Lead
| A testimonial from a decade of "failed" entrepreneurs |
If there was any domestic solo game that impressed me the most last year, it was probably "Warm Snow".
From the beginning of the DEMO online test, I already had a hunch that this would be a blockbuster product. On the one hand, the action rogue game brought by "Hadith" at that time was on fire, and the residual heat of the market was not extinguished, and players had a positive attitude towards such games; On the other hand, the quality of "Warm Snow" itself is good enough, whether it is combat feel or rogue type, it can withstand the test of players, and the national style dark style of graphics is exquisite and very pleasing, which can win the favor of players from the first glance.
It still maintains a special positive rating of 92%.
Even in the sluggish domestic solo game market last year, "Warm Snow" still won the annual domestic independent game sales championship, relying on the sales of 2 million copies of the dual platform to take the first place.
We often say that solo travel in China has always been a niche market, but with the frequent release of many successful products in recent years, it seems to be enough to prove that this plate is big enough. So for domestic developers, how to make an excellent independent game is what they urgently need to consider.
Recently, the teahouse interviewed Li Zi, the producer of "Warm Snow", and asked the same question. In his opinion, a good game should first be liked by the developer enough, if as a developer do not want to play the game they made, then how can players be willing to pay? Currently, the team is working hard to complete the development of large-scale paid DLC, according to him, "the amount of content is comparable to the main body".
The first free DLC is live
After reaching the milestone of 2 million copies, this "warm snow" from last spring to the present seems to have no intention of stopping.
01
Unemployed
Let's do solo tours
Teahouse: I heard that you were also a small team in the beginning?
Li Zi: We formed the team around April '19, and there were only five people at that time, all of whom were unemployed. Anyway, there was nothing to do, so I decided to form a team and start making indie games. Everyone also understood the rest of the matter, the team increased to 6 people, and then made the first product "Warm Snow". After the launch, the response was very good, we wanted to improve the quality of the product and shorten the production cycle, and the team has expanded to 20 people.
Teahouse: What other games did you make before Warm Snow?
Li Zi: Actually, this is quite tortuous to say. I've done quite a few games before, but most of them are mobile games. I have nearly 10 years of experience in mobile game development, the earliest time was about 10 years to do some casual mobile games like "Fruit Ninja", and then went to a game company in Shenzhen, at that time I had the opportunity to do the game "Xuanyuan Sword", but due to various reasons, our cooperation with Daewoo was terminated, and this product was not made in the end.
Later, my team and I came out to start our own business, but the investment we were looking for was a little unreliable, the boss was mainly engaged in tea sales, and the investment money never came over, resulting in us being in arrears of wages, the company could not sustain, we could only go back to Wuhan.
Teahouse: It's really not easy to start a small team, so you started to form a group to do "Warm Snow" after returning to Wuhan?
Li Zi: Not yet. At that time, when I returned to Wuhan, it was about 15 to 16 years ago, when most of the Wuhan research and development switched to chess and cards, and we also followed and did board games for a year or two. When I was 17, I did musicals for a year.
Teahouse: Sounds a bit too artistic, so you changed jobs again?
Li Zi: When I returned to Wuhan after finishing the musical in '17, a friend asked me to work at his company, but I didn't stay long, and we were unemployed again at the end of '18.
Teahouse: Laid off?
Li Zi: The department was disbanded.
Teahouse: So between 10 and 19 years, you did various jobs in various companies, went around in circles and finally returned to the solo travel industry?
Li Zi: If you only talk about solo travel, in fact, when I came out of the first company in 10 years, I had already made a small game on iOS, and at that time, this game won the first place in the casual puzzle free list in China, and all the free application lists also rushed to the top 20, and the North American region was probably in the top 100.
You think, I was a fresh graduate and I was only in the class for 8 months, and I thought I knew how to make a career, and I thought they could make money in the games they made, why didn't I do it myself? It turned out later that I could only make games, but I really didn't make much money.
The game did well, but it barely brought us much revenue. At that time, I was very impressed, probably made less than $200, we didn't understand anything at the time, and finally forgot the developer account password, and the money has not been withdrawn now.
It's a bit of a sense of age
Teahouse: Do you remember the name of the game?
Li Zi: It's called BIGBANG, because I watched "The Big Bang Theory" and took such a name. This game is divided into several chapters, each chapter has a different decryption gameplay, from the Big Bang to cell formation, and then the appearance of dinosaurs to modern human civilization, and then all the way to World War II, I remember World War II made a parkour mini-game. Originally, I was going to make computer instant noodles, which are classic little things in human history, but I didn't do it later, and the programmer ran away first after the end.
02
We made a "tough" decision
Teahouse: After 19 years of unemployment, why didn't you think about continuing to do mobile games, but went solo games?
Li Zi: The cost of mobile games is millions or even tens of millions, which is not something I can afford. Another reason is that mobile game development is actually more industrialized, more dependent on a complete market and publicity, these things you need to spend a lot of energy and financial resources to fight. It's not like solo travel, where solo travel is where we have the potential to excel as long as we do what I'm good at, and solo travel has more opportunities for us.
Teahouse: Did you think you had a chance, so you did "Warm Snow"?
Li Zi: Around 19 years ago, the Steam platform has been relatively popular in China, and the wave of eating chicken has brought a large number of player groups, it can be said that the player market already exists, since it exists, there must be opportunities, followed by the problem of piracy in China at that time has improved, and the willingness of the player group to pay for genuine copies is more obvious.
Perhaps the most impressive thing for most players is this hostess
Teahouse: When you first set up the project, where did the inspiration for "Warm Snow" come from?
Li Zi: In the early days, we designed a lot of plans, but the story was not yet formed, and we wanted to make a game of sword fairy controlling flying swords. My original idea was that if it was a touch-screen game, 10 fingers would control 10 flying swords, but I definitely couldn't do this on PC, so we changed to a gameplay prototype that shot all the flying swords in one breath and then recycled them, and everyone on the team thought it was quite interesting at the time, and then dug this gameplay separately and made a small demo.
The flying sword is the core system
Teahouse: Why did you want to use Rogue as your main gameplay?
Li Zi: I'm a fan of dark games, and I actually want to be able to do this type of game, but we didn't have much money at the time, and I just played "Dead Cells" for a while, and I felt that Rogue's gameplay had its advantages, and the same investment could have a longer life cycle.
Teahouse: Actually, it depends more on cost considerations, and it is not said that because of the meat pigeon fire, it is necessary to cater to such a market.
Li Zi: Yes, because my own conditions allow, I prefer to do the kind of brush brush ARPG game that can tell stories, but this cost is obviously beyond our pocket. Therefore, the subsequent plot of warm snow is also around the gameplay of Rogue to make some additions, such as why the protagonist can be resurrected infinitely, and you want to do the plot, such as giving the player a reasonable explanation.
A large number of alternative schools were added early in the game
Teahouse: Warm Snow has always been the most praised by players in terms of art style, what efforts have you made to achieve this?
Li Zi: Maybe it's because our main beauty is relatively strong, our main beauty is the friend who made the product with me at that time, and two of the other team members also came out of the previous company together.
"Warm Snow" is in an overhead worldview, without the constraints of historical times. We refer to some characteristic styles of the Tang and Song Dynasties and make some mixtures. The characters in the game also have some shadows of historical figures, but we didn't do the design of Facebook, after all, Rogue games can't carry out in-depth performances to portray the character image, so this way can allow players to correspond and have quick associations, and have a certain impression of the character.
Teahouse: Although "Warm Snow" does not have many plots, it is quite impressive, is the setting of black and deep residue the direction you have decided on before?
Li Zi: First of all, we are all dark soul players, and this kind of tragic story seems to me to be easier to design and frame. Take the movie, the core purpose of the tragic story itself is not to show the darkest and most brutal content, but to show the human brilliance of human beings in the face of despair, which is the best core of tragedy, which can awaken human courage.
So what we have to do is how to conceive this story and make it interesting, in fact, there is not too much deliberate design, more like the product of inspiration, think of such a story and do it directly. If you ask if there is any methodology, I feel that to tell a good story is inseparable from talent and accumulation.
Slightly grammatic plot elements
Teahouse: The BD design of Warm Snow is actually not that complicated, but it can quickly make players feel refreshed, how did you build this system?
Li Zi: At the beginning, I really wanted to make a "dark" game, including the sectarian skills that players saw, in fact, it was a talent tree similar to a profession at the beginning, and then we found that we couldn't control it at all, we made a "difficult" decision, split all the skills of the skill tree, and changed it to a skill book that chose one of the three, so it is essentially a weakening, it is between the dark ARPG and Rogue games, I think "Warm Snow" is not a pure rogue game, it also has problems, Under so many BDs, there is always an optimal solution.
But as you can see, when we went online, we had already designed 6 sects and 12 core gameplay, including a large number of equipment and skills, in which players can always find a set of matches to their tastes and get fun from it, as some players say "always brush and always cool".
Choose one of three classics
03
I love the games I make
I'm also a gamer
Teahouse: You've been starting and developing games for ten years, so what pitfalls have you stepped on during this time?
Li Zi: That's a lot. I think so, if you do games, don't blindly catch up with the market trend, small teams can't do the scale and efficiency of the big factory assembly line, and even a lot of market research may not be able to do, then what you can do is to do what you are good at. Take "Warm Snow" for example, we hope that after this game is made, the development members of the team like to play and are willing to play, if you make a game that even the people who developed it yourself don't like, then the players who have to pay to buy it can like it?
So for a small team, the cards you get are essentially limited, and you need to play them in order according to your own situation, rather than trying to get this "card" when you see what gameplay theme is hot on the market, which may make it difficult for some small teams to survive.
Teahouse: I often say that the first thing domestic solo tour teams do is find a way to survive.
Li Zi: Yes, it's really important. Maybe I'm not necessarily right, but a product developed by 5 people, if 4 people really like this product, and even after work will spend a lot of time on it, then most of them have a spectrum.
I often say that you spent 2.3 years developing the game, you should not bet on the market after 2.3 years, but you should bet on yourself, bet that you are not alone in this world, but there are many players like you, and if you as a player are willing to buy this game, then they will definitely be willing to buy it.
In essence, we as a small team are already making independent games, we should calm down and make a game that you are really willing to buy, instead of opening the Steam list to brush and brush, find some popular gameplay and themes, and do some games that you are not willing to buy, if so, what is the meaning of you doing independent games?
Teahouse: It's true that I've met a lot of solo developers who think so.
Li Zi: In addition, I think a small team should not just throw away any project resources. If you feel bad about something, you should let the planner think of ways to make it better, rather than just giving up. I have seen some teams, have done tens of thousands of things, feel that there is no future will not do it, this problem should be solved earlier, you must at least set up a product that you are willing to play after 2.3 years, otherwise you will encounter the problem I just said, you yourself will not play, then who is willing to pay for it?
Teahouse: Your first DLC was well received, and I heard that there is a large paid DLC in development in the back, is there anything to share?
Li Zi: In terms of paid DLC, we have achieved about 60%. We started around October last year, after developing the Endless Mode, and there is still a lot of work to be done, because this time the volume may be close to the size of the main body.
Teahouse: Many solo tour teams now feel that the release actually means little to them, what do you think?
Li Zi: I think the release is meaningful. Like I said before, we're never the kind of industrialized team, and you have to face the entire market in addition to developing games, which is actually not capable of taking care of both.
The mobile release of "Warm Snow" has made a lot of adaptations, such as customization and optimization for UI, operation, ease of use and other angles, including line-of-sight adjustment, custom keys, flying sword self-aiming function, and so on. In the DLC1 version update, a lot of optimizations have also been made, such as the button connection function to help players implement single-finger and multi-button on the mobile game, and auxiliary functions such as monster indicators to further optimize the game experience.
In my opinion, what a good distribution can do is to "raise" the upper limit of the product, such as market promotion, user maintenance, localization, test porting, etc., and the lower limit of this product often needs to be controlled by the development team itself.