The times are difficult, it is not easy to start a business, and many people choose to stay conservative for the winter - either stick to their posts, or gap for a period of time, in short, get through this cycle.
But for Wang Yipu, who once served as an executive in iDreamSky and has reached the age of no doubt, there is not much golden time to start a business and make games. So he wanted to fight again while he could still fight.
"People are not confused at the age of 40, and if I want to start a business and make games at the age of 50 or 60, I may not have a chance. I had to do it, even if it might fail. Otherwise, when you are old and lie in bed, you will regret it and it will be too late to cry. ”
This anxiety is not difficult to understand, after all, he saw the enthusiasm of many players in the last product "Little Animal Star": in his opinion, there is still a lot of room for animal themes to play.
Codename: Surprise Soldier is his new project. On April 1st, the game released a concept PV, showing a next-generation art style similar to the texture of a figure, as well as the theme selection of animal trendy toys.
Judging from public channels, this game has not attracted too much attention. However, Grape Jun learned from the team that the product has received invitations from 14 issuers and 3 investment institutions.
In this project, Wang Yipu is mainly responsible for the external affairs of the project, and Zhang Qi, who was the founding team of the third sword network, served as the R&D producer. In the process of communicating with Grape King, they showed full respect for the gameplay: "The point of the game is always whether it is fun or not. If we don't want to touch both of them by ourselves, then the project can be stopped, and we don't have to waste time. ”
01 Origin
After graduating from university, Wang Yipu went to work in a public institution, but because he was too fond of playing games, he left his job and went to a local game media portal - "I wanted to go to a game company, but there is really no local R&D company."
After going through many terminal game projects and building content and community from scratch, he still wants to join a company that really makes games. In the end, he got his wish and did one of the most important projects of his life: "Little Animal Star".
"Little Animal Star" is the first batch of chicken-like games after the popularity of "PUBG", which was first released in Steam Early Access in 2018 under the name "Super Animal Royale", and achieved a 100% positive rating in the first week of its launch. Until now, the game still has 93% positive reviews out of nearly 40,000 reviews.
The game uses animal themes, 2D top-down perspective, and bright colors, Q cute cartoon art style, which is called the cutest chicken game by players. At the same time, the gameplay is also a lighter casual competition: the map is small, the pace is fast, the game is short, the resource management and operation are simplified, the ranking competition is abandoned, and a lot of fun props and vehicles are added.
Wang Yipu is the producer and is responsible for the mobile game version of this product. According to him, 1 million new entries were made in the 10 days after the game was launched, and it didn't cost a penny. Although the server encountered some problems when the game was launched, the TapTap score has remained stable at more than 8.5 points so far.
In Wang Yipu's view, if you want to do a good job in word-of-mouth, you need to pick up the user operation ideas in the era of terminal games and establish communication relationships with users more frequently and efficiently. Therefore, he often communicates with players as a fat fox, and after the producers who are attentive again and again, the fat fox has also become the image spokesperson in the minds of players.
To this day, many players still miss Fat Fox and the "Little Animal Star" of the year.
Source: TapTap users' eternal fishing bears
And after the suspension of content development in "Little Animal Star" in 2022, Wang Yipu also began to think about his life:
I started to run towards the age of 50, and I was afraid that if I did something else, it might be three or five years later, and I might not have the courage to go out and start a business at that time, and finally I would be like this for the rest of my life.
It's not about the pressure of life, it's just about choosing how to live. At most, I can't stay in Shenzhen and go back to my hometown. But if I don't do it, I will be old and lie in bed in the future, and I will regret it for the rest of my life, and I may still regret it when I die.
So I figured it out, you still have to start a business, even if it doesn't work, it doesn't matter, but you have to do it. This is very important to me.
02 DEMO
Zhang Qi is a friend of Wang Yipu who has known him for many years, and the two first met in Sword Network III: Wang Yipu was the president of the top three guilds on the server at that time, ranked first in the sect PVP, and was the editor-in-chief of the game media;
In the past few years, Zhang Qi has made a lot of games, some of which have been successful and some have been lost. A small team of more than 10 people has been working together for more than a decade, and everyone has been looking forward to making a game with a unique experience. After discussing with Wang Yipu, they reached a consensus on the project's cognition and began to establish the project's research and development.
Initially, the company was largely funded by the savings of a few core members. Although Wang Yipu also thought about smashing the pot and selling iron to cover the entire team. But he thinks that this is not healthy, because if you have not been to the capital market, entrepreneurship may become obstinacy.
Luckily, he met someone who believed he could make a good game — the CTO of an Internet company who sent the money without any contracts.
At first, the team used Wang Yipu's resources to get the free IP authorization of a big DAU game, and was ready to quickly make a numerical card in the direction of gingerbread man, but in the end, I still forgot it - after copying, where is the next one? After all, changing skin is not the idea he wants to make a game. In the end, they decided to choose between MMO and competition:
"Our generation grew up playing MMOs and competitive confrontation games, and the team also does this the most, but MMO is not something that can be made at a small cost, and forcing it will die on the road. So I still chose the confrontation game. ”
Zhang Qi drew a coordinate axis and divided the confrontation game into two dimensions: one is that the difficulty of the gameplay changes from casual to competitive, and the other is that the game time is from long to short, covering popular confrontation games such as "Glory of Kings", "League of Legends", "Peace Elite", "Happy Landlord", "Dota Auto Chess", "Clash Royale" and so on.
After analyzing the positioning of each product, the team agreed that the competitive game market with heavy operation and long games has been saturated, and only casual and short game confrontation games will have more room to play.
Then the team set five project principles: replayability, each game must have a different experience, growth, both inside and outside the game, easy to use, to teach players as quickly as possible, difficult to master, to have depth of research, innovation, from scratch is difficult, at least half a step of innovation.
In the follow-up research and development, we will score these five indicators on the product in stages. And among these five indicators, the most special one may be cultivation. Because most confrontation games either don't have outside development, in order to do fair play, or there is no in-game development, in order to speed up the pace of the game.
Zhang Qi said that if you don't do out-of-game development, then the game is positioned as a fair competition game with a big DAU, which is not suitable for small teams, and it is difficult to get through the business model.
"We have to find a balance between confrontation, the commercialization model can be established, and the most difficult and most important thing is to achieve half-step innovation. There are many ready-made solutions to the first four points, but the last point is where the product opens up the gap with others. ”
Of course, the game is always easier said than done. For the first demo prototype of the game, the team quarreled a lot. Once Wang Yipu was so angry that he slammed the door and walked out.
In fact, at this time, the team has no money, and the original plan was to take this DEMO to go online, even if the art quality of this DEMO is still very rough, and there is no world view packaging, just a pure gameplay prototype.
But then Wang Yipu played one, two, and when it came to the third one, he immediately put down the game and immediately called Zhang Qi: "Stop the original plan, we have to make its art and world view and make it a high-quality product, instead of going online casually." I'm going to look for money now. ”
Wang Yipu's idea at the time was that since the gameplay was really half-step innovative, then don't waste it.
03 Kihei
Grape Jun also played this demo of "Codename: Strange Soldier".
It has a lot of other products in it, but there are a lot of differences. For example, it's a vertical screen 1v1 battle game similar to "Clash Royale", but there is no fixed cost, and the unit does not eat the operation; it has an automatic attack logic similar to auto-chess, as well as the meat pigeon gameplay of swiping cards and rising stars, but it is not a chicken mode, only 1 game can determine the winner or loser, and the deck needs to be configured in advance.
The process of a complete game is very simple: draw cards from the pre-configured deck, then play heroes, accumulate and kill enemies over time to obtain gold, and then refresh your hand with gold, play new heroes, or upgrade existing heroes, and finally defeat the enemy base.
The art style will also be modified
For reference only
Zhang Qi divides the core gameplay of the confrontation game into four major points: luck, operation, strategy, and cultivation. "All confrontation games are matched in these four aspects. ”
"Codename: Strange Soldier" first removed the operation, because the operation is more competitive, and it is easier to get started by lowering the threshold for operation. Therefore, the game only needs to choose cards and play cards.
Secondly, the game simplifies the strategy logic, a game of 3 minutes, no standing formation, the map is smaller, up to 6 to 6, and the layout that players have to do is not complicated. And because players can pre-configure card decks, with the blessing of luck, they have a better chance to play their own routines.
In the end, the team balanced strategy, luck, and development according to the game stage: the proportion of strategy will always be the same, and luck and development will change with the player's proficiency, and luck will be more important in the early stage, and more emphasis on development in the later stage.
Zhang Qi said that if a player wins, it doesn't matter how he wins, he will stay anyway, but if he loses, the proportion of strategy, luck, and cultivation determines how the player should view the defeat, and if it is more inclined to luck, the player will have less pressure to open another game.
As for "nurturing". He believes that the coolest thing about auto chess games is that the lineup keeps getting stronger, and players can feel continuous growth, but the problem is that the battle is not continuous, and after a game, you have to call a pause and carry out a new round of strategic deployment, which makes the whole battle very long.
Therefore, one of the most critical designs in "Codename: Strange Soldier" is to remove the concept of unit death: after the unit HP is empty, it will not disappear, but will only return to the base to redeploy and then set off again. And this redeployment is instantaneous, and the player can still perform actions such as star promotion on the hero at this time.
This means that, compared to games such as Clash Royale, the game has an in-game development part, and resources can be accumulated, and compared to the auto-chess gameplay, the game does not have a pause, the end of the round, and the start of the round, and the player does not need to wait, and the lineup can be completed in the battle.
"Our battles are continuous, there is no round waiting time, you can configure your strategy at any time and get instant feedback. So the game is very easy to get started, and many friends who test it will feel like they can't stop playing. ”
The existence of outsider cultivation gives the game more room to do PVE mode. Zhang Qi said that everyone has a threshold for PVP ranking, and it is impossible to play all the way up. No matter how strategic the game is, players will get tired. But players will always need rewards, want to be stronger, there is no upper limit. Therefore, through PVE placement cultivation rewards, it can be used to improve the player's medium and long-term retention.
At the same time, the PVE mode can also promote the development of the game's social ecology. "The big guy can show off his skin, show the strength of his deck, bring other players to push the level, and also get some extra rewards. The two sides are mutually beneficial, just like the logic of MMO teaming up for a dungeon. ”
The art style will also be modified
For reference only
After the gameplay was settled, the art and subject matter became another problem.
Because the project gameplay is in the direction of casual competition, the audience should be as wide as possible. Wang Yipu hopes that the art and subject matter will be more extensive, so that all players can quickly understand it after seeing it, and also take care of both domestic and overseas at the same time. "I don't expect everyone to like it, but at least make sure that everyone doesn't hate it. ”
In the end, the team still fell back to the theme of small animals that everyone is most familiar with and has the most feelings. After all, the team had done it before, and knew that it was very compatible, that it was a universal language, and that they were also familiar with the design know-how and how to show off the charm of the animals.
Once you've decided on an animal theme, the next step is how to make the 3D animals look cute but not young. In the end, the team came to a consensus that if the creature was made into a figure that everyone was willing to put on their desks, then it would be appropriate.
The first draft of art is a little turtle, Wang Yipu took this picture to show his child, and the child drew it casually. Wang Yipu immediately felt that this direction was feasible - even children could draw it casually, indicating that the image design was simple and easy to identify.
Unlike many small teams, Wang believes that worldview and gameplay are equally important and should not be taken lightly. "Every game has to have its own worldview, otherwise what do you say I'm making this game? Just a bunch of animals fighting around? That's the logic of copying the game. ”
The first version of the game's world view was that small animals wandered around the world, scavenging, picking up some equipment and fighting on their bodies, but they were quickly rejected. Because this worldview is too big, there are too many questions that need to be explained.
In the case of limited resources, Wang Yipu believes that it is necessary to choose a small and light worldview as much as possible. So in the end, the team derived from the figurine, applying the logic of "Toy Story": the animal figures were bought by the player and placed on the display shelf, and while the owner was not at home, they fought fiercely for the most dazzling place in the room.
"In this way, a limited battle scene and character relationships can be framed without telling a specific story, and it is easier for players to substitute. So for this product, the last shot of the concept PV is very important. ”
04 "Fun is more important than anything else"
Fortunately for Wang Yipu, players have responded well to the PV of this art concept, and even players have begun to create UGC.
At this stage, the team is integrating the art concept and world view design into the product, so that the quality of the game is upgraded to a higher level than the original DEMO. After all, this is directly related to the state of the product when it officially meets the user the next time.
At the same time, this product will also be made into a dual-end mode of APP + mini games - to broaden the user's plate as much as possible and seize the dividends of the mini game.
Now Wang Yipu is quite confident in his products. Because at the end of last year, he showed the DEMO to many industry bosses, and everyone was quite interested. One of the bosses played for 6 hours that day, and the ranking rushed to 6,000 points. You know, this is just a demo, and the opponents are all computers.
The players of "Little Animal Star" also gave him a lot of encouragement. "After the game was silently released on TapTap, there were a lot of dynamic players who came to hear about it, and I was quite moved. After so many years, everyone has not forgotten the moving star, and can still remember the fat fox. ”
In Wang Yipu's view, making a game is like opening a restaurant, there must be a dish to play the signboard. But if you can't eat the dish yourself, how can you sell it to customers? Now the gameplay of "Codename: Strange Soldier", at least they dare to take it out and tell others: "You can play it and see if it's fun." ”
He said that the original plan was to start mass production in April and start testing in June, but now that the team saw the enthusiasm of the players, the team adjusted the pace: it took another two months to adjust the actual combat of the new art to the best, and then to do the first test in front of the players, and complete the project by the end of the year.
Zhang Qi said that they have always believed in the project logic of "gameplay first": the team spent a lot of money to try to innovate gameplay, and then promoted the project after determining the core gameplay, rather than a set of mature gameplay directly changing skins and advertising materials, which is not what they are good at.
Wang Yipu said, "For games, fun is more important than anything else. "