Chapter 417 It can be faster!

Chapter 417 It can be faster!

Finally, the last piece of the puzzle was put together. Lilith felt refreshed and was so happy.

Finally, she became confident again!

Gu Fan looked at her and couldn't help but sigh. This hell demon has a good psychological quality? No matter what kind of setbacks she encountered before, as long as she found a new direction, she would immediately put all the previous unhappiness behind her and continue to move forward with all her strength.

If it were a normal human, she might have been discouraged long ago.

Well, this kind of indomitable spirit is really worth learning.

Lilith sorted out all the current game mechanisms and quickly wrote them down. Then, she looked around and made the final deployment.

"Okay, then the mechanism of the game "Blood of Lies" has 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 a big one and throw all the excess R\u0026D funds of our company into it!

"By the way, Gu Fan, how much money does our company have now?"

Lilith obviously didn't pay much attention to the money. For her, she didn't intend to make money from opening the company Ni Tian Tang. Even if she lost money, she could make up for it with other businesses.

It's just that she didn't expect Ni Tian Tang to keep making money, and there was no need to make up for it from other businesses. Even the newly developed physical industry was very successful.

Lilith was annoyed when she thought about Ni Tian Tang making money, so she rarely paid attention to how much money the company made.

Gu Fan was silent for a moment: "I'm not very clear about this, I'll ask the finance department later."

Lilith looked suspicious: "You don't know either?"

You know, the net income of Ni Tian Tang will be distributed to Gu Fan as a bonus according to a percentage. He should have transferred it to himself as soon as he made money. How could he not know?

Gu Fan coughed twice: "I'm devoted to the game, and I'm exhausted from writing code. How can I have time to pay attention to these things.

"Besides, whether it's money or not, I don't have time to spend it. "

Lilith was skeptical.

But considering that she had conducted surprise inspections every now and then, and Gu Fan had spent most of his time in the villa thinking about the game, there was really no place to spend money, so for the time being, she reluctantly believed half of it.

"In short, spend money! I want to see "Blood of Lies" developed as quickly as possible! Use the best skin to deceive all the players, oh no, attract them!"

Lilith wanted to put her hands on her hips, with a very proud expression.

But at this time, Zhou Yang poured a basin of cold water on her in time: "But President Li... Games are not something that can be made faster by spending money...

"It's not that 100 people take 3 months to develop a project, and 200 people can shorten it to one and a half months. It can't be calculated that way..."

Games are indeed a labor-intensive industry. Basically, most of the expenses are on labor costs. Generally speaking, the more people in the project team, the faster the game development speed.

But this kind of thing also has a limit, and it can't be piled up indefinitely.

Because whether it is games or movies, or other similar industries, the more people there are, the more complicated the division of labor is, 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 the scene at the same time. Let alone letting these thousands of people perform their duties, just providing them with food is enough for the director to drink a pot.

The same is true for games.

If you want to make a large-scale game, the more people the better, but with more people, the middle-level personnel required for coordination and management will also increase exponentially, and even the upper-level personnel who manage the middle-level personnel will also increase exponentially.

The more people there are, the more serious the internal friction caused at the management level, and the more people there are, the uneven and difficult to unify the code or art level, and the energy consumed in standardization may even exceed those serious work itself.

Therefore, there is an upper limit to the increase in personnel, and Anti-Heaven has basically reached this upper limit.

So far, Anti-Heaven can be roughly divided into two production groups, led by Zhou Yang and Wei Chengjie respectively.

After continuous poaching and recruitment, the number of people in these two production groups has reached a team size of nearly 200 people.

The entire staff of Ni Tian Tang has reached more than 400 people.

This is already a relatively high number.

Because the game production of Ni Tian Tang is actually a flat structure, the number of people between departments is quite unbalanced.

Since Lilith can directly provide art resources and music resources from Hell, Ni Tian Tang does not need to support a large art team at all, but only needs to adjust the 3D art and action art of the model details.

In addition, Ni Tian Tang does not need a special operation team. After all, all the games of Ni Tian Tang are directly thrown on the official game platform, and there is no problem of subsequent operation at all.

After cutting off these insignificant personnel, the employees of Ni Tian Tang are still mainly in the three departments of planning, programming, and testing. Basically, all the good steel is used on the blade.

In the previous few games, almost every game development, the project team will absorb 20% to 30% of new people.

This is almost the limit that the company can bear. If there are more, I am afraid that the management of the entire project team will have problems, and 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 spending money, but this is probably just a daydream.

However, Gu Fan shook his head slightly: "To say that we can speed up the development of the game by spending money... it is not completely impossible.

"The solution is very simple: outsourcing."

Zhou Yang was stunned for a moment, but soon shook his head: "No way, Mr. Gu? If we outsource, how can we guarantee the quality of the game?"

Lilith's eyes lit up immediately: "No need to guarantee!"

Gu Fan was silent for a moment: "No, we still have to guarantee, otherwise we can't guarantee whether the outsourced code will have some magical bugs."

Lilith instantly wilted: "That's right... Then what about outsourcing?"

Gu Fan explained: "It's very simple. While outsourcing, we just need to ensure the quality of development as much as possible. This takes a certain amount of time, and may require two or three projects to run in, but once successful, it can further speed up the development of the game. "

Zhou Yang and Wei Chengjie both felt a little unbelievable when they heard this.

Outsourcing, as the name suggests, means that a company entrusts non-core businesses 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 multiple other companies at the same time.

In layman's terms, it means spending money to find other companies in the market to help share the work.

For example, some entrepreneurial game companies basically outsource art directly.

Because in the process of game development, it is a waste to directly support an entire art team. When all the art resources of the game are used up, After the release, the art team has nothing to do, and the company has to pay to support them. But if it is an outsourcing company, after the art resources of this project are released, they can continue to release the art resources of the next project, which can be perfectly connected and can be regarded as optimizing resource allocation.

But outsourcing is not omnipotent, and the reason is still the same as before: the company's organizational structure has limits.

If the company's organizational structure is unreasonable, then more resources will need to be spent on internal coordination and rule unification, which will increase new workload and will not be worth the loss.

In terms of the current situation of Against Heaven, the art resources that need to be outsourced the most are not the most Big problem.

Although the bigger the game, the longer it takes for Hell's art team to produce art resources, but in general, no matter how big the game is, the time it takes for Hell's art team to produce resources is still less than that of program development.

In this case, there is actually no need to outsource art too much, and the entire process is stuck in the program.

And the program is not suitable for outsourcing.

Because the standard of art is easier to establish and it is more convenient to communicate online, while the program needs to be coordinated at all times, and online communication is inconvenient, it is better to communicate offline and unify standards. If any problems or bugs are found, it is better to solve them as soon as possible.

Moreover, once the program goes wrong, it is a big deal. Such an important thing, general game companies don't like to outsource.

Of course, there are some magical European and American game companies that outsource the program to Indian programmers in order to save money, and the final results are all terrible without exception.

Although Lilith doesn't care about the quality of the program, the various strange bugs before have made her a frightened bird, and she no longer accepts the appearance of any bugs.

After being surrounded and blocked, there are still frequent accidents. If you let yourself go, wouldn't it be a reappearance of "Ascension"? That's absolutely not possible!

Gu Fan explained: "My idea is very simple, exponential growth!

"So far, all the programmers of our Against Heaven have added up to about 300 people, and among them, there are about 240 reliable senior programmers who are familiar with the work process.

"We will select about 100 people from these 240 people to form about 10 groups.

"Each team will directly move into an outsourcing studio to be responsible for a part of the development work.

"For the remaining 140 people, we will directly recruit programmers of almost the same number and let them complete the development tasks one by one."

Zhou Yang was a little surprised: "Mr. Gu, are you saying that 140 will become 280, and then 560? Such an exponential growth?

"But I'm afraid it won't work, because the process of old employees leading new employees will also seriously reduce his work efficiency. In this way, two people developing programs together may not be faster than an old employee alone."

Gu Fan nodded: "In the short term, this is the case, 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 they are already familiar with our internal development process, so we can continue to expand.

"Then we can send another batch of previous employees to various outsourcing studios.

"The outsourcing studios are the main part of our efficiency improvement.

"As for the establishment of the program framework and various coordination tasks, it will be my responsibility, Dahui and I, as well as all the key programmers who remain in the company."

Zhou Yang was even more confused: "Is this... possible?"

Why does it feel so unreliable?

Wei Chengjie nodded slightly after thinking for a moment: "In theory, it can barely be established. After all, those top companies basically use similar methods to expand their staff, and they teach and mentor within the company.

"But if we do this, there are several major disadvantages.

"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 the subsequent game development will not stop at all, without any gaps, and the money we give is far more than 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.

“For a long time, our input costs may be three or even five times as much as before, but the output will be about 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, I won’t even be able to recoup the cost of the game.

“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, money is not a big issue at all. It doesn't matter if the game shrinks a little, but it may increase the negative emotions of 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. The little adds up to a lot!

"Very good, then you should proceed with this matter immediately and run forward, quickly!"