《Star Wars: Galactic Racer》如何通过“分布式开发”保持核心团队精简与可持续

"When you shrink, there's a personal impact to people, but you also lose an incredible amount of knowledge, which I think is probably way more expensive to retrieve"

Matt Webster, CEO of Fuse Games, is "thrilled" with the critical reception to Star Wars: Galactic Racer, which is currently sitting on a Metacritic score of 88 for the PS5 version. Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at Game Republic New Horizons this week, he says it "felt like we had something good", but you "never really know" how a game will land.

He cautions that it's "too early to tell" whether the game has met sales expectations – "I mean, we're only really through our first weekend" – but he's been pleased to see the audience is receptive to innovation.

"We felt like we were doing some interesting new things that would be unexpected and surprising, and I think that has helped us," he says, noting that racing games are mired in convention, where it's all about winning. But the roguelike structure of Galactic Racer means that "a really hard fought eighth place finish feels great."

"I was reading Stephen Totilo's article about him experiencing the game with his son, and it was his son's first foray into the roguelike structure. And it was really interesting to me because it joined up some thinking around failing in life and coming back stronger. Yes, all games are about fantasy fulfillment and wanting to play around in another world and be successful and learn things. But failing and then learning from that failure and coming back stronger feels like a metaphor for modern life."

Galactic Racer is a great success story for a new UK studio (and a newly independent UK publisher in Secret Mode). But the most interesting story is the way the game was made, which, like the game itself, broke away from convention.

Traditionally, AAA games have been made by in-house teams of hundreds of people – this week it was revealed that Rockstar now has more than 4,700 staff members – but Galactic Racer was made by a core team of 75. In fact, Webster says the core team "averaged a lot smaller than that" through most of development.

Instead of hiring hundreds of team members, Fuse Games has relied heavily on external providers. "What we wanted to do was keep that core small, smaller than perhaps you might have done in the past, and scale capacity and capability with what we call distributed development," says Webster.

"We want to operate at Premier League level," he says. "We know what that takes, but we didn't want to grow and shrink for a bunch of different reasons. Because when you shrink, there's a personal impact to people, but you also lose an incredible amount of knowledge, which I think is probably way more expensive to retrieve."

Three-tier model

What Fuse calls distributed development is split into three tiers, separated in terms of their distance from the core team. Furthest away is traditional outsourcing – involving the creation of art assets, and so on – which typically involves teams in "lower cost locations," Webster says.

"You give a brief, you get an output back, and you integrate it in. Which sounds transactional, but you shouldn't treat it as transactional. It's very important that you build relationships with those folks, you get a better result when you do so."

Slightly closer to the core team is what Fuse calls external development, which involves giving an outside group a self-contained piece of work. Webster gives the example of Galactic Racer's photo mode, which was handed lock, stock, and barrel to an outside studio.

"It's clear to brief, clear to point to a set of features, and you need a cross-discipline team to bring it together, so you need production, art, UI, and code to create that thing. But because we're in Unreal, it can be self-contained. So someone can go off and build that, and we can slot it in."

"They are, to all intents and purposes, an extension of our team. They just happen to work for another company"

The closest tier to Fuse's core team is co-development. "Those are people that are in our stand-ups, they're in our Slack channels, they're in our code base, they're in all of our team stuff. They are, to all intents and purposes, an extension of our team. They just happen to work for another company."

All of the co-development studios Fuse worked with are based in the UK – newly Manchester-based Expression Games recently confirmed it worked on the title – which Webster says was partly about keeping the teams in the same time zone. Working so closely together requires "high-frequency communication", he says, "so time zone makes a difference."

He adds that the UK is extremely well positioned for co-development. "There's just a broad range of experience," he says. "There's different configurations of teams, different cost bases. It used to be in the past that those external studios would help you because they needed to keep the lights on, and really they'd much rather be doing their own thing. And that's changed dramatically."

Now, he says, people are much more willing to work in co-development, partly because games take so long to make these days, and a co-dev role provides much more variety. "They don't want to be on the same thing for three years."

Webster says that Fuse carefully chose co-dev partners that aligned with the organisation's five values, which he says are "incredibly important" to the company and are "not things that go on a webpage never to be seen again". Those values can be summed up as love of games; collaboration; iteration; be clear, kind, and responsible; and curiosity. "Lead by example, stay humble, and be curious," Webster says of the latter. "And with that you create an environment where people can be their very best."

But if other studios are thinking about applying the same distributed development model, Webster offers a note of caution. "You can't just take this model and apply it. You've got to configure your studio with it from the start."

It requires a lot of thought, preparation, and management, he says. "Every additional partner has a disproportionately higher load on you," he says, "because you are supporting a whole bunch of other people. So you have to build that strategy in from the start."

Sports in space

Star Wars tends to bring to mind lightsaber duels, epic space battles, and force powers. But Webster's experience with making Star Wars games (he was previously at Criterion, which made the X-wing VR mission for Star Wars Battlefront) has taught him that the franchise is far broader.

"What blew my mind when I went to Star Wars Celebration for the very first time when we were doing Battlefront was people dress up as the characters you'd never expect. Yes, of course there's people dressed up as Darth Vader or Princess Leia or whatever, but there's also the 501st Legion, and there are all sorts of different stormtroopers. You've got such a broad galaxy, and people really love that."

That's why Fuse decided to tell a sports story in the Star Wars universe, "about rivalry and big egos." Sports and Star Wars might not be two things you would immediately put together, but Webster says it makes sense. "If sports is the biggest entertainment medium on this planet, then surely the same would be true in a galaxy far, far away."

"The intrigue and the excitement off track is as compelling as it is on track"

He says that a big inspiration for Galactic Racer right from the start was the Netflix series Drive to Survive, which follows the trials and tribulations of Formula 1 drivers across a season of the F1 World Championship. "The intrigue and the excitement off track is as compelling as it is on track," says Webster, and this is something Fuse wanted to capture in Galactic Racer. "So the paddock was incredibly important for us, because the paddock is where we immerse players in Star Wars and they get up close with the Star Wars characters."

He says that as well as advancing the narrative, these off-track sections in Galactic Racer are essential for the game's pacing. "Perhaps most importantly, it's a lower intensity space to offset the higher intensity racing," he says. "Because there's only so much time you can spend with your eyes on stalks at super high speed. You've got to have that light and shade."

And Webster remains a fan of the Netflix series. "I think it's been a little bit sanitised recently, but those rivalries… You want people to like each other, but you also really want people to not like each other as well."

As for what's next for Fuse Games, Webster says that although they have ideas for the next game, right now it's all about servicing the current one. He says they have already patched Galactic Racer four times since release. "You've got to take stock and learn from what an audience is telling you, and that will move things around the priority list – it already has done. That's part of making games: prioritization and being flexible and adaptable. We'll be in that mode for a little while."

"The launch is the beginning."