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

The Dragon Kingdom was the last to be launched.

Because of the issue of localizing and adapting map data, it was officially launched almost two days later than overseas.

However, the number of registrations on the opening day broke all previous records for TUTU products. Within fifteen minutes of the server opening, the server load surged to three times the preset limit. When Zhao Yiming was pulled up from his seat for emergency capacity expansion, he still had half a cookie in his mouth and hadn't had time to swallow it.

Domestic players reacted even more enthusiastically on social media platforms.

Someone caught an Yinglong (a mythical dragon) near Wudang Mountain and posted a screenshot. The comments below were all saying, "This is a real dragon!" and "I'm going to climb the mountain tomorrow too."

Someone caught a nine-tailed fox by West Lake, and the caption read, "I didn't see Lady White Snake, but I did find a nine-tailed fox."

Someone even caught a Bifang on the Great Wall. That post was shared thousands of times. Someone asked in the comments, "Which section of the Great Wall did you catch the Bifang?" The poster replied, "Mutianyu. It took me three hours to climb there. It was worth it."

By the end of the first week after the product launch, the results from the backend data were even more optimistic than Lu Ran had expected.

The number of daily active users worldwide has surpassed the peak of TUTU's existing main games, the average online time per user is much higher than expected, and the rate of enabling location permissions is extremely high.

The longer a player stays in the game and the more paths they take, the denser the data stream recording location requests in the background becomes.

But when Lu Ran was sitting in his office looking through the data, he realized one thing: the collection gameplay could sustain the initial wave of popularity, but to keep people playing, collection alone was not enough.

On the night of the release, he sent a message to the project team: "Collecting gameplay is just the foundation. Prioritize the modules like battles, character development, guilds, and group activities, and allocate development resources to them as soon as possible."

Zhao Yiming replied in the group, "I'm already writing the underlying logic for the battle. Give me three more days." Chen Mo followed up with, "The values ​​for the character development system are still being adjusted. The first version should be available within a week."

Zhou Mingzhe sent a longer message, reorganizing the schedule for the next two weeks and marking the resource usage and estimated completion time for each module.

In the following days, the lights in TUTU's technical department were on later than usual.

Zhao Yiming sat in front of the battle system code for two whole days, the sound of keyboard typing constantly coming from his workstation, only stopping briefly once to make instant noodles.

The art team was working intensively to adapt the new creature models to motion, and everyone's desk was piled high with reference images and line drawings.

The operations team is keeping up with the updates of the multilingual versions of the copy, with localization files for more than a dozen languages ​​circulating simultaneously, and the translation memory on the computer screen being refreshed every few minutes.

Lu Ran would go to the technical department to take a look before leaving get off work every day.

He saw the battle scenes running tests on Zhao Yiming's monitor, the special effects of the new creatures releasing skills in the virtual arena being iterated and debugged, and the UI design draft of the development interface being refined little by little.

On the third night, he stopped by the technical department and saw Zhao Yiming leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed. The monitor in front of him was still lit, and there was a line of code on the screen that had not yet been saved.

He didn't wake him, but simply went over and replaced the cold coffee next to the monitor with a fresh cup of hot water, then turned and left.

At the weekly meeting in the second week, Zhao Yiming showed everyone the initial version of the battle system.

The two creatures in the scene take turns unleashing skills in the arena, their health bars bouncing back and forth at the top of the screen, and the hit effects exploding every time a skill lands. The frame rate remains stable at 60 frames per second without dropping.

After Zhou Mingzhe finished reading it, he said, "This feels good to play." Chen Mo added, "I'll send you the numerical table for the development system before noon. You can just embed it here."

On the night the battle system went live, the backend data jumped up again.

Players started bringing their creatures into the arena to spar with each other. Someone asked on the forum, "My Tengu can't beat the opponent's Yuki Onna. Is there something wrong with its moveset?" Immediately, someone posted a screenshot of a moveset.

People were arranging to team up in the guild chat to farm rare creature spawn points that night, and the chat was flooded with messages faster than the battles in the game.

Lu Ran read the latest edition of the weekly newspaper on Friday night.

The attachment to the weekly report, called "Active User Distribution Heatmap," has generated a new map, and the areas marked repeatedly on the map are now denser than last week.

In some places, the marking density is so high that it covers the original map's base color blocks, while in other places it remains completely blank.

He noticed a blank area on the map, located near a coastline, surrounded by densely packed city markers, but that small area was almost never covered by any user location requests.

He glanced at the picture a couple more times, then closed the page.

...

In the second week, Lu Ran called the project team together again.

There were more than a dozen people in the conference room. Zhou Mingzhe sat to his right, Chen Mo was opposite him, and Zhao Yiming sat in his usual seat by the window with an open laptop in front of him.

He projected a simplified user research report onto the screen and began to share his observations from the past few days, speaking at a measured pace: "The collection gameplay combined with the battle system has resulted in good user retention data. However, looking at the user demographics in the backend, the players' age range is currently concentrated in a relatively narrow area—between eighteen and thirty-five. There are very few older players, and not many younger ones either. If we want people to keep playing, we must get more people involved."

He switched to a different slide, which listed three sets of figures: "Users over 35 years old account for less than 10%, while users under 18 years old account for a slightly higher percentage, but still relatively low. This means that our current gameplay has a high barrier to entry for older users, while not being attractive enough to younger users. People over 35 may not be interested in going out to chase creatures every day, and parents will worry if their children under 18 spend a lot of time outdoors."

Zhao Yiming, sitting by the window, added, "So you mean you want to make the gameplay more casual and fragmented?"

"It's not just about fragmentation. It's about making the gameplay flexible. An office worker can open the game and tap a few times to complete daily tasks during their half-hour lunch break; a retired senior can take a walk in the afternoon with location services on; a child can catch a few on their way home from school—everyone can find their own rhythm, without needing to invest large blocks of time or learn complicated controls."

Chen Mo flipped through his notes, looked up, and asked, "Technically, fragmented daily tasks are easy to implement, but how do we ensure user engagement? If everyone just taps a couple of times and closes the app, what's the difference between that and leaving it running?"

"Daily tasks are just the entry point. What truly keeps users engaged is the social aspect. I plan to add a community-centric gameplay element to the game—each neighborhood, street, and district will have a virtual territory where players' daily activities can accumulate resources. These resources can be used to unlock territory-specific decorations, creatures, and events, or to compete with neighboring territories. You're not playing for yourself, but for your entire community. Resources collected by seniors during their walks will be directly contributed to their local territory, and creatures caught by children on their way to school will also contribute to the territory's activity level. Everyone has their own way of contributing, and it doesn't require a high level of skill."

After listening, Zhou Mingzhe organized his thoughts and first confirmed the technical feasibility: "We already have the map data needed for the territory system; we just need to add a partitioning layer to the existing map. The key is the user grouping algorithm—how do we determine which territory a player belongs to?"

"We use a grid-based system. First, we use city blocks as the basic boundaries, then dynamically fine-tune them based on user activity heatmaps. Users within the same grid automatically belong to the same territory. The grid boundaries are recalculated monthly, and migrating users are reassigned to new territories."

The meeting lasted for about forty minutes, going over the technical solutions, numerical framework, and art style of the territory system.

When the meeting ended, Zhao Yiming was the first to leave, already mentally calculating how to write the algorithm for the territory boundaries. As Chen Mo left, he said, "I'll revise the logic of the numerical table and send it to you tomorrow morning." Zhou Mingzhe stayed behind and chatted a bit more with Lu Ran in the meeting room about whether this new gameplay could drive long-term user retention.

In the following days, the technical department once again entered a state where everyone was working all night.

The territory system's codebase was larger than expected because it involved partitioning algorithms, resource allocation logic, matching rules for inter-territory competitions, and a real-time leaderboard update mechanism. Each part needed to be developed independently and then pieced together and integrated.

Zhao Yiming broke down the partitioning algorithm into six sub-modules and assigned them to different people to write, while he himself was responsible for the core matching logic.

The art direction is also progressing at the same time.

The visual elements related to the territory include the territory marker, the territory main interface, territory decorations, and the special appearance of territory creatures. Each of these requires a concept design and multiple versions.

When the art team leader met Lu Ran in the corridor, he said, "If each territory needs its own unique visual identity, we'll have to create a set of background colors and icons for tens of thousands of grids across the country. That's a lot more work than we expected." Lu Ran replied, "Let's start with the city level. Once we have more users, we can further subdivide it into district and county levels." The art team leader nodded and turned to leave.

There was no big-scale publicity on the day the territory system was launched.

The operations team simply posted an update note in the game announcement, briefly outlining how to use the new features and the rules for accumulating territory resources. But the player base reacted faster than any promotional announcement.

That evening, Lu Ran saw in the backend that the data in the social sharing section had started to climb.

Someone posted a message in the chat channel of Jing'an District, Shanghai, saying, "Our community has accumulated more than 1,000 resources, while the neighboring Huangpu District only has more than 600." Someone replied, "Hey, Huangpu District, come out and show yourselves."

Then someone from Huangpu District actually replied, saying, "Our people are catching creatures on the Bund. You guys from Jing'an District, come over and see who catches more."

After players from the two regions exchanged barbs in the chat channel for dozens of seconds, someone suggested organizing a cross-regional friendly match.

The person who made the suggestion said in the channel, "We don't need an official organization. Let's set a time, both sides turn on their location services and walk around for an hour at the same time, and see which side catches more rare creatures." Immediately, a bunch of replies appeared below saying "Sign up" and "Count me in."

The situation in Beijing is even more lively.

Players from Chaoyang District and Haidian District argued about who should own a certain limited creature in their territory. The argument eventually turned into who could place the bigger and more eye-catching "territory decorations" in their territory.

Someone said, "I bet on a tower," and the other side immediately replied, "I bet on a mountain." Then someone else chimed in, "What's a mountain? I bet on a dragon."

The name of the player from Chaoyang District who "threw a dragon" remained on the territory decoration leaderboard all night without being surpassed.

Lu Ran glanced around and saw that the players were quite enthusiastic.

However, his destination was not China.

For him, data from abroad is more important.

...