Game Development: Starting with Recreating the Anime Game Style

Chapter 144 is too easy!

However, at this moment, Wang Jiayi did not feel any of these things. He just felt a little regretful. The stories and art scenes of the previous levels were actually quite atmospheric.

For example, in the tea room of the second level, light shines through the paper sliding window, casting two distinct grids of light and shadow on the tatami mats. A complete set of tea utensils is arranged meticulously, yet it exudes a sense of coldness.

The third level's gloomy shrine, with its vermilion torii gates appearing particularly oppressive, and white gohei fluttering silently in the wind.

The antique shop in the fourth level takes the dim and dusty atmosphere to the extreme. Every antique on the shelves seems to hold a secret, quietly waiting for the player to touch it.

The problem is that the difficulty of the first few levels is too low.

Basically, it's the kind of problem that you can solve with just a few clicks and a little thought, without even having to think too much.

"What a pity, it's so simple. Who would die? There's no need to share to get hints."

"Lin Wanwan actually died playing this kind of game?..."

"Looks like she's not quite right in the head... but that's okay, being a little silly is kind of cute..."

The first four levels were "too" easy, so much so that Wang Jiayi felt like he wasn't playing a puzzle game, but rather reading a comic book called "Tales of the Unusual".
This feeling lasted until the fifth level.

The game's difficulty suddenly became unfamiliar.

The fifth level is called: Dry Landscape Garden.

The scene is a Japanese garden under the moonlight. The garden is very dilapidated. Unlike the previous levels where there were densely packed dolls, this time there are only 7 stone-carved dolls standing on 7 pillars in the middle of the garden.

Logically speaking, these 7 dolls...

Even using the exhaustive method, clicking through each option one by one, you're guaranteed to get the correct result in no more than seven tries.

Wang Jiayi simply did just that; since dying meant starting over from the fifth level.

Unfortunately, when he had selected all seven dolls one by one...

Aside from dying seven times and obtaining the achievement "Exhaustive Sacrifice," which made Wang Jiayi feel like he was being mocked by the development team, he gained nothing else.

So we had no choice but to honestly decipher it.

Once he started to seriously solve the puzzle, Wang Jiayi was quickly drawn to it. The level was very interesting, with various clues and connections that made it much richer.

He spent a long time trying to solve the puzzle, using several hints from shared links, but by the time he got off work, he still hadn't been able to solve it.

Until the next day.
The next morning, on his way to work, he remembered the game again, so he turned on his phone on the subway.

Then he discovered the "new world".

The game's setting matches real-world time!
It was nighttime last night, so even though the background changed, he didn't notice the detail. But this morning, the information became very obvious.

After obtaining this crucial information, he instantly understood many things.

The game doesn't make useless settings. Since a realistic timeline has been arranged, it means that the answer to the puzzle is definitely related to time. Following this line of thought, he finally found the clue.

Furthermore, it was deduced that this time should be 12:08 PM.

Then, he spent the entire morning thinking about this while working.

Wait until noon.

Sure enough! The light and shadow on the ground in the center of the game changed. This change lasted for only a dozen seconds. In that short time, he reacted with lightning speed.

Final victory.

He obtained the "Peeping into the Shadows" achievement, which, according to the pop-up notification, is a "Platinum" achievement that can be displayed on his profile page on StarTap. The moment he received the achievement, Wang Jiayi jumped up.

Then he almost ran to Lin Wanwan's side and shared the news, but Lin Wanwan was speechless.

"No, why are you only telling me now?!"

The girl was a little angry, but Wang Jiayi couldn't care less. The ingenuity of the fifth level and the final result made him look forward to the sixth level.

The sixth level of the game is called: Anokko
A direct translation would be "that child".

There's only one doll in this level, if you only look at the initial level instructions, which say you need to find the doll that's in the problem.

You don't even need to choose a level.

However, having experienced the fifth level, this level also has hidden tricks.

The scene shifts to a room in an abandoned shrine. This is the same shrine from the third level, except that the third level took place in the shrine's courtyard, while this time we're inside a room.

Moreover, the shrine scene this time was quite normal, with even worshippers outside.

The scene includes a niche, an ordinary painting, a low table, a cabinet, and a neatly laid-out quilt.

Moreover, compared to those previous dolls that used "weird and cute" aesthetics everywhere, with cherry blossom kimonos, cracked porcelain textures, and blood-red gradient pupils.

The doll in the final level looks very normal, even a little too normal.

Therefore, the problem that players need to solve at the beginning is not to solve the mutation, but to make the mutation occur. After all, to solve a problem, you need to know where the problem is before you can solve it, right?

But the problem is.

This shrine is so normal that there is no problem at all.

There was no other way, so Wang Jiayi also chose to share the game to get the initial hints. The hints in the game "Doll" were not the kind that were very straightforward.

So sometimes even if you get the hint, you can't use it directly.

The good news is that the prompts you receive are different each time you share.

The bad news is that only the first two shares each day will receive a notification; additional notifications will only be given if someone downloads Startap and logs in.

Despite the numerous limitations, Wang Jiayi gradually found some solutions after receiving hints.

Especially when you see the same sun and moon changing outside the shrine in the game as in the previous level.

The clue was actually quite obvious. After a series of operations, Wang Jiayi finally found a broken clock in a hidden compartment of the cabinet. After repairing it, a stopped clock could be seen on a low table (the hands were stopped at 20:08).

At 8:08 PM, the grandfather clock suddenly began spinning wildly counter-clockwise, and the painting behind the alcove changed from "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" to "The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons."

Bluish-black finger marks appeared on the back of the cotton doll's neck.

However, Wang Jiayi got stuck again after that.

I was thinking of playing again tomorrow, but lying in bed thinking about it left and right, I still felt uneasy. I also thought about how I would be taking on a new project at work tomorrow, so it might not be as easy to slack off as it was today.

"Sigh, I guess I'll just look for a guide."

Although using walkthroughs for puzzle games is tantamount to cheating and will diminish the enjoyment of the game, there's no other way.
The life of a corporate slave is one of being completely powerless.

(End of this chapter)