Game Development: Starting with Recreating the Anime Game Style

Chapter 140 This promotional campaign!? [Bonus chapter for smoother plot development]

He continued jumping down, and the grid changed rapidly. The background turned light green without him noticing, and the blocks transformed into things that would appear beside a stream.

Just when he thought these blocks were just having their textures changed, the next block looked like a gray rock.

He jumped as usual and landed steadily.

Just as the little man stood firm, two small pincers suddenly emerged from under the rock, and a pixelated red crab crawled out sideways, waved its pincers at the little man, and then quickly withdrew.

At the same time, an achievement for "Encountering Crab" popped up and disappeared in a flash.

"I rely on?"

The animation is cute and fun.
The difficulty increases significantly after the tenth and twentieth squares, as the squares become smaller and some irregular squares begin to appear.

Although he concentrated, he still accidentally jumped onto the small pond at the edge of the twenty-third square.
"Boom!"

A dull sound of defeat plays, and the game ends.

His final score popped up on the screen: 42.

As the score ended, a leaderboard animation appeared, and his default avatar started climbing rapidly on the leaderboard, then slowed down.

Upon arriving here, David noticed that this game actually had two rankings.

One is the friends ranking. Dawei's account is a newly created account, so naturally he has not added any friends. Below this ranking, there is a button to authorize the automatic addition of friends by reading contacts, but Dawei did not click it.

In addition to the friends leaderboard, there is also a global leaderboard. The UI of this leaderboard is also very clean, with three pieces of information: the country at the top, the user's name, and the specific ranking.

Having traveled this far, Dawei already had a pretty good idea of ​​what was going on.

For a game developer, using leaderboards to increase user engagement is as common sense as eating and drinking.

The Starry Night Games ranking list is nothing more than adding country information in an attempt to increase user engagement through "global rankings," but in essence, this tactic is not very effective.

After the two leaderboards, two buttons appeared: "Resurrect" and "Try Again".

At the same time, the game screen also changed slightly. The camera was zoomed out a bit, and in front of the player's grid, a Japanese player with the ID 【さくらふぶき】 appeared and was waving at him.

"."

The way this greeting is presented has a strong Nintendo game vibe.

Furthermore, even though it was a friendly greeting, because that little figure was standing in the square in front of his own, Dawei always felt that the guy was mocking him.
My finger instinctively tapped the resurrection screen.

I thought I was about to be taken out of the classic "watch ads" screen, but instead it led to a sharing link that clearly stated: "[First share of the day grants 5 revival chances (tip: You can only revive once per game!)]"

"That's pretty generous; sharing once gives you five chances to revive..."

Wait!
David's fingertip hovered over the share link.

Just as the shared link started redirecting to WeChat, a chilling sense of enlightenment spread from his fingertips all the way to the top of his head.

He understood!
Now I understand why Starry Sky Games launched its promotional campaign at this time.

It's not that Starry Sky Games is stupid, but that its own thinking is rigid!! CNJOY's traffic is indeed huge, as huge as a surging ocean.

But precisely because it's the ocean, everyone has brought their ships in. Hundreds of manufacturers and thousands of games are all crowding into this sea, vying for the limited attention of the audience and the media.

The end result is that, apart from giants like Tencent and NetEase with their massive fleets of technology that can consistently dominate the headlines, the voices of most other companies will be drowned out by the cacophony of noise.

Your "trump card" might be overturned by an even bigger one before you even hear the sound.

What is Starry Sky Games doing now?
They did not rush into the Red Sea to engage in hand-to-hand combat.

Before the massive tsunami of CNJOY arrived, they dug their own channel, diverting the most eager and active player traffic to their own pond in advance!
As for what happens next?

There was no "after that." If Dawei's prediction is correct, the games on StarTap should all have similar splitting mechanisms.

The game Dawei just played, Jump Jump, is so simple that anyone can pick it up in three seconds.

The barrier to entry is low enough.

It also has a certain degree of fun and challenge.

Furthermore, scores and rankings exploit humanity's most primal competitive and adventurous spirit.

Although simple.

Even David himself almost shared it, so you can imagine how this thing spread like a virus!
In other words, once StarTap had garnered enough attention the day before CNJOY, even if other companies started pulling out all the stops at CNJOY, StarTap didn't care, because this first batch of players had already begun to split into two groups.

And now, today, the day before CNJOY.

All eyes, all discussions, all the buzz—it's all theirs! This isn't some marketing blunder; it's intentional! This is a textbook marketing strategy!

"How could I not have thought of that?!"

Dawei's mind was buzzing. After understanding Xingchen Games' marketing strategy, his first thought was that Honkai Impact 3's marketing should not be done at CNJOY, but should be done today.

He missed that opportunity.

However, he quickly realized that even if the promotion of Honkai Impact 3 was released today, if it did not generate a word-of-mouth effect, what difference would it make from promoting it tomorrow?
His gaze returned to the simple, almost rudimentary, little game on his phone screen.

That's the problem.

Honkai Impact 3rd is currently only in the marketing phase; players can see it but can't actually play it, so there's no reason for it to generate a massive fan response unless they also create a similar demo. Otherwise, no matter how high the quality or how good the art style in the promotional footage is, it won't make a difference.
No... even if a demo was made, the Honkai Impact 3 demo didn't have this kind of viral marketing "split" gene.

That's not quite right... Actually, you could also add a new user referral/team-up reward system.
While his mind was racing, Dawei couldn't help but glance at the game "Jump Jump" on his phone.

What makes the Star Games so terrifying is not only that they saw through the timing, but also that they tailored the perfect weapon for that timing.

This entire set of combined punches was perfectly linked and incredibly precise.

Looking at this interface, I suddenly had a subtle feeling, like being in an exam hall, scratching my head over a difficult problem, while the person next to me solved it with ease.
However, David is David after all, and he quickly realized that he could also learn from the other party's publicity tactics.

(End of this chapter)