You were supposed to have a fake marriage with the diva, so how did you become her father?

The Japanese market performed even better than Lu Ran had predicted.

The newly renovated office of Chixiao Technology was already full of people. In the photos sent by Jiang Feng, you could see that the monitors of the row of workstations by the window were all showing League of Legends matches. There were handwritten operation progress charts on the wall, with Japanese and Chinese mixed together, densely marked with various milestones.

The lingering impact of the boycott posts on Japanese gamer forums is still present, but the level of discussion has dropped to a fraction of what it used to be in daily conversations.

Most posts have returned to normal game content sharing—how to climb the ranks, whether skins are worth buying, and which heroes are strong in this version.

Occasionally, you can see people joking about the "Japanese envoys to Tang China," followed by a string of "haha" emojis.

But Lu Ran felt it wasn't enough.

That day, he sat in his office, flipping through the monthly summary report sent by Jiang Feng.

The data in the report looks great: user growth is stable, the paid conversion rate continues to rise, and the Chixiao Technology team is almost fully integrated.

As he read, his mind started wandering to other things.

He remembered a game from his past life called "Bloody Battle of Shanghai".

It was a target shooting game with very few levels, and the graphics even look somewhat crude by today's standards.

But the game's perspective and content were unique—the player's character was on the streets of old Shanghai, facing waves of Japanese soldiers, armored vehicles, pillboxes, and even Japanese generals.

The game controls are simple: aim with the mouse and shoot with the left mouse button. But the emotional catharsis it provides is something no other game can offer.

That game doesn't exist in this world. At least not now.

Lu Ran tapped his fingers lightly on the table a few times.

He thought that Chixiao Technology had already opened a door in Japan, but the door was not wide enough.

Those players are now playing TUTU games and talking about TUTU tournaments. They think that Chinese games are fun and well-made, but this is just "commercial goodwill".

They won't go to their history textbooks because of this.

But what if there were a game that would prompt people all over the world—not just those in China—to actively research that period of history after playing it?

Lu Ran turned off the report on the computer screen, stood up, and drew a line on the whiteboard.

One end of the line connects to China, and the other end connects to Europe, North America, South America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

He marked each branch with a question mark.

He put down the whiteboard marker, sat back in his chair, and began to carefully consider the execution path for this matter.

It definitely wouldn't pass censorship in Japan.

It's not just a matter of censorship; there are still people in that country trying to distort history in textbooks. Getting them to publicly release a game with an anti-aggression theme is more difficult than growing rice on a mountaintop.

However, Lu Ran never intended to go through the local Japanese review channels from the beginning.

His idea was simple—first launch it in China, and then distribute it to all other markets through TUTU's overseas servers.

In Europe, North America, South America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, wherever TUTU covers, there is a download link for this game.

What about the Japanese market?

If Japanese players really want to play, they can use a VPN to connect to servers in other regions to download the game.

This isn't about circumventing censorship; it's about letting Japanese players choose whether or not to cross that wall.

Moreover, this game is a standalone product, which does not require continuous server maintenance, version updates, or localized operation.

Upload it once, leave it alone, and it will speak for itself. Once players around the world have finished playing and discussing it, and spread the information about that period of history to every corner of the internet, the public opinion field in Japan will naturally explode.

By then, it won't be the Chinese talking about Japan anymore; it will be the British, the Americans, the French, and the Brazilians.

When the whole world sees the same history, no matter how much the Japanese try to block, delete, or revise textbooks, they cannot silence the voices on the internet.

After sorting out his thoughts, Lu Ran began to address another issue—the quality of the game itself.

He knew that the game "Bloody Battle of Shanghai" in his previous life was an arcade-style shooting game with fixed levels, and the positions and rhythms of enemy appearances were all predetermined.

Players can memorize the patterns and complete the game once they get familiar with it, but the ceiling for replayability is very low. If he simply ported this version over without any changes, although the content itself is already exciting enough, players wouldn't be interested in playing it a second time after playing it once.

To get more people to see this game, relying solely on historical themes is not enough; the game itself also needs to be engaging.

Fortunately, the version lying in the system is optimized.

Lu Ran had previously flipped through that folder, and the "Bloody Battle of Shanghai" inside was no longer the single-line shooting game from his previous life.

The image has been re-rendered with a higher resolution, and the textures of the buildings, the movements of the characters, and the muzzle flash effects of the guns are all much more detailed.

The plot has also been expanded. What was originally just a chronological description of the checkpoints has now been transformed into short animations interspersed between the checkpoints. Each animation tells the story of what happened in old Shanghai at different points in time—the January 28 Incident in 1932, the August 13 Incident in 1937, the chaos inside and outside the concessions, and the people's escape and struggle.

But the biggest change is in the gameplay.

The previous version had automatic movement; players didn't need to control the character's movement. The character moved forward along a fixed route, and players only needed to aim and shoot.

This mode is fast-paced and easy to learn, but lacks the fun of exploration.

The optimized version gives players complete control over movement. WASD controls the character to move freely between streets and alleys, the crosshair follows the mouse movement, and the shooting button is on the left mouse button.

Players can decide which direction to go first.

Should we first eliminate the Japanese sniper on the left rooftop, or go around to the right alley and shoot down the observation window of that armored vehicle?

Should we launch a frontal assault and storm the watchtower, or should we scale the courtyard and flank from behind?

The map is several times larger than before, with various entrances and passages hidden between the connecting alleys and abandoned buildings. Some can only be found by breaking wooden planks, while others require walking along the wall to the end before the steps are revealed.

Lu Ran tested it himself once.

He downloaded that version from the system and installed it on one of the company's test machines.

The game's tutorial interface is very simple. The opening is a short animation of old Shanghai street scene, about ten seconds long, with rickshaws, tram tracks, dusty shop signs, and the sound of a ship's whistle in the distance.

The camera then zooms in to the entrance of an empty alleyway, where the player-controlled character, wearing a gray-blue short-sleeved shirt, stands at the end of the alley.

The objective of the first mission is to cross three city blocks to reach the designated extraction point, where Japanese soldiers will appear from various corners along the way.

Lu Ran held the mouse and walked for five minutes. His character went out of the alley and into a main street.

There were Japanese soldiers patrolling the street, and two motorcycles stopped in the middle of the road. He didn't rush to engage in combat.

First, walk forward along the wall on one side, and you'll find a half-open wooden door at the corner.

Pushing open the door leads to a small courtyard with a dry well and a wooden ladder against the wall.

He climbed the wooden ladder to the roof and looked down, taking in the enemy's deployment throughout the entire street.

The documentation in that folder in the system contained a passage that roughly stated: "Each level has at least three different paths to completion. Whether it's direct confrontation, flanking maneuvering, or using the terrain to set up an ambush, players can choose their preferred method. The game doesn't judge which method is 'correct,' but different choices will lead to different ending segments."

Lu Ran read that sentence twice and felt that the design concept was very much in line with his own aesthetic.

He dislikes games that force players to play in a specific way. Giving players enough choices and letting them decide how to play is what games should be like.

He turned off the test server, downloaded the complete game package from the system, and saved it to an encrypted hard drive.

That afternoon, he called Zhao Yiming to his office.

When Zhao Yiming arrived, he was still chewing on half a cookie. He paused for a moment when he saw the hard drive on Lu Ran's desk.

"Something new again?"

"Could you take a look at this for me?" Lu Ran pushed the hard drive over. "No need to change any code, just run a compatibility test to make sure it runs on current mainstream hardware configurations. Run a test on screen smoothness, frame rate stability, and UI adaptation at different resolutions."

Zhao Yiming took the hard drive and weighed it in his hand: "Have you been taking things out a bit too often lately? We just finished the last project, and you're already doing another one?"

"This is different. This project doesn't make money."

Zhao Yiming was about to turn and leave when he heard this and stopped: "Why are you doing it if it's not profitable?"

Lu Ran leaned back in his chair, his gaze fixed on the hard drive in Zhao Yiming's hand: "The money-making stuff is already being done. Now we need to do something that doesn't make money but is still necessary. You just focus on testing, don't ask too many questions. You'll understand once you try it out yourself after it's released."

Zhao Yiming glanced at him for two seconds, then took the hard drive and turned to leave without saying anything more.

Lu Ran sat in his office, watching the sky outside the window gradually darken.

In Shanghai, the evenings come late in July; around six o'clock, a pale golden light still hangs on the horizon.

He wasn't thinking about technical issues; he was thinking about a map.

That map covered China, Europe, North America, South America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

Each region has a TUTU server node, and each node can be used to distribute the same thing.

He stood up and walked to the window, looking at the streetlights gradually lighting up on the street below. He thought that after Zhao Yiming's test results came out, the next step would be to complete the game's language packs—English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic. Each version had to be adapted to the local historical narrative framework, not just translated literally, so that players from different cultural backgrounds could understand what happened in that period of history.

He stood by the window for a long time, until the light on the horizon had completely faded, before turning back to his desk to review the test plan, then shutting down his computer and leaving the office.

When I passed by the technical department, the door was still open. Zhao Yiming was sitting at his workstation, debugging something in front of the monitor, with lines of log output running on the screen.

Lu Ran didn't go in to disturb him; she just glanced at him as she passed the door and continued walking towards the elevator.

As the elevator descended, he mentally planned out his upcoming schedule.

Testing will take about two to three days, and the language pack can be developed in parallel. Once everything is ready, we can schedule the launch.

Because of previous relationships, the approval process in China will be much faster, and the overseas distribution can be decided by China itself without waiting for any third party.

When he stepped out of the elevator, the young woman at the front desk was packing up to leave work. She nodded and greeted him, and Lu Ran nodded back before pushing open the office building door and stepping into the July heat.

It's time to let other countries feel the latest wave of TUTU gaming fever.

...