In recent years, with the domestic game production level, especially independent games has been greatly improved compared with previous years. Every once in a while, you can see a lot of bright new games emerge, from fairy tales to sci-fi, from text adventures to large-scale 3D action shooters, both in terms of genre and genre.
At present, domestic games are not only loved by domestic players, but also gain some overseas fans. In the evaluation area of many excellent domestic independent games, we can even see foreign friends issuing "We need English" requests, writing a variety of small essays with emotions calling for multilingual versions, which is also a kind of feng shui rotation.
English commentary under a domestic indie game
However, this situation also reflects a very realistic problem: many excellent independent games in China are already quite good in terms of quality itself, but they are inevitably lacking in international localization for various reasons, and they cannot convey the voice from China to more overseas players.
These days, many players may have seen an online game show called "Enter the Dragon" on Steam. The name is based on the event of Bruce Lee's film of the same name, "Dragon Fights Tiger Fight", which aims to make players and media around the world recognize the excellent indie games from China. The game is categorized by genre in six different colors of dragons, such as black dragons representing horror thriller games, red dragons representing action/shooter games, and so on.
Not surprisingly, the Black Dragon category is the least in the online show, with only 7 games, while the Red Dragon category has as many as 26
From the 23rd to the 30th, the week-long event was led by Pixmain, a publisher of domestic independent games such as "Portia Time" and "Iglia Wars" under the umbrella of Sunrise Lightyear, and domestic first-line publishers such as Bilibili, Lightning Games (Thunder Games), Yooreka studio, indienova, Thermite Games and other domestic first-line publishers also cooperated.
Therefore, the active lineup of more than 100 games basically covers all the popular domestic independent hits in recent years. There are excellent games that have been released such as "Shadow Torch City", "Portia Time", "Word Game", and there are also many games in production, such as "Homeless", "Most", "Gravel Town Time" and so on.
The first three days of the show had a live stream of Steam platform developers. These streams take the form of rotating live streams, with a game developer streaming every hour, 72 hours a day. Regardless of the time zone, just open Steam to see that a developer is working hard to stream. Interestingly, while horror thriller games classified as "Black Dragons" are the least among the games on display, the live rooms for horror games tend to be the most popular.
In addition to the Steam live broadcast, the organizer Pixmain official also set up Discord, providing the opportunity to communicate directly with some game production teams in English, such as the "Reloaded Outpost" (tentative name) that was really popular with the trailer before, and the production members of Team Ranger revealed in Discord that they spent a lot of effort to balance the values and feedback between FPS gameplay and building tower defense gameplay. In order to make two very different ways of playing a good experience.
In fact, independent developers, whether domestic or foreign, especially like to communicate with players, publish development diaries, videos, live game development processes, etc. on social media, so that players can also participate in this process. Due to the language barrier, the communication between domestic developers and overseas players has not been particularly smooth. But in online exhibitions like Enter The Dragon, we have seen that the organizers have tried their best to play a supporting role, whether it is language assistance, or exploration of standardized processes, or collecting and sorting out information that players are interested in in advance, so that the communication links of developers can be used more effectively, and the entire communication process is more worry-free and efficient.
For example, in Discord, some players mentioned that they had encountered some domestic indie games that updated the English patch after release, but lacked a push mechanism and were easy to ignore. Players recommend that developers and publishers give the game a small discount after updating the English patch to trigger the push mechanism, or add the words "English supported" to the cover of the game.
When developers mention their creative paths, they more or less mention their stories or system ideas from their favorite games. Some developers even posted their star-chasing "achievements" of the year, and now, they have become developers, have players who like their own games, and can communicate directly with their "fans" at this opportunity.
For example, the Japanese school style "Bad Girl" production team O.T.K GAMES members also revealed a lot of secrets in the discussion, although "Bad Girl" seems to be just a horizontal board clearance game with certain RPG numerical elements, it seems to have the meaning of the horizontal board school style "Like a Dragon", but their ambitions are more than this. According to the production team's self-report, their production was also inspired by Fallout: New Vegas, using a story mode in which the player chooses to decide the story branch and the fate of the NPCs. And they also mentioned that the heroine of the game will have 4 men and 4 women to choose from, which really made the players involved in the discussion excited for a long time.
Moreover, an event with domestic games going to sea as the core also provides a platform for foreign players who pay attention to domestic games to get together to share their experiences and pain points, and also helps developers to obtain valuable first-hand feedback.
The most important part of the game show, of course, is playing the game. The number of trials this time pays attention to a large amount of tubes, and most of the participating games, including those that are still in the development process, provide a fairly rich demo version, which cannot be played at all.
When the small hard disk that I had been carrying the weight forward suddenly told me to be anxious, I realized that in just a few days, I had already dropped a 40+G demo
Of course, during this week's exhibition period, there are also sincere discount packages, and there is a direct payment for the eye-catching.
The campaign also featured three discount bundles called Dragon Bundles
As mentioned earlier, the games exhibited in the exhibition are very diverse in the choice of themes, such as american Fury wind text adventure games, simulation games that freely assemble warships in space for battle, strategic meat pigeon games that lead ancient Egyptian warriors to ancient Roman soldiers, cartoon fairy tale style horizontal board flying shooting games, and so on. In fact, when I showed a friend a promotional video of some of the games, she even thought they were "foreign games."
Even those games with sufficient Chinese elements are not all ancient genres, there are "Most" that wants to show the hard work of the working people in the real society, there is "Heroes of the World" who wants to tell a touching story of family love that happened in a small township in the 90s, and there are also "Reincarnation of Life and Death" that directly gets a near-future cyberpunk style, and "Reincarnation of Life and Death" that plays a detective to solve the case, completely surpassing the stereotype of some players in Chinese games that "it is either martial arts or Xiu Xian".
"Reincarnation of Life and Death" is full of terrier signboards, how many do you see?
For a game exhibition that is mainly aimed at overseas players, in this trial game, the vast majority of games support both Chinese and English, and some games even support multiple languages commonly known as "eight Chinese words". There are also games such as "Reincarnation of Life and Death", which not only prepares the text, but also has two sets of plot dubbing Chinese and English, which can be said to be quite thick. In addition, whether it is in terms of wording, font selection, typography, etc., we can see that the localization of English is quite sincere, rather than a simple and rude machine translation.
For example, the live broadcast of the Steam platform mentioned earlier is carried out using the English interface. It can be seen that the organizers are very clear about the target audience, they just want to maximize the maximum, so that players in the global market can intuitively recognize the charm of Chinese independent games. The end result was indeed quite successful. Well-known English-language media such as Rockpapershotgun and PCgamer also reported and warmed up on Pixmain.com.
And I myself also tried to use the English interface directly to play the game, whether it is the explanation of the system in the novice tutorial or the statement of the point of view in the storyline, it is very natural. As mentioned earlier, there are games that don't even make the player realize that this is a native Chinese game without specifically stating it.
We often say that "the aroma of wine is also afraid of the deep alley", excellent localization with the publisher's vigorous publicity, can solve the problem of "deep alley", but the core competitiveness also falls on the "wine aroma", that is, the quality of the game itself. Fortunately, the games exhibited this time are all prepared, and many of them have excellent systems and excellent gameplay, and the quality games that are already very fun just to try it out. This inevitably makes me look forward to using this event as an opportunity to hatch more acclaimed and popular high-quality games such as "Shadow Torch City" and "Dyson Ball Project".
Like "Sandstone Town Time", there is basically no need to worry about the foundation of a high-quality previous game
"Carbonic Acid Crisis" is a good example, like this wild title, the demo feels like drinking a 355ml can of Coke. This horizontal action shooter has rhythmic music, a very solidly polished operation feel, and a very enjoyable high-speed combat experience. If you are still unsatisfied after playing, you can also challenge the express mode.
"Jelly Express" produced by domestic college students is undoubtedly a potential stock, this local two-person cooperation game is not only simple and cute, low operating threshold, but also a physical effect that makes people can't help but be funny, it can be said that it is suitable for all ages, Both Chinese and foreign. The decryption + platform jumping gameplay that emphasizes the cooperation of the two also has certain requirements for the tacit understanding of players, which reminds people of the "Hu hao kitchen" series with the reputation of "breakup kitchen". It can be predicted that whether it is the "program effect" during the live broadcast, or the test of whether the relationship between the two players is iron enough, "Jelly Express" will be a good choice.
Rollover, overturn, overturn, and then turn over the boat of friendship
In this event, I saw overseas players who were eager to communicate with domestic developers. It was as if I had watched all the films on E3 and started waiting for days for these foreign games. This also makes people can't help but look forward to the near future, in addition to this time Pixmain hosted The Dragon, we can also see more independent game exhibitions with similar visions and ambitions, so that diversified domestic games can "fight against the tiger" in the global market and write a new chapter of domestic independent games.