Game Development: Starting with Recreating the Anime Game Style

Chapter 555 Explosion and Destruction

In fact, Chu Chen didn't need to pretend in front of Song Yueying at all. However, Song Yueying provided too much emotional value most of the time. Just like now, when Song Yueying was dressed in a maid outfit and looked at him with admiration, Chu Chen subconsciously started to "show his true feelings" again.

"To do better than all of them" Many outsiders believe that Xingchen's success is due to marketing, timing, and various dazzling business tactics, which have portrayed me as a marketing genius.

"But in reality, I've only ever had one way of dealing with competition."

Song Yueying looked up curiously.

"What is it?"

"It is irreplaceable top-tier content."

That statement is only half true. Besides content, distribution channels are equally important.

However, Chu Chen's pretentious act and Song Yueying's praise were simply the couple's unique way of flirting.

So when Chu Chen said this, Song Yueying made a "suddenly realized" expression, but the expression was so fake that Chu Chen lost his composure.
He reached out and pinched Song Yueying's white silk stockings.
I must say, the quality is really good; it feels great in the hand.
~~~
While spring was in full bloom at the hot spring hotels in Lingnan, the atmosphere inside the Starry Night Japanese photography studio was completely different.

When Hikaru Tono arrived at the backstage dressing room, his heart was still pounding uncontrollably.

Don't be fooled by the fact that Xingchen's own studio is used to film online programs. In terms of both the size of the venue and the various equipment, it is absolutely top-notch.

In the enormous studio, countless camera cranes moved slowly overhead, staff members hurried about with walkie-talkies in hand, and the air was filled with a peculiar odor that mixed with the smell of equipment cooling and boxed lunches.

All of this made her, a newcomer who had almost only attended small meet-and-greets, feel dizzy.

The other two voice actresses in her group are Ari Ozawa, who gained a lot of popularity as the female lead in "Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun" and has taken on many roles in Starry Night games, and a newcomer from the same cohort as her.

Ozawa Ari was clearly used to this kind of scene and was going over the process with her manager, while another newcomer, like Tono Hikaru, was restless and sweating.

Is this your first time participating in such a large live-streaming event?

“Ah, yes, senpai.” Tono Hikaru bowed quickly.

"Don't be nervous, just treat it like a normal game collaboration." Ozawa Ari smiled and pointed to the script. "There are a lot of people participating today, so just relax and do your best."

While the open beta of "Final Zone" was very impactful, its promotional efforts in the Chinese server were actually rather limited.

The reason is simple: it's the Spring Festival, after all. If you don't get a holiday, everyone else does, so it's basically impossible to present any overly exaggerated promotional methods.

In other words, they placed some advertisements on their own channels.

However, in Japan, the promotion of "Final Zone" is much stronger. On the one hand, the popularity of "PUBG Mobile" in Japan has obviously declined much faster than in other regions.

The player churn rate is also more pronounced compared to other servers.

On the other hand, when the project "Final Zone" was first conceived, the people at StarCraft Japan believed that compared to PUBG Mobile, "Final Zone," a product with an anime style, had much greater potential in Japan.

This was already evident in previous promotions. PUBG and End Zone were first revealed on the same day, and discussions in other regions mainly focused on the fact that PUBG Mobile would be officially released the day after its first reveal.

Only in Japan were there many discussions about the visuals of "Final Zone" at the time.
With great potential, the publicity efforts will naturally be greater.

In addition, since Starry Sky Japan doesn't give holidays, they organized a global "Final Zone" exhibition match for this global open test.

Although it's called a competition, it's more like a variety show.

Each game has sixty players, divided into teams of three.

The twelve voice actors present formed four guest teams, while the remaining forty-eight people, although not present, were all professional players invited by Starry Sky.

So the gimmick of the competition is that it's a team of "unarmed" voice actors, and who can survive to the end. This can be considered a clever idea from Hoshino Japan. After all, e-sports competitions, especially those of shooting games, have a high barrier to entry because the amount of information is too dense and the camera switches frequently.

Hoshino Japan is clearly aware of this as well.

Thus, the program's focus was cleverly shifted from "competition" to "survival" and "variety show".

The twelve voice actors are the eyes of the audience.

No matter how skillful the professional players are, the camera will only show them a kill replay. Most of the time, the camera will be fixed on the voice actors' first-person perspective.

What the audience wants to see is not a battle of gods, but to watch how their familiar and beloved voice actors tremble in fear, scream in terror, and survive desperate situations, even creating miracles and turning the tables.

This is what guarantees the show's effectiveness.

For the sake of the show's effect, the production team even provided small in-ear headphones so that viewers could see the voice actors' faces more clearly.
The studio lights suddenly came on during the countdown, illuminating the entire stage as if it were daytime.

"Welcome to the special global open beta program of 'Final Zone' presented exclusively by Starry Sky Games - 'Voice Actors' Life-or-Death Battle'!"

The host's loud voice resounded throughout the venue through the speakers, and the atmosphere was instantly ignited by the exciting electronic music and cheers from the audience.

Hikaru Tono sat at the very edge of the guest seating area, feeling as if his heart was about to jump out of his throat.

"Hikari-chan, don't be afraid, jump with me!"

"Let's find the most secluded corner!"

The plane took off, its flight path passing through the center of the map. The three people disembarked and glided towards their destination.

Although the public beta version of "Final Zone" is based on "PUBG", there are many differences.

The most obvious change is the addition of many destructible elements to the scene, a decision made by Chu Chen.

In order to speed up the development cycle, the map of "Final Zone" reused a large amount of existing art assets from "PUBG" from the very beginning of the project.

While reusing assets makes game development incredibly fast, it can also cause players to lose interest.

Chu Chen has always said that gamers are the people in the world who care the most about novelty.

Therefore, in order to differentiate itself and to create more program effects and tactical variables, the Starry Sky development team added a "scene destruction" system.

Of course, this kind of destruction is not like some blockbuster console games that can raze an entire building to the ground, as that would place too high a burden on the server and incur too high a development cost.

Thanks to the team that Fuller poached from EA's engine division, the StarCraft game engine can implement physical destruction in a simpler way.

This is the model replacement method.

The so-called model replacement method sounds profound, but its principle is actually very simple.

Simply put, it involves pre-creating multiple state models of the same object, such as an intact wall, a wall riddled with bullet holes, and a wall with a large hole blown in it.

When the damage a wall in the game takes reaches a certain threshold, the engine does not calculate complex physical breaking effects in real time. Instead, after a preset animation, it directly replaces the "intact" model with a model that has been "blasted open".

This approach greatly reduces the computational burden on the server and development costs, while providing players with intuitive feedback on scene destruction, thereby creating new shooting paths or channels.

What's most ingenious is that many buildings in PUBG are reusable, so the amount of work required to destroy these "pseudo-buildings" is not significant.

Of course, Hikaru Tono knew nothing about these technical details.

(End of this chapter)