Game Development: Starting with Recreating the Anime Game Style

Chapter 137 The Taste of It All
Time flies, and it's the end of July.

The Magic City of China.

The first two days of the CNJOY exhibition.

As the largest game exhibition in China, CNJOY has seen its showgirls get more exposure than the games themselves due to the rampant skirting of regulations by various manufacturers in recent years.

Most people come to CNJOY with a straightforward purpose: they buy tickets to see long, white legs, underwear, and pubic hair.

Games? You came to CNJOY to see games?
Nevertheless, CNJOY is the only game expo in China officially guided by the General Administration of Press and Publication and the Shanghai Municipal Government.

Its value, exposure, and influence in China are still top-notch.

Besides being a convention for gamers, CNJOY is also a convention for manufacturers.

While players are admiring the big names and queuing up to receive gifts from manufacturers outside, other venues will also be hosting many business exhibitions, such as the China Game Outsourcing Conference, which focuses on global outsourcing cooperation, technical exchanges, and IP licensing.

For example, the China International Digital Entertainment Industry Conference, the Global Esports Conference, the China Developer Conference, and so on.

Therefore, in addition to a large number of players gathering here, representatives from game companies around the world usually arrive here in advance, and the organizers also provide accommodation for the main exhibitors.

In this situation.

There's a high chance of bumping into acquaintances at the hotel designated by the organizers.

Some business meetings may even begin now.

Take, for example, Mingyue Mansion at this moment.

As an official partner of CNJOY2016, the five-star hotel has an open 24-hour buffet restaurant and an executive floor coffee shop. Everywhere you look, you can see industry professionals in suits, chatting in small groups.

The coffee shop on the third floor of the hotel, a window seat.

Three figures were sitting around a table.

On the inner side is Huang Jintao, the head of the Onmyoji game studio. Sitting opposite him is Qi Zhihong, the producer of Night Spirit. The other person is Pang Zhen, the producer of Jade Dynasty Auto Chess.

Despite the fierce competition among major companies like Tencent, NetEase, and Wanmei in the market, their executives are also at loggerheads.

However, when it comes to the project leader level, the tension is much less intense.

At major industry summits, people run into each other frequently, and their networks overlap significantly. Producers who now belong to different camps may have been comrades-in-arms in the same company a few years ago.

A company is a company, and personal connections are personal connections; seasoned veterans in the industry know this very well.

Just like these three sitting in a circle right now.

Although they are producers from three different companies, they actually have a pretty close relationship.

Huang Jintao and Qi Zhihong had worked together before, and Pang Zhenyou was Qi Zhihong's classmate in university. The three of them occasionally communicated in private.

"This year's CNJOY is really lively."

Huang Jintao put down his cup.

Of the three, he was the most emotional.

After all, of the three, only his "Onmyoji" is about to be launched in September.

Based on this launch timeline, after discussion, the Onmyoji studio decided to put their final and most important promotional campaign on CNJOY.

The Onmyoji version available for trial at the exhibition included a prologue experience, a complete auto-chess matchmaking mode, and various press releases had already been prepared.

He naturally had high expectations for this grand event.

"It's lively, yes."

"But looking around, it's all VR or auto chess, it's getting a bit tiresome." Since it wasn't a formal occasion, the three chatted casually, mostly complaining.

The most criticized aspect is naturally the behavior of manufacturers' executives chasing after trending topics.

This behavior is mostly based on commercial considerations and is decided directly by senior management, often without taking into account the wishes of the producers below.

For example, last year, the three major mainstream VR headsets, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Sony PlayStation VR, were all launched, and VR suddenly became popular.

The concept of the "Year Zero of VR" has been hyped up to an extreme degree, with a large number of domestic manufacturers also starting to promote VR. Even IPs like the Legend of Sword and Fairy have jumped on the bandwagon, claiming they will showcase a VR version of the Legend of Sword and Fairy at CNJOY.
At the beginning of this year, the auto battler game "Final Battlefront" became popular again, and its popularity continued to grow. As a result, a large number of companies started making auto battlers and creating anime-style games.

Pang Zhen's "Zhu Xian Auto Chess" is a project that is purely following the trend.

These kinds of projects that capitalize on trending topics are the hardest for producers to do. If you do them well, the credit goes to the trending topic; if you do them poorly, you'll be labeled as useless for not even being able to copy properly.

More importantly, producers don't have much say in these kinds of projects, because when making original games, even if the boss doesn't know much about the industry, they won't give unsolicited instructions.

When making these kinds of "plagiarized" games, the boss always thinks he "knows" everything, which only makes things more complicated.

Pang Zhen's complaints were quickly accepted by Qi Zhihong.

His "Night Spirit" project team is in a similar situation. After the failed promotional campaign against Starry Sky in mid-July, Qi Zhihong has had a miserable ten days or so.

During the day, we developed a special playable demo for CNJOY, and at night we had to organize the entire team to study the "advanced experience" of "Final Front".

There are even people within Tencent who create a "Chu Chen R&D Ideas Compilation," which is a compilation of Chu Chen's discussions about game development in various interviews, videos, and live streams, for them to study.

"Did you guys see that developer daily update from 'Final Frontline' a few days ago? Even Chu Chen mentioning his love for pig's trotters while working overtime last night was included in the document, supposedly to teach us how to build closer relationships with players through 'daily updates'."

"puff--"

Pang Zhen almost spat out his water, choking and coughing repeatedly.

Huang Jintao was at a loss for words, both amused and exasperated.

"Surely not? Is Tencent really that surreal?"

"What do you think?"

Qi Zhihong twitched the corner of his mouth.

"Sigh, in our line of work, if the boss is incompetent, it's really tough."

"When we started developing 'Zhu Xian Auto Chess,' we had eight meetings. We argued for half a month just about whether to use chibi or realistic versions of the chess pieces. In the end, the boss made the decision to use both and let the players switch between them themselves."

"I'm really... haha."

He didn't finish his sentence, but that "heh heh" contained so much helplessness and utter frustration—those who know, know.

Huang Jintao is relatively better off, as Onmyoji is one of NetEase's most important projects this year, offering a relatively high degree of freedom.

But he also knew in his heart that this freedom was based on the data from the previous tests. If the performance of "Onmyoji" was not as expected, everything he had now would be taken back instantly.

"In the end, it's just envy."

Huang Jintao looked out the window and softly uttered a few words.

The atmosphere at the table instantly fell silent upon hearing this.

Yes, I'm envious and jealous.

There was even a hint of something indescribable...sour.

These "veterans" who have toiled in the industry for over a decade, their hair turned white, their stomachs ruined by drinking, to climb to their current positions, are now turning around and trying to "copy" and "learn" from a young man in his early twenties.
Only the person experiencing it truly knows the feeling.

(End of this chapter)