Game Development: Starting with Recreating the Anime Game Style

Chapter 422 Breaking the Circle
October 17th, 8:00 AM.

With two hours to go before the official open beta of "Night Spirit", the operations department of Starry Sky Games is already bustling with activity.

"Has the integration with Bilibili been completed? Has the final version of the video recommendation list been confirmed?"

"Check the homepage banner and countdown module of StarTap thoroughly to avoid any bugs!"

"Recheck the push notification text for players!"

Although this time the focus was on developing the marketing and distribution capabilities of "Azur Lane", the overall operational process was handled by the Starry Sky Games' operations center.

One reason for this is to reduce communication costs.

After all, many of Xingchen's publicity efforts originate from here.

Secondly, Chu Chen put a lot of effort into Azur Lane.

Considering the 40% shareholding, plus the platform's revenue share and the agent's revenue share, you could say that Azur Lane is to StarCraft what Dungeon Fighter Online is to Tencent.

In addition, Azur Lane is the first anime-style game in the Star Alliance.

It can be considered a benchmark.

Many people are watching to see if the anime-style game developed by StarCraft can replicate StarCraft's own success, and naturally, there is a lot of attention on Azur Lane.

Therefore, the entire Xingchen and Manjiu operations team has been under considerable pressure over the past ten days or so.

From "playing the victim" interviews to cash voting for "ten million to find ship girls," and then to fan-created content incentives for "the first encounter with ship girls."

These activities are essentially all about building up energy, gradually maximizing the players' expectations and curiosity.

Today is the tipping point where all this energy is released.

Success or failure depends on this.

It was nine o'clock that day.

As Tencent prepared for the launch of "Night Spirit", the mobile phones of tens of millions of players in China who participated in the "Find Your Favorite Ship Girl" event vibrated at the same moment.

A text message popped up.

"【Starry Sky Games】Dear Commander, the winners of your participation in the Azur Lane 'Ten Million!!! Find Your Favorite Ship Girl' event have been announced!"

Almost simultaneously, all players who had installed StarTap also noticed that the banners on the splash screen and homepage had changed to "The 10 million cash prize has been revealed! Are you the chosen one?"

Star Wallpapers has also updated with new interactive wallpapers for Azur Lane.

Bilibili, as the core of its promotional efforts, also provided a splash screen ad.

At the same time, a video titled "The Final Owner of Ten Million! The Birth of a Popular Ship Girl in Azur Lane!" was released on the official Starry Sky account.

Traffic surged rapidly.

In fact, compared to Tencent, the current round of push notifications from Xingchen has a smaller impact than those from Tencent QQ and WeChat.

However, the feedback received was much greater than that from Tencent. On the one hand, many users had actually been paying attention to this "invoice issuance" for a long time.

Anyone who has ever bought a lottery ticket knows that the most exciting moment is when the results are announced. The Azur Lane voting event is essentially a lottery.

Players who actively participated in the event arrived early at the "event site."

Players who haven't been paying much attention to the event will at least want to check if they've won a prize when they see the notification.

Therefore, when Xingchen released the "lottery results video", the traffic was like a floodgate being opened.

The video garnered hundreds of thousands of views within minutes.

The production quality of the lottery announcement video was also quite high, starting with a fast-paced editing that reviewed the entire voting event.

Countless screenshots of players' messages urging them to vote flashed across the screen. Finally, the screen suddenly went dark, and the rousing background music changed to the melodious sound of a guzheng.

Under the spotlight, Yi Xian's figure slowly emerged. "Congratulations to [Yi Xian] for winning the overall popularity championship of this event with an absolute advantage of 86 votes!"

"All commanders who vote for [Yixian] will share a cash prize of ten million! Each vote will earn 11.62 yuan!"

"The ship girl [Yixian] will be a limited-time character given away as a gift in the Chinese server!"

"You can also receive 24 RMB worth of game points by choosing a different ship girl as your commander!"

At the end of the video, the screen freezes on a global map, with icons for dozens of countries and regions, including China, Japan, South Korea, and North America, lit up simultaneously.

"Azur Lane, global pre-download begins today!"

"See you on October 18th!"

~~~
The internet quickly went into a frenzy as soon as tickets went on sale.

The first to get excited were naturally the winning players. With 860,000 votes, even if you count two votes that both chose Yixian, that's 430,000 people who won. Not to mention that a large number of users voted separately.

So at least 50 people received the money.

Although it's only a dozen or so yuan, winning is winning, and with the complete disclosure of the rankings, you can see that it's all done in a completely anonymous manner.

These nearly ten million votes are quite dispersed; for example, there is only a 3-vote difference between the first-place winner, Yixian, and the second-place winner, Enterprise.

These 3 votes mean that hundreds of thousands of players who voted for the Enterprise account are screaming with excitement.

Whether you win or not.

The topic has been thoroughly discussed.

"Holy crap! I won!! I bet on Yi Xian! The money has arrived in my account!! So fast! It really paid out! Xingchen is awesome!"

"You can now see the free game time cards, and check out the UI in the game!!"

"Holy crap? Pre-download lets you see the UI???"

The discussion wasn't just about the game itself, but also about "why Yatsen."

After all, before the tickets went on sale, the popularity of historical ships such as Enterprise, Richelieu, Hood, Shimakaze, and Kaga was quite high. Although Yat Sen also had some discussion due to its illustration, the popularity of the discussion was not as exaggerated.

Even the producer, Yuwan, was surprised by this result, let alone the players.

"Can't figure it out?"

"Kind of."

Fishball nodded. He really didn't quite understand the logic, even though he was the one who organized the event.

"Yi Xian's strength in the game is just that of a pretty face! And in terms of the level of exposure in her character art and her appeal to otaku, she's not even among the top tier, so how could she be number one?"

Chu Chen glanced at Yuwan and thought to himself that this kid really still needs to practice.

"Because Azur Lane has broken out of its niche."

"It's broken out of its niche?"

Chu Chen nodded.

For military and ship girl enthusiasts, Richelieu, Hood, Enterprise, and Lexington are naturally more appealing, but for ordinary players...

Could he tell the difference between the Enterprise and the Essex? Did he know about the feud between Hood and Bismarck?

It's obvious that ordinary players don't know these things, so their voting is really just based on first impressions.

"What style is Yi Xian's character design?" Chu Chen continued to guide him.

"The style is Chinese, the blue and white porcelain cheongsam is gentle and elegant, and has a kind of... classical beauty," Yuwan described.

(End of this chapter)