Game Development: Starting with Recreating the Anime Game Style

Chapter 212 The End
Having grown up in arcades and video game arcades, and then becoming an art student in the game industry after graduation, Chen Yanxin has a good sense of game quality.

Whether a game is truly mediocre or not can sometimes be determined with just a single promotional image.

Because promotional images actually represent the game's main art direction, or rather, the upper limit of the entire development team's "aesthetics." If the promotional images can't catch people's eye, then once they enter the game, at least in terms of art, they're unlikely to bring any surprises.

But this picture in front of me...

Composition, lighting, color, and atmosphere—if not a perfect 10, it's at least a 9.

The gray sky and the layered urban ruins, using only simple cool colors, precisely create the vastness and desolation of the post-apocalyptic world.

By using contrast between light and dark, the player's eye is naturally guided to the main subject of the image.

Moreover, the details in the picture are also very rich. If you look closely, you can see the faint white breath exhaled by the brother and sister. This wisp of white breath is the only "warmth" and "life" in this cold and desolate world.

"This is exactly what game company artists should be doing."

Chen Yanxin murmured to herself, a nameless sorrow welling up in her heart.

Why is there such a big difference between people who make games?
While sighing, Chen Yanxin scrolled through the page to view the game's detailed information.

[Developer: Starry Oasis Studio]

[Game Type: Post-Apocalyptic Sandbox Survival]

[Price: 38 yuan] [Limited-time free trial opportunity]

[Game Description: The first game developed using StarCraft's self-developed engine. On the ruins of a destroyed civilization, you will play as a pair of surviving siblings, gathering resources in the harsh winter, building shelters, exploring unknown city ruins, and uncovering the truth behind the world's destruction...]

The introduction is short, but it contains a decent amount of information.

After reading it, Chen Yanxin felt that it was the kind of thing that would make people want to try it out. She scrolled down, clicked to claim the trial voucher, and then clicked to download.

When I clicked to download, Startap popped up a notification.

This game is available on both PC and mobile platforms. For optimization purposes, only the PC version offers ultra-high graphics settings. The mobile version is currently being optimized, so please stay tuned.

"Ok?"

Chen Yanxin was stunned for a moment...
Why bring that up here?

Because we deal with planning all year round, and the company is small.

Therefore, Chen Yanxin had heard about some common sense in game development, such as that lousy game planner who was always thinking about how to cover up the problems in the game.

This is the first time I've seen someone proactively inform me like this.
After clicking download, Chen Yanxin placed her phone on the desktop, then opened Star Tap on her computer, found the game, and clicked download and install.

However, although the game was installed
But she didn't plan to play it right now. After all, she was still at work. It was fine to collect some loot in "Final Frontier," but to actually play the game was a bit of an exaggeration.

I can only wait until lunch break...
~~~
As a working professional, Chen Yanxin couldn't play the game immediately.

But Ye Feiyang, being a college student, didn't have these worries. He was half asleep when he heard Lao Wang from the lower bunk shout, "Holy crap!! StarCraft has released a new game!!!"

He rolled over, sat down on the lower bunk, and opened the game.

The whole thing took less than twenty minutes.

Most of those twenty minutes were spent copying games from Lao Wang's computer.

"Your damn USB drive is so slow..." "Screw you! Your father waited twenty minutes just to copy these games for you, you unfilial son!"

Amidst the dorm's traditional debate about "who is the father and who is the son."

Ye Feiyang rubbed his hands together, put on his headphones, and entered the game.

Although Ye Feiyang only glanced at the game's name and looked at the poster a few times, it didn't stop him from "making expectations on his own"—that's the charm of the four words "Starry Sky Games".

Upon entering the game, the first thing you see is a "Healthy Gaming" reminder in white text on a black background.

The white text appeared for a few seconds and then disappeared, leaving a completely black screen.

About half a second later, a star fell from below into the center of the black screen, followed by a sky full of stars, and the familiar Starry Night Games logo appeared on the screen.

Immediately afterwards, the game's main interface appeared in front of Ye Feiyang.

"Fuck."

As a game addict, Ye Feiyang has seen countless game main interfaces. It's no exaggeration to say that the game main interface is the face of the game.

A well-designed main interface can greatly increase players' anticipation for the game. The UI of "Final Survival Guide" is a typical "starry sky" style game interface.

That is, 90% of the screen area is the game scene, and only the bottom left corner has some common buttons such as game start, settings.

The background of its entire UI is a "slanted section" of a giant skyscraper.

The entire building appeared to have been vertically cleaved in two by some immense force, revealing its internal structure.

The building is completely hollow from top to bottom, forming a bottomless vertical abyss. The edges of each floor are cliffs, and rusty steel bars twist and protrude outwards like withered bones on the broken concrete floor.

The pale light and raindrops poured down from the cave, and the tiny raindrops quickly condensed into small ice crystals as they fell, encountering the extremely cold air currents.

These shimmering ice crystals also serve as the light source for the entire scene; the constantly drifting ice crystals, refracted by the moonlight, illuminate the whole picture.
Beside this area covered in gray and white, in a corner of a building on the left side of the screen, a campfire is burning, and the warm light emitted by the campfire illuminates the shadows that were originally dark.

As you can see, although the central part of the building no longer exists, a portion of the structure remains on the edges of each floor, and the location of the campfire is in a corner of one of those floors.
Clearly, that should be the players' camp.

"This scene is pretty impressive."

Ye Feiyang wasn't a professional artist. When he saw a beautiful scene, all he could say besides "Wow!" was "That's something!"
Click to start the game.

After pressing the start button for the game.

A gentle breeze carrying ice crystals swept by, and all the UI elements on the screen disappeared. Then, the camera zoomed in on the scene, and the game's perspective began to switch.

The End Survival Guide uses a 2D top-down perspective.

However, the overall visuals are different from those of ordinary 2D games.

The final version of the game, "The Last Survival Guide," uses a new engine that extends from Reality.

This engine is based on a native 3D framework, combined with some 2D-HD lighting and shading techniques, and reconstructs a rendering pipeline customized for a top-down perspective.

This enabled optimizations in various aspects of top-down 2D games, including lighting, texture, physics, and atmosphere.

(End of this chapter)