Lessons learned from a game translation competition

摘要

The success of mobile platforms and the casual game genre has radically transformed the game development scene in the last five years. Huge 200 or 300 employee studios have been joined (or, often, replaced) by an army of independent developers, teams of one or two people focusing on projects with reduced budgets and development times. In a way it's back-to-the-origins, a new millennium version of the phenomenon that saw hundreds of programmers committed to creating, from their desks at home, an endless series of masterpieces for the 8-bit and 16-bit computers that invaded our homes nearly 30 years ago. But there is a sharp distinction between the developers of that era and the current generation, embodied by the greater collaborative spirit of the latter ones - a spirit largely fueled by technologies that have spread from the 1990s. It's the offline (or early online) generation versus the always-online one. It's in this environment that game jams were born, virtual or real-life gatherings where developers plan, design and create a video game in a reduced period of time, sometimes as short as 24 hours. The Global Game Jam, an annual event born under the IGDA (International Game Developers Association, a professional association that brings together more than 12,000 members of the gaming industry) involving hundreds of teams of developers from around the world, is probably the most famous game jam.