This is the story that happened before "Dream Star" and everyone officially met.
Wang Zixi first learned about this game from his teacher - "Yuan Dream Star" cooperated with 13 colleges and universities to carry out a UGC college co-creation program, providing basic training in the early stage, internal testing qualifications, and giving creative incentives.
Jilin University of the Arts is one of them, and the teacher recommended Wang Zixi and several other students to form a team to participate.
This is Wang Zixi's third year of studying in the "Digital Media Arts" major, which is more colloquially known among students as the "game major". Students here learn graphic design, art modeling, and some basic programming Xi their daily lives, so many of them are considering joining the game industry as their future career plan.
"But before that, I just felt that I hadn't touched the edge of the industry at all. Wang Zixi said.
On the one hand, this is a kind of anxiety that is common in everyone's school days, and at the same time, the situation in the game industry is somewhat peculiar.
Fellow players with a somewhat special identity, streamers, UP hosts, and community opinion leaders often have more opportunities to contact manufacturers, obtain early trial qualifications, and some cooperation opportunities;
This creates a paradox to some extent: "If you want to get into the gaming industry faster and deeper, it may be a shortcut to try to become an influencer in addition to building up professional knowledge and skills." ”
Therefore, even for game students, there are not many opportunities to face major game manufacturers and get the attention of the other party like "Yuan Dream Star". As for how to prove themselves through this, at first Wang Zixi and they didn't know the bottom of their hearts.
1
Before entering the test server of "Yuan Dream Star", Wang Zixi had no idea what kind of game it was, and after experiencing almost all the content in the game, she found it difficult to summarize "what kind of game it is".
In addition to the official gameplay of "Racing Break", "Survival Break", "Smash Bros. Bros.", "Weapon Master", "Hide and Seek", "Who is the Werewolf", there are more player-created maps in the Star World of "Dream Star", and many of them are well done.
"As long as you have something you want to play, you can basically find it in it. Wang Zixi described his feelings like this.
And what they have to do is to make something of their own outside of these popular examples.
"Dream Star" itself provides a large number of creative tools, and there is almost no threshold for getting started, but about "what you want to express", it is still up to the creator to think about it himself.
Authoring templates is basically a toolbox with instructions
At first, Wang Zixi only had a vague idea of wanting to make something "exquisite and atmospheric", but it was not until she accidentally swiped pictures related to "Dunhuang patterns" on social networks that her thoughts began to become clear: "I want to make something related to our traditional culture."
Wang Zixi herself is a Hanfu lover, in addition to being obsessed with guqin and guzheng, and among the three classmates in the same group as her, the other two girls, Tan Huiting and Li Ziyang, also love national style and traditional culture.
Perhaps at the beginning, the "exquisite atmosphere" they wanted to pursue came from this experience in their daily lives, but it took some twists and turns to change from the "receiver" of their own hobbies to the "expresser". And trying to project some Chinese culture covering 5,000 years of history in the virtual world displayed on this 6.1-inch screen is not an easy task for novices.
This in itself can even be considered a "thankless" direction: most of the popular maps on the market are biased towards entertainment themes, and cultural content requires a lot of research and research.
"At first, we were actually very scared that if something was actually contrary to history, it would be very bad to be misleading. But we still hope that some people will be curious about this, and pay more attention to understanding and falling in love with these traditional cultures. Wang Zixi said.
So, they still decided to stick to this direction.
2
"Falling into Dunhuang" is the first map that Wang Zixi and Tan Huiting made together, and it took them nearly three weeks before and after.
This is a platform-based racing map, in which players can see a lot of Dunhuang-related art elements, and before the finish line, they can see the flying dancing girl statues that Wang Zixi and Tan Huiting put together little by little with various geometric color palettes.
In order to achieve a better visual effect, many of the object models in the level were made by the two of them and uploaded to the game. Modeling is their professional counterpart, and it is easier than the average player to make sure that the looks are factual rather than based on vague impressions.
It was also in this process that Wang Zixi realized that the characters who appeared in the Dunhuang murals were not only the familiar flying goddesses, but also the Heavenly King Lux, and then added these unexpected contents to the map, hoping that players could also have the same new knowledge as them, or feel more resonance.
"Cultural Restorer" is the second work produced by new team members Li Ziyang and Xun Minghan.
This is a puzzle-oriented map, showing some bronzes from the Shang and Zhou dynasties damaged due to war, acid rain, etc., in different styles of scenes, and it is up to the player to restore them one by one.
Confirming the true appearance of these bronzes over time is still the most important part of the group, and after a deeper understanding, even Wang Zixi himself was surprised - it turned out that the true state of many artifacts when they were unearthed was almost a pile of fragments.
This is also reproduced in the process of retrieving the fragments in the level
This further strengthened her idea of wanting more people to understand this background: "Seeing the broken appearance of these cultural relics when they were unearthed, and seeing that some intangible cultural heritage may still be dying out at the moment, I will feel very sorry and uncomfortable, so I still want to attract some attention from everyone to a certain extent." ”
In "Falling into Dunhuang" and "The Restorer", Wang Zixi has added some relevant background explanations, but it is not mandatory to read it as content, and interested players can read it on their own.
She said that this is also a bit of an insistence from the player's point of view, that they are adding this popular science content out of their own ideas, and that they also respect the player's desire to watch it.
3
According to Wang Zixi's initial statement, in the process of making these two maps, the team members actually did not have a clear division of labor - because everyone's professional knowledge is similar, so they can also "take charge of themselves" here, and each of them can contract the design, modeling and production of different scenes.
However, as the chat deepened, the team members talked about their hobbies and feelings about participating in this activity, and the whole map production process became clearer.
As the only boy in the group, Xun Minghan did not know as much about traditional culture as the other three students, and the last map he made was more focused on puzzle solving itself.
He said that he originally felt that he was lacking in art aesthetics, but he didn't know how to improve it, until this time he participated in the cultural theme, and came into contact with more specific examples in terms of color matching and shape, and his horizons were also broadened a lot.
In fact, most of the puzzle-solving mechanisms in "The Restorer" were set up by Xun Minghan, and with only the basic logic elements, a seemingly simple password door would take a lot of effort to achieve.
However, he feels that the process itself is very much like a puzzle game, which can bring a lot of fulfillment.
Tan Huiting is a photography enthusiast in her daily life – not only taking photos in real life, but also taking screenshots and videos in games, and editing them into albums and videos.
Together, she and Wang established the art style of the two maps, including how players would view each scene in the game, and how to make the graphics look coordinated from more angles.
There are many designed "photo positions" in "Falling into Dunhuang"
Before joining, Li Ziyang's first map was related to "Song of Long Hatred", which not only showed art elements on the screen, but also included a complete plot line and connecting cutscenes, which became the reason why she was invited by Wang Zixi to join her group. Through this collaboration, she learned how to make more detailed models.
"The Restorer" also has a more complete starting and ending
Wang Zixi originally thought that the level he designed in "Falling into Dunhuang" was not difficult at all, but it attracted the unanimous opposition of the team members and classmates who tried the game, so he had to coordinate the difficulty and set up a shortcut to clear the customs. She was determined that she would make a race map that matched her own challenges......
Reality is different from RPGs, and it doesn't wait for everyone to choose their own role and positioning, but there are still some opportunities in life for you to get to know yourself better.
After this activity, although the specific impressions were different, several students tasted the "sweetness of creation" to some extent, and also felt that they seemed to be closer to the game industry.
4
Then came the official launch of "Dream Star" - the game reached the first place on the iOS free list, and was on the best-selling list and the "double king" of "Honor of Kings", even people who don't care about these are enough to see the name and appearance of "Dream Star" from all corners of the Internet.
Wang Zixi had previously forwarded the gameplay videos of "Falling into Dunhuang" and "Cultural Restorer" to his family and friends. Her parents didn't know much about the game, and her mother even thought she was bragging, not believing that she had done the "so good" map.
But her family is still concerned about when the game will be launched, asking "why can't I find it yet", and now, when they are asked what their daughter is studying, it is probably not so difficult to answer.
Tan Huiting hopes that "Yuan Dream Star" will receive more attention and become a new "national game", which will give her the opportunity to further introduce her major and what she is Xi to her parents.
Xun Minghan forwarded the map he made to his friends, and most of the feedback he got was "too difficult", according to the background data, the clearance rate of the puzzle map he made himself was almost 3%.
Li Ziyang likes the free Da Qiao skin after the game is officially launched, and she has also experienced more maps made by other players and felt all kinds of whimsical ideas......
As a wider group of players poured into the game, the player-generated maps in "Dream Star" quickly became more and more diverse, many of which showed professional backgrounds and experience, and the authors behind them may be as professional as Wang Zixi and others, or they may be enthusiasts who have been creating similar works for a long time.
In the face of the continuous emergence of excellent works, Wang Zixi is not only amazed but also feels that he still has an advantage - just like the two maps made before, as professional students, they will also value the meaning and value of the game in addition to pure entertainment.
Cultural relics may be broken, but culture will never disappear – this is the philosophy they insist on transmitting.