Game Development: Starting with Recreating the Anime Game Style

Chapter 330 Standard Answer?

Just as anxious as Ding Lei was Xia Anbo.

As it approached 9 p.m., Xia Anbo reluctantly put down his mouse.

After playing hard for eight hours.

He finally had to stop writing copy.

As a video blogger who created "Why Tencent Games is a Paper Tiger", I have been writing this video since last year.

Xia Anbo's life can be described as "a rollercoaster ride".

The rise refers to the fact that the video did bring him immense popularity, with his fan count soaring to nearly 500,000. The fall, however, is due to the past six months.

His video views have reached a plateau.

Logically speaking, given that "Floating Dreams" was suddenly launched under such circumstances, time is money, and he should have stopped playing long ago. He should have played for at most an hour or two before preparing to produce the video in order to grab traffic.

However, "Floating Dreams" is just too addictive.

Although Starry Sky only showcased 12 events in this DMEO presentation, these 12 events evoked completely different feelings.

Almost the instant he put down the mouse, Xia Anbo began typing in the document.

"These twelve incidents are not isolated events at all..."

"I think the most core and most fun part of 'Floating Dreams' is this event system."

"Its true essence lies not in the options themselves, but in the terrifying connections between events."

"Based on eight hours of gameplay, I went through almost all twelve events. After going through them all, I summarized three common association patterns among the events in Floating Dream Song."

"The first, and the easiest to understand, I call the 'sequential model'."

The so-called sequential pattern is an easily understood chain of events. The "Martial Arts Tournament for Marriage" in the game demo is a typical sequential pattern quest chain.

After killing Li Bangui and completing the martial arts contest to find a husband, the player will find that things are far from as simple as "winning the heart of a beauty." The manor lord will ask the player to stay at his manor for one night and discuss the marriage the next day.

At this time, the player's "fiancée," Zhao Yangyu, will find an opportunity to tell the player to "run away quickly" in front of him.

Therefore, the second event, "Night Visit to the Boudoir," will be unlocked.

Of course, this "night raid" is not the same as that "night raid". Players are not going to be flower thieves, but to sneak into the boudoir of Miss Zhao Yangyu of the Zhao family and find out the truth.

This is considered a stealth mission.

After this event, players will discover that there is more to the story than meets the eye in this martial arts contest to find a husband.

Li Bangui didn't come on his own; someone summoned him. And the person who summoned him was none other than the head of the Zhao family's estate.

Their goal was to use Zhao Yangyu as bait to lure people in, kill them, and then turn them into pills.

This is why the martial arts contest for marriage requires players to be ranked highly on the leaderboard. Miss Zhao Yangyu of the Zhao family revealed the truth to the players because she saw that they still had a sense of justice.

Incidentally, this event has a "chain" effect; if the player chooses an "unjust" victory as their first step, this event will not be triggered.

This will lead directly to the third event, which is "The Great Disturbance at Xianke Manor".

Here, the BOSS becomes the head of the Zhao family manor.

Xia Anbo hadn't fought before when he got to this point, so he had to run away. Therefore, the aftermath of this incident is still unknown, which is why he was still not satisfied after playing for almost 8 hours.

On one hand, he wanted to experience other events; on the other hand, he spent a lot of time farming Black Wind Stronghold outside the city, which was a large dungeon.
In short, let's get back to the point.

Although the head of the Zhao family was not killed, it is clear that there will be further developments in this incident.

"These events are interconnected and progressively unfold, forming a complete main storyline."

"Only by completing the previous one can you unlock the next one. This is the most traditional MMORPG quest design, which ensures the integrity of the core story."

"But if that's all there is to it, then the 'Floating Dream Song' incident is really just a publicity stunt."

He took a deep breath, pressed Enter, and created a new title.

"The second event pattern in 'Floating Dreams and Long Songs' is what I call the 'parallel pattern'."

That's what truly amazed him.

Parallel mode means that two or more seemingly independent events will interact due to the player's choices and actions, resulting in drastically different processes and outcomes.

There is such an excellent example in the DEMO.

In the west of Chang'an, there is an event called "Theft of the Official Granary." The government reports that a batch of disaster relief grain has been stolen and hopes that players can assist in the investigation.

Meanwhile, on the bulletin board in the south of the city, another event was posted: "Suppression of Mountain Bandits," offering a reward for information leading to the capture of a group of mountain bandits from Black Wind Stronghold outside the city.

Most players, including Xia Anbo himself, would consider these two as completely unrelated side quests when they first played the game.

However, if you accept the quest "Theft of the Official Granary" first, through a series of investigations, you will find that the clues ultimately point to Black Wind Stronghold.

You can lead a group of officers and soldiers to suppress the bandits.

Conversely, if you completely ignore the official granary matter and go directly to suppress the bandits, you might stumble upon the Black Wind Mountain bandits who are transporting grain.

These two events are related; completing one first will allow you to complete the other, but the order in which you do so will affect the difficulty of the event itself.

"see it?"

Xia Anbo became more and more excited as he wrote, his fingers almost sparking on the keyboard. "This is the charm of the parallel mode. Although this mode is still very rudimentary at present, it does provide a possibility. The task is no longer a linear process of A→B→C, but gives the player a crossroads of choices."

In terms of the fun factor of these two tasks alone, they're just average. However, as Xia Anbo mentioned, since *Floating Dreams* is essentially a single-player game, and all the tasks in the game are broken down into "events,"...

Therefore, after a player "completes a certain event", the result of that event, the cutscene, can indeed be mapped to another event.

If this mode can be used effectively, it can obviously bring a lot of fun to the game.

However, that's not all.

"The last one, and the most terrifying one, I call the 'radiation mode'."

If the "parallel mode" is the intersection of two lines, then the "radiation mode" is a point that projects an invisible influence in all directions.

It is more hidden, more subtle, and more ubiquitous.

There's a very inconspicuous event in the demo called "The Blacksmith's Troubles".

The quest involves an old blacksmith in Chang'an City who needs the player's help to find a "cold iron crystal" in a mine outside the city to repair his broken forging hammer.

This is an extremely simple errand-running task, and the reward is nothing more than some copper coins and experience points.

99% of players forget about it after completing it.

However, just now, when Xia Anbo returned to find the blacksmith again, a dialogue was triggered.

I heard you caused quite a scene at the Zhao family's house today?

Based on this conversation, Xia Anbo learned that the weapons at Zhao Family Manor had been repaired just a few days ago, and then another event emerged from the conversation.

Players can gain the blacksmith's trust to obtain special information about the Zhao family lord.

Successive, parallel, radiating.

The three event association modes do more than just turn everyone's "tasks" into "rogue pigeons."

This also makes the game world more realistic.

The only problem might be production capacity, but after careful consideration, Xia Anbo realized that even for a system of this level, the production capacity wasn't excessive.

The reason is very simple.

Because this is a "framework," as long as this framework exists, everything else is just about filling in the information according to the format.

More importantly, the profit model of "Floating Dreams" looks very similar to that of "Genshin Impact" and "Mingchao".

In reality, they are quite different.

The strength and development of the characters Yuan and Ming have virtually no impact on the storyline.

Therefore, these two games rely on character development, XP, and whether the characters can "influence team composition" and "form a system".

As mentioned before regarding "Floating Dreams and Long Songs".

It may seem like they're selling the characters, but in reality, besides the appeal of the characters themselves, they're actually selling the techniques. These events themselves are also part of the "sharpening stone."

To make this core cycle of developing a character, completing events, obtaining development materials, and continuing to complete events work, StarCraft needs to focus on events.

in other words.

The event system is the core system of "Floating Dreams". Build up production capacity on it, which can not only increase the player's playtime and experience richness.

It can also be linked to in-game purchases.

Secondly, in this demo, besides the twelve fixed events, there is actually another type of "event," which is the "random event."

For example, the carriages mentioned at the beginning of the Jianghu news, which were used for investigations outside the city.

Most of these types of events have time limits.

For example, the incident might disappear after a few days.

As for why "random events" are time-limited, it's actually a very "clever" approach. First, it makes the events seem more numerous, and if players haven't completed a certain type of task, it will seem like there are many events.

Several events might randomly appear, such as "investigation events." These events might only differ in the beginning, but the latter half would be exactly the same.

Before a player accepts a quest, several event quests may appear at once, but once the player completes one of the quests, the other events will expire.

Secondly, this time system.

It can also provide more interfaces for the subsequent construction of a dynamic world of stars, adding new events.

"Many people are asking why domestic manufacturers are flocking to make martial arts films?"

"The answer is simple: because players are highly receptive, and the business model is mature and stable. It's a path dependency."

"More doesn't equal better. I believe everyone, like me, often wonders why domestic manufacturers can't make good martial arts games. Is it because martial arts games are not suitable for MMORPGs?"

"This question may not have had a standard answer in the past."

"But now, Starry Sky Games has arrived with 'Floating Dream Song'."

"It tried to answer this question with a new answer, so what score would you give 'Floating Dreams' this time?"

(End of this chapter)