Zhenxin Town Xiaomao | Interviews, writings
I wanted to write a nostalgic popular science article, trying to remind you of the classic game that we once loved, but was lost in the memory gallery.
Because I want more people to remember that there was once a group of unknown people who brought precious memories of play to our childhood with only interest and love.
As early as a few years ago, the Flash game production team that had blossomed in a hundred flowers had almost disappeared. There are many reasons, such as technological obsolescence, life forced, or simply a loss of enthusiasm.
So before contacting the 5DPLAY production team, I didn't expect that a Flash mini game that was born more than 10 years ago and did not have any commercial operation was still maintaining a strong vitality in the circle through continuous iteration.
"Grim Reaper VS Naruto (BVN), a game that has been around for 13 years since 2008. The production team members came and went, and I didn't know much about the members who were farther away. ”
One of the current members of the production team, and also serving as Baidu's "Grim Reaper VS Naruto" Tieba bar owner's amorous jun told me.
As a college student, Amorous Jun is mainly responsible for the operation and management of the game community and the organization of the annual BVN offline competition.
You read that right. In addition to the loyal fans who have been sticking to it for more than 10 years, BVN has also been holding offline competitions since 15 years, and has now been held for the sixth edition.
Its impact extends beyond even borders. The amorous jun revealed to me that there is an american fan active in their official group, who has been bubbling and chatting with them for almost two years because of jet lag, hard-nibbling Chinese.
What kind of mini-game is this, and what charm has made it bloom for more than a decade?
1
How BVN is made
When we think of Flash games, we have this impression in our minds: it was born in an era of barbaric development of the Internet, and many works are interesting enough, but the production is simple and crude. It's easy to think of Crazy Kids and Gold Miner, which are fun, but the former has a short process and the latter system is extremely simple.
It wasn't until 2010 that an ARPG called Trial of Death 2 was born. It's not particularly well-known, but it has a flow of more than 10 hours, an impressive story, a well-developed equipment system, a complex skill tree, and a large number of game eggs, and the depth of gameplay is a dimensionality reduction in Flash games.
The game's author, Kenjin, is the creator of Death VS Naruto. The name of the 5DPLAY production team comes from a Flash game website made by Jianjian in the early days, and later due to financial problems, the url was transferred to the "1212321 Forum" and has been operated ever since. The website not only has game resources, but also contains technical issues and related materials for game development.
The original 0.1 version of Grim Reaper vs. Naruto is not a mature work, but the product of Kenjian's self-taught birth during college. The game is a collection of characters from the most popular manga at the time, "Grim Reaper" and "Naruto", and was officially launched in 2008 and released on Flash game websites such as 4399.
The earliest BVN is more like the Flash version of "Jump Smash Bros." there is no complex rubbing moves, only simple close attack, long attack, must kill, instantaneous four basic mechanisms, attack with the arrow keys can release different must kill skills, and there are only 8 optional characters, anyone can quickly get started.
Popular IP combined with PVP battle gameplay is very suitable for elementary school students to tear up. Therefore, at that time, BVN was the starting star in the computer class of primary and secondary schools. In front of the computer, the teacher talks about boring computer operations, and the neighboring king two dogs stare at the minesweeper and sleepily, while you call Kiyou and operate the vortex Naruto Blood Battle Kurosaki Ichigo, of course, becoming the most beautiful boy in the class.
The game received a very good response after its release, with more than one million hits in its first year, winning the 2008 17173 Most Popular Flash Game of the Year.
When I found Jian Jian and asked him how he felt after the game became popular, Jian Jian didn't seem to think much of it. In his eyes, making games is like another gamble, he is just lucky, and the game he makes happens to be on fire.
Jian Jian himself is 33 years old, works as a team manager in a software development company, and is a very busy person in reality.
As for why he bothered to set up a production team, "power generation with love" for more than ten years, Jian Jian said: "The focus is on having a group of loyal players, they don't give up following, I will always keep updated." ”
During the chat, every member of the 5DPLAY production team kept stressing to me the importance of "players". Due to Flash's low threshold for getting started, many fans personally participated in the production of the game, and gradually formed their own "revision circle".
Search for "Grim Reaper vs Naruto" on the B station, you can find a large number of folk versions on the homepage, some of which even include hundreds of characters, all of which are from the player's second creation.
"In a way, BVN is a game created by all players. I will leave some modifiability when making characters, players like this, gather in Tieba to share their own game experience, some views on the game characters and mechanics, and gradually form a cultural player community. ”
It's like Chinese your own mugen
This is necessary for the game to remain active for a long time. Because in a way, Jian Jian is a "gifted" developer who can teach himself to create interesting indie games. But at the same time, he is also a "game idiot", in his own game can not even play human-machine, the balance of the game is difficult to say.
Therefore, the earliest BVN can only be regarded as a simple casual game, the difference in character strength is obvious, and many characters have mechanism bugs such as "infinite connection". If competitive players are together, it's easy to evolve from playing games to "live BVN".
Tieba still hangs a slogan prohibiting "unlimited connections"
Subsequent updates to the game have continuously added new mechanics such as "Ghostburd", "White Bully", "Endurance", "Body", etc., and have also spawned hundreds of technical terms. For example, the simplest attack instructions are divided into four types: "hit", "real hit", "fake hit" and "fake hit", gradually giving the game a strong depth of research and beginning to move closer to the traditional sense of fighting games.
For related content, please refer to the Grim Reaper vs Naruto Wikipedia established by the production team member "President", which contains thousands of articles including guides, culture, and memes.
But this is not enough, it can not meet the competitive needs of ten-year-old fans. So under the impetus of various factors, the 5DPLAY production team joined hands with senior players to launch a "vigorous" parallel plan in response to the balance problems in the game.
2
Parallel planning
"The so-called parallel plan is because the original game has a balance problem, and the characters have to be divided into 7 to 8 levels according to the performance intensity during the game, so that players can only choose characters in the same class to fight, which leads to a great reduction in the diversity and strategy of the game.
Therefore, the parallel plan is to adjust the skills and attributes of the characters, merge the levels into 3 to 4, and create a new PVP environment. ”
The president of one of the production team members gave me science popularization. He is primarily responsible for maintaining the BVN Wikipedia, while also working on improvements to other aspects of the game.
I asked him if there would be a detailed division of labor, such as programming, art, gameplay design, etc., or whether there would be a hard and fast demand on the professional ability of the new team members.
"Not really, the production team members are also cooperative partners, everyone is a like-minded friend, the word enthusiast may be more suitable for us now."
There are currently more than a dozen members of the parallel team, most of whom are just players and have no additional technical skills, but their in-depth understanding of the game is their unique talent. If there is a gap, there will be many people who will learn the relevant skills spontaneously.
However, some things, such as pixel animation and special skill code design, require a lot of time and effort, and also require professional skills to do, and only when it comes to these, the division of labor is more clear. ”
Creator Jian Jian is not involved in the parallel plan, but all changes will be uniformly recycled before the next official update, except for a few characters who will be slightly adjusted by Sword Jian, and all other changes will be retained.
It is these changes that deepen the charm of the game, spawn thousands of words of in-depth strategy, and make it possible for BVN to go to "professional competitiveness".
3
Competitive circle
The "professional competition" of "Death VS Naruto" is divided into two types: online and offline.
Among them, the birth of the online competitive circle is more or less related to the secondary two diseases that everyone has committed.
The amorous jun in charge of the operation of the competition told me: "Due to the explosion in the computer classroom, many people feel that they are the "first in the school" in this game after PK with their classmates.
After becoming the "first in the whole school", they will really feel that they have thoroughly studied everything in the game and reached the realm of invincibility in the world.
Then almost every one of them, when they first entered the online group, would be fiercely educated. There is no shortage of mentally broken brothers, who suddenly hang up and flash back halfway through the game to pretend that they did not lose. ”
Therefore, the brothers who can survive in this kind of hell are real hardcore players, and before they enter the society, they begin to use teamviewer, todesk and other office remote control software to connect.
BVN also gave birth to two real "teams", not only with high technical thresholds, but also through rigorous examination papers, including judgment questions, multiple choice questions, reading comprehension questions and genre analysis questions.
The annual offline competition is actually closer to the fan gathering, which is independently hosted by the operation staff of the production team.
Although the sparrow is small and complete, take the sixth edition held by the amorous jun last year as an example, he will arrange the schedule, competition venues, format and event prizes in detail before the competition.
At the end of each competition, a group photo will be left to commemorate this unforgettable memory and youth.
Amorous Jun shared some interesting stories with me. The majority of participants are college students, but every year there are minors. Because it is an inter-provincial competition, they cannot avoid fierce confrontation with their parents.
"I myself had the experience of fighting with my parents, when I was a sophomore in high school, crying and begging my father to agree to my fourth offline competition, and then my father accompanied me to take the train from Guangdong to Nanchang."
His experience is not unique, and all minors are accompanied by their parents. Because it is often misunderstood as a pyramid scheme, the amorous jun always has to chat with other people's parents on WeChat, and providing identity documents is already a common thing for him.
Later, I asked the amorous jun how he felt when he recalled his two competition experiences. I thought that this emotion would be a joy and shyness for the impulses of youth, but without thinking, he said another answer.
"If I participate in the offline competition, I personally feel more regret - because I have always wanted to prove myself with the championship, especially in the fifth session, I prepared a lot, but I was still eliminated due to lack of strength.
Compared with the experience of being a host, I still care more about the games I play, watching my victory video more than a dozen or twenty times, and the lost game is painful to watch only once. ”
Maybe on the business card, he is the lord of death vs. Naruto, a core member of the production team, but deep down, he is always a player.
4
future
"Grim Reaper VS Naruto" can write a lot more, such as the story of the power generation with love for more than a decade, a copyright dispute it has been involved in, or some interesting fandom.
But at this point I want to focus more on the game itself. In the era of students with little entertainment, it provided a rare joy for too many people, but it was gradually forgotten with the rise of pan-entertainment.
But in this long time, and in the corners that we ignore, there are still groups of people who get together because of interest, and gather the ideas in their minds into towers, so that this old tree can grow stubbornly in the shadows and sprout new shoots.
Just two days before the release of this article, the 5DPLAY production team officially updated the 3.5 version of "Grim Reaper VS Naruto" and wrote down the thinking and planning for the near future of the game.
The new version adds the long-planned Peerless mode and incorporates routing gameplay, an idea that shines even in commercial games.
This is just the beginning, and the production team promises to add more gaming experiences in the future. Creator Jian Jian also revealed to me that he was working on a Unity version of BVN.
Flash's life is coming to an end, but the story that belongs to them will continue.
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