Game Development: Starting with Recreating the Anime Game Style

Chapter 47 Entry Point

Liu Cixin's global influence in the future is exactly what Chu Chen needs.

Let's imagine.

What would it be like if, in the future, a promotional video for one of the chapters of "Final Battle" featured the script supervisor: Liu Cixin?

Alternatively, a game based on "The Wandering Earth" could be released simultaneously with the movie.

For example, after the release of "Micro Era," there was a segment featuring the "original author's gameplay."

All of these factors can help a game gain more traffic from the very beginning of its launch.

If we add the quality of the game itself to that, then basically the entire path for the game to expand its reach has been laid.

Therefore, Chu Chen had long harbored ambitions regarding Liu Cixin's copyright.

If it weren't for the events of the past few months, Chu Chen would have spent all his cash flow on game development, expanding his workforce, and outsourcing animation.

He really didn't have much money on hand, so he had already done the work of storing IP addresses a long time ago.

However, things have started to progress in a way that Chu Chen never expected.

He contacted Liu Cixin directly.

Moreover, the "agreement" means that if a project proposal that Liu Cixing approves of can be created, Xingchen will be able to interact more with Liu Cixin after acquiring the copyright in the future.

At the very least, the game itself will definitely get Liu Cixing's help in promotion and distribution.

For Chu Chen, this is actually a good thing.

~~~
Writing a game design proposal is very complicated, but writing a game project proposal is very easy.

Because planning documents are more execution-level documents, they need to consider many things, while project proposals, frankly speaking, are the producer's "daydreams."

There's no need to consider the actual execution; you only need to build the game's core.

So, in just one night yesterday and one morning today, Chu Chen has already completed a relatively complete project proposal.

However, before discussing this game project, we need to understand what story the novel "Micro Era" tells.

Broadly speaking, you can think of Micro Era as another subplot of The Wandering Earth.

In short, humanity on this timeline also predicted a violent energy flash in the sun. In order to continue civilization, humanity sent multiple spaceships called "Ark" to other star systems to search for habitable planets.

The astronauts who carry out the mission are called "pioneers".

The Ark's exploration missions all failed, and the other pioneers died one after another, with only the last pioneer surviving and returning to Earth.

At this time, 25,000 years had passed on Earth, and the once blue planet had become a black and white sphere.

The black is the rock that melted and then solidified, that's the black of the tombstone; the white is the ocean that evaporated and then froze, that's the white of the burial cloth.

Just when the pioneer thought that human civilization had been completely destroyed, he unexpectedly discovered that there were still signs of life in such an environment.

Those are "micro-humans" created by human scientists through genetic engineering, shrinking humans to one billionth of a human (about 10 micrometers).

The Micro-Humans consume very few resources. They used nanotechnology to rebuild society, hid in underground shelters, and survived the solar catastrophe before reproducing and multiplying again.

Microman inherits the technology and culture of Hongren, but is more efficient and energy-saving.

They once fought a war with the remaining Macro people, which ultimately ended in victory for the Micro people.

The pioneers witnessed firsthand the prosperous society established by the Micro-humans. Due to their tiny size, the resources on Earth were almost infinite for them.

The entire micro-human society has a population of tens of billions. The society is carefree, without hierarchy or competition for resources. Everything is as beautiful as a utopia.

Having witnessed such a "real" utopia, the Pioneers, as the last macrohumans, destroyed the macrohuman embryos preserved on the spaceship and chose to let the Micro Era become a new chapter in human civilization.

That's the whole story. Like The Wandering Earth, the original Micro Era is also short, only a little over 1 words in total.

However, it is precisely because the original work has few words but an extremely grand framework that it is very easy to adapt.

Just like the movie "The Wandering Earth," if you were to try to map the content of the movie onto the original novel, many plot points would only be a sentence or two, or even none at all.

However, this does not affect the success of the movie "The Wandering Earth". Director Guo Fan successfully cut out a timeline within the framework of the original work and refined the story.

With such excellent examples to follow, Chu Chen's approach was the same: to use Liu Cixin's framework to create this game.

In the Micro Era game version, the background slice was cut to the early stages of Micro Era's construction.

The reason for choosing this point in time for the segment is that the original work basically does not describe this period of history, which gives Chu Chen a lot of creative space.

To enhance visualization and gameplay, Chu Chen made changes to some vague details in the original work.

For example, the micro-era was divided into two stages.

Phase one is the technology exploration phase. In this micro-era, the proportion of humans can be reduced to one-thousandth, which is the size of an ant.

Stage two is one billionth of what is described in the novel, which is the micrometer stage.

In fact, looking at literature around the world, there are many stories that shrink humanity to a smaller scale.

Similar to Marvel's Ant-Man, there are many games with similar titles, such as Grounded, which was released in August 2020.

This is a sandbox survival game where players take on the role of a child shrunk to the size of an ant, navigating through a courtyard amidst giant plants in search of the mystery of their shrinkage, while also facing enormous insects that are both friend and foe.

This game surpassed one million players within 48 hours and topped the Steam weekly sales chart, becoming the top-selling game of the week.

Therefore, the idea of ​​shrinking is not new, and there have indeed been successful examples of this in history.

Chu Chen could also refer to these works for adaptation, but adapting the novel "Micro Era" by simply focusing on shrinking would be a waste of its potential.

Because there are so many things that can be interpreted from this novel.

Moreover, the core discussion is not about narrowing down the scope, but rather focusing on two issues, the first being...

"Are humans still human after being shrunk?"

The second question that arises from this is whether it was right or wrong for the "forerunners" to abandon their own civilization and burn the last embryo of humanity.

Different perceptions can lead to completely different views on a story.

Furthermore, the question of whether the Micro Era was truly a human utopia is worth discussing, even though in the novel, the Micro Era ultimately escaped a century-long extinction.

They also created a spaceship the size of a golf ball, but just like in the original novel.

A magnificent micro-era!

The romantic micro-era!

The melancholic micro-era!

The fragile micro-era!

As the micro-humans shrink, the impact of their actions on the macrocosm also diminishes. How will this seemingly utopian world ultimately develop...?
Everyone has a different understanding, and these are probably the things that Liu Cixin wanted to express.

Of course, Chu Chen was just a casual gamer.

He doesn't need to convey so many thoughts; what he needs to do is figure out how to use this framework and these contradictions to create fun and interesting games.

Based on this, if anyone can perceive anything, that's up to the player themselves.

In Chu Chen's view, the most interesting part of the entire "Micro Era" framework is naturally the era in which micro-humans and macro-humans coexist, and he chose this point as his first entry point.

(End of this chapter)