TapTap veteran players must be familiar with the Fountain of witches series. This is an RPG series about the brave hunt for witches, but the perspective is from the witch, the player to accompany the witch to survive alone, meet new friends, and finally compose the end of the fairy tale.
Before it was officially introduced into China, "The Fountain of the Witch" had another name in The Sinicization and fan circles: Spring Witch.
"Spring Witch" is undoubtedly mistranslated from English Switch Spring, but "Witch Spring" does give people this feeling. A little witch embarks on a big adventure in a strange world, the little witch has a vibrant smile, and the continent is full of spring breath.
From an annual income of 1200 yuan to the first place in the buyout payment list
From 2015 to the present, the "Fountain of witches" series has won Apple Store recommendations in more than a dozen countries, the first place in the paid list, and other large and small awards. Its production team, Kiwi Walks, is actually just one person most of the time: Suyoung.
Suyoung has had a deep interest in Japanese RPGs since childhood, especially Falcom's Legend of Heroes series, which led him into the game industry. In 2014, after some careful design, Suyoung released her first and only free mobile game, Catch Play.
"Catch Play" can already see some of Theyoung style, cute shape, lively color matching, holding a sledgehammer everywhere to hammer people, is the kind of men and women and children can click in to play.
The protagonist also had a cameo in Witch's Fountain 1
So after a year of operation, Catch Play brought Suyoung... 200,000 won, or 1,200 yuan in revenue.
In 2015, on her way home from a New Year's party, Suyoung reflected deeply on this and asked herself: What kind of game do you really want to make?
He thought of his favorite Japanese RPG and thought of his character "Piberry", so he held the psychology of "no worse than worse", and decided to make a pure buyout game this time.
Suyoung named her studio Kiwi Walks. Kiwi is New Zealand's national bird, small in number and unable to fly, but walking like Suyoung. Kiwi also represents another thing that is endangered: buy-out mobile games.
Kiwi also means "kiwi", and the kiwi bird moves a bit like a runner
After six months of production, in July 2015, "Fountain of the Witch 1" featuring Piberry was released. Did not deliberately do marketing, just by excellent quality, it has obtained google shop recommendations and various rankings of good results, this road is right!
Almost turned into a monster defense game
In the years that followed, as you know, all of Suyoung's energy was spent in the follow-up series of Fountain of witches. But what you may not know is that in the beginning, Fountain of the Witch was almost made into a pure monster game.
The original plan at that time adopted the pixel style, and Piberry's identity was the opposite of now, she had to be the daughter of the demon king to fend off human warriors, using spells to repel wave after wave of enemies.
But it didn't take long for Suyoung to sense his mind— he didn't like the purely defensive gameplay, but he loved The Piberry. He decided to use Piberry as the protagonist, but to make an RPG game, this time The Piberry should be cute, have its own small actions, have the right music, and bring a memorable story.
Suyoung had previously designed the original image of Piberry, and because she was not good at drawing, she hired an outsourced illustrator to perfect the art, and finally made The Piberry become what everyone saw.
Suyoung's original Piberry design
A Piberry that gradually took shape under the hands of an illustrator
The same is true in the next 3 generations of games. Suyoung sketched out the approximate setting of the protagonist witch, such as white hair, a large wizard hat, dark skin... The final draft is then perfected by the artists. Suyoung himself did most of the work, including the program and the plot.
This division of labor continued until the third generation, until the time of "Fountain of witches 4" recruited an additional 3D modeler, maintaining a streamlined staffing structure.
Even so, the development progress did not fall too far, the production of the first works only took 6 months, and the development time of each one after that was about 1 year. Suyoung once slept only 4-5 hours a day, and challenged to sleep only 2-3 hours a day during the development of Witch's Fountain 3.
Of course, this is also because Suyoung considers himself a "workaholic", and we in front of the screen should not easily imitate it for the sake of health.
A steady stream of energy and creativity was Suyoung's booster, and every Fountain of witches since then has been a word-of-mouth and commercial success. Obviously, this is not a story of an indie developer who risks starvation to stick to his game dream, nor is there a bridge where the partners who work together have gone their separate ways after they have achieved fame. From a variety of reports that appear in the text, it can be seen that Suyoung's development process has been smooth to be called flat, the biggest difficulty encountered is the debut work, and because of insufficient manpower, he has painfully deleted some of his own game ideas, so that the number of endings in the first part has been sharply reduced from 20 to 9.
Finding the right painter was the biggest difficulty he encountered for a while
But that's pretty good.
Just watch the character walk and feel warm
Suyoung has a principle that runs through it: make games that "make players feel warm just by looking at the characters walking on the map."
To this end, he designed a lot of delicate expressions and costumes for the characters, in "Witch's Fountain 2" the main characters have 13 facial expressions, the protagonist Luna has 7 kinds of costumes, counting various combinations, Luna has a total of more than 90 standing paintings, and even the supporting characters have special standing paintings.
Each generation of witches has small actions that match their identity and personality. For example, The temperament of The Piberry is like a cat, and Luna has a feeling of arrogance and laziness.
The two witches sleep in very different positions
The Fountain of Witches series brought four different protagonists, and when Suyoung himself was asked who the most important witch in his heart was, Suyoung cleverly replied:
"Honestly, each one is precious to me, and it's really hard to pick the most of them (laughs). The strongest of the protagonists of the ages is Mocha Molly, but without the protection of the ancient god Agamo, she would be the weakest being. On the whole, the one who can exert the strongest ability is the Piberry, and Eluddi, who has the power of the gods of the Continent of Druka, has the greatest potential. ”
For the fans, everyone laughs and cries with the witch, and in the player's mind, the witch is not so much a "wife" as a "daughter". Seeing that the daughter has fallen in love and has a sweetheart, there will also be a heartache of the cabbage being arched by the pig, so the male protagonists of "The Fountain of the Witch" often have to bear the extremely harsh eyes of the fans.
But no matter which generation, it has told everyone enough stories to remember.
In this respect, Fountain of the Witch does live up to that heartwarming principle.
At present, Kiwi Walks has also released a horizontal version of the Worldview of the Witch's Fountain, "The Shadow of the Witch Doll", and is producing THE REMAKE work "Witch's Fountain R". It has been a year and a half since the release of "Witch Fountain 4", and the official has revealed that the fifth and sixth generations of games have a rough plan, and the style of the protagonist will be very different from the previous one.
So let's wait for a while and wait for the adventure of our new daughter.