How does Xishanju use ONES to build a game industry assembly line? ｜ONES Industry Practice

China has the world's largest gaming market. According to the "China Game Industry Report" released by the Game Work Committee of the Audio and Digital Association, in 2021, the actual sales revenue of the Chinese game market will be 296.5 billion yuan, and the scale of domestic game users will reach 666 million. Games have become an important productivity of the digital economy.

With the improvement of the creative ecology and changes in the demographic structure, players' requirements for experience have increased, and the game industry, which is gradually becoming saturated, is entering the second half of the quality and efficiency priority stage from the stage of savage growth and profit. In order to compete for existing users, game manufacturers need to continuously innovate in terms of picture quality, plot, gameplay, etc., and achieve breakthroughs with high-quality products and refined operations. In this context, the cost of game development, operation, and distribution continues to increase, and project management and team collaboration are also deeply challenged.

Founded in 1995, Xishanju is the first game studio of Kingsoft Group (3888.HK) and the first batch of game studios in mainland China. In the era of terminal games, Xishanju has already emerged. In 2003, it first released its first martial arts game, "Swordsman Love Online Edition", which promoted traditional Chinese martial arts culture in the form of games, and made "the greatest of heroes serve the country". The idea of "for the people" spread and is regarded as a benchmark for martial arts game brands. The self-developed 3D engine is also one of the cutting-edge technologies in the industry, and is supported by the National 863 Program.

Adhering to the belief and original intention of martial arts culture, Xishanju takes client and mobile online games as the core, and has been cultivating and creating games for 25 years, and tailor-made cultural and creative products for some influential IPs, such as music, film and television. It has gradually developed into the best digital interactive entertainment company integrating production and distribution in China. Up to now, Xishanju has operated dozens of online games, including Jianwang 3, Jianwang 3 Yuanqi, Jianxia World 3, Jianwang 1 Return, "Jianxia Love" mobile game, etc. Among them, the "Jianxia Love" series has been successfully expanded to Asia market.

The game development process is complicated, and it usually goes through multiple stages such as "project pre-research - project establishment - demand collection - art design - development - internal testing - public testing" before it can be officially launched. How to coordinate a large production team with complex roles to ensure stable product delivery and rapid iteration is a problem that Xishanju has always been exploring.

Guo Weiwei, CEO of Xishanju and producer of the "Jianwang 3" series, once said: "Today's game development is different from 20 years ago. It is often a large-scale production of three to five hundred people. In this process, the product development process must be Rely on industrialization to complete it. Instead of coming up with an idea like the R&D team of dozens of people in the past, just shout in the office and you can make it.” At the same time, “The maturity of industrialization is first established in the production pipeline. On the basis of maturity, this means that each pipeline must be optimized upstream and downstream."

Based on this technical thinking, Xishanju attaches great importance to the R&D management capabilities of enterprises, and has tried self-developed and various third-party project management tools. However, with the expansion of R&D scale, the team began to face many difficulties:

Requirements change frequently, existing tools are not suitable for complex management requirements, game development cycle is long, it is difficult to control the overall progress of the project, there is a lot of cross-functional collaboration, departmental data is fragmented, and there are bottlenecks in communication

Therefore, the company urgently needs to choose an enterprise-level R&D management tool, establish a unified R&D management standard, and improve the efficiency of project resource utilization. After evaluating various tools at home and abroad, Xishanju finally chose ONES with high configuration flexibility, thoughtful after-sales service, and support for privatized deployment.

By analyzing the actual R&D scenarios of Xishanju, ONES clarified the customer's demands:

• Requirements management: flexible response to changes in requirements
• Resource management: efficient organization of cross-departmental collaboration
• Progress Management: Make sure new versions go live on time

Game projects are creatively oriented, demand volatility and management uncertainty. Therefore, Xishanju's game development adopts a progressive and detailed agile model. On the premise of ensuring excellence, it flexibly adjusts the project plan and quickly responds to player needs.

In addition, in the daily cross-departmental collaboration, Xishanju adopts a common project management method to connect various production links and promote seamless collaboration between different functions.

Requirements management: flexible response to changes in requirements

The success or failure of a game depends largely on how players respond to the game, whether it's bug fixes, expansion releases, new characters coming online, festival event updates, emerging technologies, fierce competition, and continued growth make game demands complex and easy changes, further increasing the complexity of game development. Do a good job in demand management, you can respond to market changes in a more detailed and agile way, deal with emergencies, and ensure that the game can gain market competitiveness. With the help of ONES, Xishanju has not only realized the transparent management of demand, but also established a clear and standardized demand change process.

After the project is approved, the team will create a new demand pool in the ONES Project to store the suggestions or feedback collected at this stage, and record the source and attributes of the feedback for later classification and statistics.

During project execution, a custom workflow can be configured according to the actual project operation, and status attributes and post-action actions can be added flexibly. When the demand status changes, the person in charge will automatically change and receive the corresponding email notification, which greatly improves the efficiency of information transmission. The upgrade greatly facilitates member operations.

During this process, all changes to the requirements will be automatically recorded in the work item dynamic area, which is helpful for the person in charge to track and trace back.

Resource management: efficient organization of cross-departmental collaboration

The internal operation of Xishanju is based on the project system. After passing through the links of "pre-research - project evaluation - project establishment", a new project is created in ONES Project and a formal project team is established. Each project involves multiple positions such as producer, planning, programming, art, QA testing, user operation, operation and maintenance, and sometimes needs to be connected with outsourcing teams to entrust design or development tasks. At present, the scale of Xishanju has exceeded 1,000 people. , the difficulty of collaboration continues to rise. How to quickly decompose requirements and efficiently assign them to various functional roles is a major problem in project management.

After connecting to ONES, Xishanju has built a unified and interoperable production line, which collects information in one place, helps the project management department to comprehensively manage and control all projects, and improves the resource utilization efficiency of the project.

Taking the art center department as an example, the art center needs to undertake the design of various games. In ONES, the project is named after the end of the game (such as mobile game project, PC game project), and the project uses "tasks" through custom attributes. The field "belonging game" is used to distinguish the ownership of the game and the department to which it belongs. Project managers can identify the allocation of art tasks in each department and the department to which each game's art tasks belong through flexible filtering conditions and view management functions.

Progress Management: Make sure new versions go live on time

Overdue version releases are a common pain point in the game industry. Before that, using Excel to do task splitting and status follow-up was a common way in projects, but manual management was not only time-consuming and laborious, but also prone to omissions and errors.

ONES supports reasonable planning of project schedules and resources, and helps relevant personnel track and control the overall progress in a timely manner. In the actual business scenario, the Xishanju team will plan the version and iteration according to the business process of game production "prototype-Alpha-Beta-operation phase" and the stage target, set the completion time of the iteration, define the main tasks of each iteration stage, set The priority and estimated work time of the task and assigned to the appropriate person in charge.

At the same time, the team can track the development progress through Gantt charts, burndown charts and other visual charts, control key nodes, and identify delay risks as soon as possible, effectively reducing the problems of opaque team collaboration and untimely viewing of progress, allowing the team to press Plan deliverables.

The domestic game industry has developed to this day, and the competition is the quality of the game and industrial capabilities. After the introduction of ONES, Xishanju has opened up the workflow of cross-departmental collaboration, and unified the requirements, development, testing and other processes into the standardized process. Changes in requirements can be controlled and traced, and game releases are more orderly and punctual, effectively reducing management and communication costs.

ONES is highly flexible and easy to use. It effectively connects various roles in game project management and streamlines the workflow of team collaboration.
Front-line executors can easily manage research and development needs, improve task processing efficiency, and managers can intuitively control project progress to ensure that new versions are launched on time with high quality.

In the next few years, Xishanju will continue to cultivate high-quality games, polish innovative gameplay, and escort the game experience of the majority of players. The ONES team will also continue to pay attention to Xishanju to help it optimize project management to the greatest extent, coordinate large teams, achieve full-time team coverage and closed-loop management, and serve players' full life cycle experience.

With professional solutions and service capabilities, ONES has successfully helped more than 200,000 medium and large teams in various industries such as Inspur Software, China Merchants Fund, Kweichow Moutai, and China Telecom to improve their R&D efficiency.