far exceeds that of other companies, 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.
“In a long period of time, our input costs may be three or even five times that of before, but 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 to 80% of the original time. Wouldn’t that be too cost-effective?
“I’m afraid that in the end, even the cost of the game will 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 with the risks of doing so, it always feels like it is small. Losing a lot…”
?However, Lilith didn''t care at all: "It doesn''t matter, it doesn''t matter at all!"
Obviously, for her, it’s not a big issue whether the game is worth money or not. It doesn’t matter if the game shrinks a little, but it may increase the negative emotions of the players.
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. A little adds up to a lot!
“Very good, then proceed with this matter immediately and run forward, quickly!”
(End of this chapter)