When I write a bug it becomes the core gameplay.

Chapter 417 Can it be faster?

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

Finally I feel 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 this were a normal human being, he would have probably lost his temper long ago.

Well, this indomitable spirit is indeed worth learning.

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

"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!

“We’re going to do something big this time, 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 the money. For her, she had never intended to make money from opening Nitiantang. Even if she lost money, she could make up for it with other businesses.

I just didn’t expect that Nitiantang would keep making money and there was no need to make up for it from other businesses. Even the newly developed physical industries were very successful.

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

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 know, the net income of Ni Tian Tang will be distributed to Gu Fan as a bonus according to a percentage. He should transfer the money to himself immediately after earning it. How could he not know this?

Gu Fan coughed twice and said, "I'm focusing on the game and writing the code so hard that I don't 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 he conducted surprise inspections every now and then, and that Gu Fan really spent most of his time in the villa thinking about games and had no place to spend money, he only reluctantly believed it halfway for the time being.

"In short, spend the money! I want to see Blood of Lies developed and completed as quickly as possible! I need to use the best appearance to deceive all the players, oh no, attract them!"

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

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

"It doesn't mean that if 100 people take 3 months to develop a project, then 200 people can shorten it to one and a half months. You can't calculate it that way..."

It is true that gaming is a labor-intensive industry. Basically, most of the expenses are on labor costs. Generally speaking, the more people there are in the project team, the faster the game development will be.

But there are limits to this kind of thing, and it cannot be piled up indefinitely.

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 big-budget movies, there may be thousands of people working on the set at the same time. Not to mention making sure these thousands of people have their own jobs, just providing them with food is enough to make the director very worried.

The same goes for games.

When it comes to making large-scale games, the more people the better. However, with more people, the number of middle-level staff required for coordination and management will increase exponentially, and even the number of upper-level staff to manage the middle-level staff will also increase exponentially.

The more people there are, the more serious the internal friction at the management level will be. Too many people will also cause the code or art level to be uneven and difficult to unify. The energy consumed in standardization may even exceed the serious work itself.

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

So far, Against the Heaven can be roughly divided into two production teams, led by Zhou Yang and Wei Chengjie respectively.

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

The entire team of Nitiantang now has more than 400 people.

This is already a fairly high number.

Because the game production of Against the Heaven's Glory is actually a flat structure, the number of people between departments is quite unbalanced.

Since Lilith can provide art and music resources directly from Hell, Against the Heaven does not need to maintain a large art team at all. It only needs to adjust the 3D art and action art of the model details.

In addition, Nitiantang does not need a dedicated operation team. After all, all of Nitiantang's games are directly thrown onto the official game platform, and there is no problem of subsequent operation at all.

After cutting off these irrelevant personnel, the employees of Nitiantang are still mainly concentrated in the three departments of planning, programming and testing, which means that all the good resources are basically put to good use.

In the development of almost every game before, the project team would absorb 20% to 30% new people.

This is almost the limit of what the company can bear. If there are more, the management of the entire project team will be in trouble. It is possible that the new employees will have nothing to do 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's not completely impossible.

“The solution is simple: outsource.”

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

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

Gu Fan was silent for a moment: "No, we still have to guarantee it, otherwise we can't guarantee that there will be no magical bugs in the outsourced code."

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

Gu Fan explained: "It's very simple. When we outsource, we just have to ensure the quality of development as much as possible. This will take a certain amount of time, and may require two or three projects to be run-in, but once successful, we can further speed up the pace of game development." Zhou Yang and Wei Chengjie both felt a little unbelievable when they heard this.

Outsourcing, as the name suggests, means that a company entrusts its non-core business to an external professional company 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.

In simple terms, it means spending money to find other companies on the market to help share the work.

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

Because in the process of game development, 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 has to pay to support them. But if it is an outsourcing company, after the art resources of this project are completed, they can continue to produce 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: a 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 rule unification, which will in turn increase new workload and not be worth the cost.

Given the current situation of Against the Heavens, the art resources that need to be outsourced the most are not the biggest problem.

Although the bigger the game, the longer it takes Hell's art team to produce art resources, in general, no matter how big the game is, the time it takes 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.

However, the program is not suitable for outsourcing.

Because art standards are easier to establish and online communication is more convenient, while programming requires constant coordination and online communication is inconvenient, so it is better to communicate offline and unify standards. If any problems or bugs are found, they can be solved as soon as possible.

What's more, once something goes wrong with the program, it will be a big deal. For such an important thing, most game companies don't like to outsource it.

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

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

After the pursuit and interception, there were still frequent accidents. If I let myself go, wouldn’t it be a reappearance of "Ascension"? That was absolutely not allowed!

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

“So far, we have about 300 programmers in Nitiantang, and there are more than 240 reliable and experienced programmers who are familiar with the work process.

“We selected about 240 people from these 100 people to form about 10 groups.

"Each team directly moves into an outsourced studio to take charge of a portion of the development work.

"For the remaining 140 people, we directly recruited a similar number of programmers to complete the development tasks one by one."

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

"But I'm afraid that's not going to work, because the process of the old employee training the new employee will seriously reduce his work efficiency. In this way, two people developing a program together may not necessarily be faster than the old employee developing it alone."

Gu Fan nodded: "That's true in the short term, but what about in the long term?

"After working on one or two projects, the 140 new employees will be able to become senior programmers and 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 studio is where we see the main improvement in efficiency.

"As for the construction of the program framework and various coordination tasks, it will be the responsibility of me, Dahui, and all the key programmers who remain in the company."

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

It just feels so unreliable.

Wei Chengjie thought for a moment and nodded slightly: "In theory, it can be barely established. After all, those top companies basically use similar methods to expand their staff, that is, internal mentoring.

“But there are several major disadvantages to doing so.

“The first is the outsourcing company.

“The outsourcing company must not only work 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 them in the short term, what about the gap in game development? They will always have to develop other games.

“Unless we can ensure that the future game development will not stop for a moment, without any gaps, and the money we pay is much higher than other companies, we can gradually use these outsourcing companies for our own benefit.

“Secondly, whether it is outsourcing or internal one-to-one training, it actually brings huge financial pressure.

“For a long time, our investment may be three or even five times of the previous cost, but the output is basically the same, and the time may not be shortened by half.

“This is still an optimistic scenario.

"If we are not optimistic, we may invest five times the cost, but the output of the game will be smaller, and the time will only be shortened to 70% or 80% of the original time. Isn't that too uneconomical?

“I’m afraid that in the end, I won’t even be able to recover the cost of the game.

"Of course, the only benefit of doing this is that, perhaps after a few games, when this model gradually matures, we can indeed further shorten the game development time. But compared to the risks of doing so, it always feels like a small loss for a big one..."

However, Lilith didn't care at all: "It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter at all!"

Obviously, money is not a big issue for her. It doesn't matter if the game is slightly reduced in size. On the contrary, it may increase the negative emotions of players.

All she wants now is speed! The faster the better!
As long as games are released fast enough, there will always be treasure games that make people contribute a lot of negative emotions, and little by little they will add up to a lot!
"Very good, then you should push this matter forward immediately, and run forward, quickly!"

(End of this chapter)