A game with a fairy spirit
Developed by Yunshan Xiaoyu Studio and released by Gamera Game, the Guofeng puzzle adventure game "Mountain and Sea Traveler" has been released in September last year, and has continuously won the favor of players with pixel ink style, ingenious Chinese elements, and a strange story that can stand up to scrutiny. For the Yunshan Xiaoyu team, this is also an adventure. Game producer Xinyu said that "Mountain and Sea Traveler" is a group of works that do not understand the game, but have a lot of ideas, great ambitions, and some regrets.
Before the release of the DLC "Night Walking Willow Crossing", we talked to him about the origin of the game, the Chinese elements design, and what it was like to make the game for the first time.
When Xinyu was not yet a game producer, he had just graduated from high school, set foot on Australian soil, and was about to spend a long time trekking in the field of AI. But at that time, he was most interested in not technology, but speculative fiction, Kyogoku Natsuhiko, who integrated folk culture into speculative fiction with "yokai reasoning". It was also at that time that he felt a little depressed in Melbourne, Australia is a young country, there is no too deep cultural heritage, he can not feel any Chinese culture around him, Australian classmates may play Japanese games, talking about ninjas, shrines are not strangers, but they know nothing about Chinese culture with water.
At that time, Xinyu was still soaking in the ancient speculative fiction forum, and together with netizens, he posted the novels he had written on the forum. The idea was simple, to leave something in the world before life died. But one day, he suddenly felt frustrated—"Who reads their own novels?" It's too hard to write a novel. But at the same time, another thought came to mind—"Why not add some graphics and turn the story into a more acceptable game?" "Like opening up the second vein of Ren Dou, the confluence of the two perceptions, leading to a result- "To be a national style game that can be remembered." ”
"Perception" is a very important element in "Mountain and Sea Traveler" and makes people feel refreshed when playing. At that time, Xinyu wanted to tell a story of "untying the knot", inspired by the observation of the people around him. He felt that life was very short, that some things could not be changed when they happened, that trivial things sometimes became small organs under the big fate, just as too many people around him would sigh - if another choice had been made at that time, it would not have been like this, or if something had not happened... What he wants to bring to the player is the experience of changing choices by going back in time to the past, thereby changing the outcome and dissolving the knot, although the new ending is still a question mark.
Playing games related to "time" is a challenge. On the one hand, whether the timeline and causal relationship logic can be consistent; on the other hand, how to keep the pace of the game without making people feel bored when letting the player understand his view of time. Xinyu played a Flash game "400 Years" many years ago. Players play as stone people, walking and walking in this world, if in the spring, by a river blocking the way, the player can press the space to wait, in the winter, the river water ice, naturally can pass. Xinyu felt that this moment was quite Zen. The week that followed, he thought about the game almost, and that's when he realized that gameplay innovations could be a huge inspiration to players.
The gameplay designed by Xinyu for "Mountain and Sea Traveler" is "Reverse Dream" - the player plays the "Reverse DreamEr" through key props, from people's memories back to the past, by changing the choice to change the ending, resulting in different choices is different perceptions, which is a process of reverse reasoning. For example, the tree is about to fall, the carpenter wants to cut the tree, "too dangerous, go now", or "it doesn't matter if you go a little later", Xinyu captures the idea of people in a moment, people will have inertia, self-interest, people are also susceptible to others, external influence, these will affect the adoption of perception, thus affecting the choice and result.
Before doing "Mountain and Sea Traveler", Xinyu had decided to make a game product that could show Chinese culture, and the most direct way to talk about the cultural and spiritual life of a nation was to return to the myths and legends created by this nation.
Before this, Xinyu knew almost nothing about this, and after deciding to make this game, he only delved into chinese literary classics, from "Shan Hai Jing" to "Shi Shu Xinyu" to "Liaozhai Zhiyi", following the vein of mythological-Zhiwei novels, discovering a different world. This world is also real and illusory, there are specific people, there are monsters, there are gods, whether it is the four values of GongCao, who is not familiar to us and who controls time in the Taoist worldview, or the little gods that we know and have a more intimate sense of: the land public, the ghosts are bad, the black and white impermanence. When people have a knot in their hearts, they will become monsters, and when they have difficulties, they will turn to God, and the story will begin.
Mountain Sea Traveler is a puzzle game. Usually in puzzle games, there is no shortage of puzzles for counting and weight counting, and the more common solutions generally use Western measurement methods. Xinyu felt that it was a pity that when he was a child, there were abacus classes, the bank counter was usually crackling sound, and the street vendors were still using scales, but now, with the popularity of Western electronic scales and electronic calculators, these traditional objects have been rarely used, becoming a memory of true and false. To this end, he replaced the way of solving the mysteries, replacing them with scales and abacuses, so that the lost folk culture could be recreated in the world of "Mountain and Sea Traveler".
In the scene, "Mountain and Sea Traveler" wants to reproduce the quiet atmosphere of Chinese villages, such as the babbling Zhuxi Village, the houses are hidden in the bamboo forest, extending in a step-like manner according to the mountain, and the Taoist temple on the top of the mountain actually refers to the Shanxi Hanging Temple, the whole temple is like hanging on the cliff, the whole temple looks like only a dozen bowls of thick wooden pillars to support, in fact, it uses the ancient Chinese architectural method, half-inserted flying beam as the base, cleverly borrowed rock secret support, beam and pillar up and down, showing a sense of virtual reality.
In terms of character design, Chineseness is more restrained, such as Xiao Liu'er, who is widely loved by players, and his inspiration is "Stick! The left-behind children depicted in "Teenagers" in Xinyu's understanding, these children may be naughty and rebellious for family reasons when they are young, but at some point, they may also choose to sacrifice themselves, do a luminous thing, and become heroes. Some of these elements are ingenious, some are full of meaning, and some touch the emotional core of the Chinese, so that the player feels a sense of belonging.
Before the production of "Mountain and Sea Traveler", Xinyu never thought of "making a game", and the other four members of the main creative team at that time, although they had their own origins with the game, had more or less the same ideas. Majoring in industrial design, he was cut off by Xinyu when he applied for an art teacher. After deciding to make the game, Xinyu had to face a problem- art, which he thought seemed simple and cheap, although he later found out that this was not the case. Curating candy is a philosophy major, and the program is the "weirdo" encountered at the show.
It was such a seemingly unreliable team that spent three and a half years from Australia back to China to the garage of publisher Game, but Xinyu sometimes felt that it was not a surprise to come here, maybe everything they had done before was related to making games, and let them come here, to the present moment.
Member of Yunshan Xiaoyu Studio
Xinyu said that "Mountain and Sea Traveler" is a group of works that do not understand the game, but have a lot of ideas, great ambitions, and some regrets. Xinyu originally wanted to use the game as a carrier to let everyone feel Chinese culture, but after the actual operation, it was found that even if they explained each term in English, for Chinese players, it is almost impossible to explain things, for foreign players, it is still difficult to fully understand its connotation, cross-cultural communication is not as simple as he imagined.
This is especially true of making games, from striking a balance between storytelling and gameplay to polishing the details of the script, the iterative process is made up of many sleepless nights. Now that they have some experience, they also hope to make up for their regrets and realize more ideas in the sequel that continues the worldview, such as most importantly, how to give players more freedom of exploration space and more possibilities.
There is a level in "Mountain and Sea Traveler" to break through the maze and go up the mountain to find the Taoist Temple, if you get lost enough times, you will encounter a small house on the mountain, which is the Yunshan Xiaoyu Studio. Xinyu was fascinated by the ending of "Star Frontier", where a group of good friends sit in front of a campfire and the world is about to perish, while they roast marshmallows and sing songs. Although this picture is about to fade, it has a sense of eternity. And the studio that appears in "Mountain and Sea Traveler" may have the same meaning, no matter how the world changes, their initial enthusiasm remains in this world created by them, and this "world" is also the mark they left.
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Image from Yunshan Xiaoyu Studio
Written by Lee Lee
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