Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: Peng Chuwei

Developing independent games is a kind of "having fun".

Editor's note: in recent years, the domestic stand-alone game market is gradually becoming mature, and a number of stand-alone game producers are also growing steadily. Some of them choose to go it alone and develop independent games; others choose to form professional teams to make larger stand-alone games.

Against this background, we decided to start making a series of planners. This series mainly reports on the more well-known game producers in China, through their perspective, to show the changes of China's game industry in recent years, to show the hardships experienced in making stand-alone games, and to record the stories of stand-alone game developers in China.

If you want to develop a video game, you also have a great idea-- for example, combine self-chess battles, "Hero Invincible" big map exploration, and "Vampire Survivor" skill design into a new game-- what are you going to do next?

In the current market environment, a development team of a certain size will first conduct market research to verify the feasibility of the idea, and then create Demo to obtain investment and consider the possibility of mobile end on the game.

HideChara never thought so much, and when an interesting idea came to his mind, he would quickly implement it with a simple prototype and tell whether it was "fun" or not by his own feelings. As long as it was fun, he focused on his strengths-the core idea of the game, firmly and quickly developed the game and pushed it to market, without scruples and ambition.

Legendary Biology is one such game, which has a development cycle of only six months. HideChara built a creative and open framework for the game, and then threw it into the Steam store for 19 yuan each. So far, nearly 200,000 copies of the game have been sold, and free mobile versions have been downloaded more than 1 million times.

Legendary Biology 2, launched at the Steam store on October 17, 2023, is a collection of ideas mentioned at the beginning of this article.

Legendary Biology 2 may not sell as much as a generation, but it is still a small independent game full of ingenuity. How was it made? After talking to developers, I think I should write down what I think of HideChara: if someone still insists on developing independent games today, then his experience may provide some guidance and help.

Legendary Biology 2 is also selling quite well in the Steam store. Like most independent game developers who make it on their own, HideChara's experience goes back 10 years. In that era of mobile games and PC games, when stand-alone games had a chance to catch their breath again, HideChara graduated from school and began the road of game development.

HideChara's decision to develop games is not a whim after graduation, but the result of laying the groundwork for a long time. He has certain programming skills and is especially interested in action games. when he was at school, he developed a stand-alone version of Demo imitating Dungeon & Fighter. After graduation, he partnered with several classmates to form a small game development team.

It took them two years to develop a card game as third-party developers using the engine of a game platform owned by NetEase. The quality of the game is very good, and the recharge once reached the first place during the public test of the platform. Unfortunately, the game didn't really go online because the cost of porting it from the platform was so high that the team was eventually disbanded.

HideChara found a small mobile game company that is starting a business, and spent more than a year with several people to develop a game Demo. At that time, the first wave of investment in the game industry came to an end, and investment inside and outside the industry was common. The boss of HideChara's company soon got the investment by virtue of this Demo.

HideChara and several colleagues saw hope that they left the company as a team to start a business together and wanted to develop a game of their own.

It is 2016, and according to the investment community, the mobile game industry has just entered the "regular army" era-a large amount of early investment left, leaving only in-industry investment. HideChara, who has been wandering outside the game industry for a long time, because of the lack of relevant contacts, after the team spent half a year doing Demo, he failed to get the investment and the team broke up again.

In 2017, HideChara caught up with the rise of independent games in China. He made a stand-alone action game, "ruins of Red Stone," which was launched immediately after "lost Castle." it didn't make much waves in the Steam store, but got a recommendation on the Wegame platform, selling more than 100000. With this success, HideChara has received many olive branches from mobile issuers. After that, he began to develop a mobile version of the game.

On the other hand, since July 2016, mobile games have been included in the scope of version number approval, followed by a tightening of version numbers, and HideChara coincided with this period. In the end, the mobile game version of "ruins of Red Stone" failed to get its version number and went online without a cure.

"ruins of Red Stone" is relatively well-made. If you want to sum up HideChara's previous experience, it can be said that he has gone through the process of domestic game industry from chaos to maturity. As a practitioner in the game industry, he has always been somewhat marginal: playing games, and then hitting a brick wall somewhere that has nothing to do with game development-"playing games" is such a simple and complex word that different people have different associations. Most people will think of the long and tedious process, from setting up a project, market validation, identifying resources such as art and programs, developing prototypes, formally developing, polishing to pulling investment, applying for version numbers, issuing, operating, and then working overtime to exhaustion. Start to deny yourself. In a sense, it is a miracle that any game can be made.

For HideChara, the definition of "playing games" is simple: "come up with ideas, achieve ideas, and be self-satisfied."

With this in mind, HideChara has naturally taken many detours and encountered many twists and turns-when a person is not suitable for his surroundings, the circumstances are mostly similar.

But in the end, HideChara waited for a good time for him.

The idea of the idea in 2018, the sequel to "ruins of the Red Stone" by HideChara's team did not get a version number. He took some time off, when the hottest games on the market were "self-walking" games.

Self-moving Chess is a simplified version of the chess game in which players place their characters on a grid-shaped battlefield in preparation, and then the characters automatically fight each other, usually without further action. This kind of play is so new that HideChara sees it as an excellent example, and after playing for a while, with the idea of entertaining himself, he tries to make a stand-alone version of self-walking chess. After that, he made a self-moving monster nurturance game.

Legendary creature's monster nurturance system is the most attractive design for gamers. This development shows the style of HideChara.

First of all, HideChara is not the kind of creator who creates games out of thin air-no independent developer would take such a risk to develop a game. What he is good at is constantly polishing and innovating on the basis of a rough and vague idea, or, to put it bluntly, using a game as a sample plus his own good idea. After that, he used it as a prototype to develop works that make people feel refreshed. This kind of development is fast, inspirational, and avoids the risk that the game is too niche.

Second, when HideChara finds inspiration, he will ignore it and do it first. His self-confidence comes not only from his own innovation based on proven ways of playing, but also from the creative mode that drives him.

Every independent game developer has his own creative mode. It is not so much that they build the creative model in the process of developing independent games, but rather that the creative mode makes them suitable for the development of independent games.

The creation mode of HideChara, the early development map of Legend 2, is very pure, and all his satisfaction comes from implementing his own ideas-a creative process that he calls game development "having fun." Because of this, all his games are full of his personal characteristics, as is the case with legendary creatures.

The top comment on the Legend Biology store page goes like this: "rough UI, not pleasant sound effects and crude combat special effects, equals no operation, poor balance, fewer arms, open source vertical painting, all of which seems to be not what a good game should have-but why is it just up there? Unwittingly played for 10 hours, unwittingly achieved all the achievements. "

This is HideChara's game: obsessive gameplay, excellent framework, and the oncoming rough sense of "developers are a little tired after completing the most interesting creative stages."

When developing Legend, HideChara was well aware of his strengths and weaknesses, and like many gamers who grew up at that time, he had full confidence in the strengths of his work, that is, the way he played, so he had no intention of spending a lot of money to make up for his shortcomings.

In the end, it is gameplay that makes legendary creatures achieve high sales. The integration of "electronic cricket", nurturance and tower climbing conforms to the trend of the era of video and live streaming, and the game has been greatly helped by the authors of game videos. On the other hand, the excellent framework and openness of the game enable players to create monsters themselves, bringing long-term vitality to the game in round after cycle.

After Legend, in 2021, HideChara began to conceive of new independent games.

At first, he focused on the hot game of "Vampire Survivor" at that time, based on which he wanted to realize his idea of urban construction with a big map. But soon, he realized that big map exploration and tower defense could not make up for the disadvantage of the "Vampire Survivor" game-the player's construction could only be focused on a single character.

At first, Legend 2 was a tower defense game where there was always a limit to building if there was only a single character, a limit that tied HideChara's hands.

In the end, HideChara decided to use self-walking. When he was experimenting with the idea of Vampire Survivor, he had already made a rough prototype of the game, which he substituted into self-moving chess. the change took place in a chemical reaction: he realized his idea-Legend 2 with big map exploration and automatic combat play.

Criticism and change since the launch of Legend 2, the game has always faced some criticism from players, which can be summed up in two categories.

First, the gap between legendary creature 2 and the previous legendary creature is too big. Some players think that legendary creature 2 has lost the refreshing feeling of legendary creature: "it seems to enrich the content, but it actually castrates the comfort and reduces the player's experience."

Second, the game is not balanced in numerical value. This criticism soon shifted to the comparison with legendary creatures, with many players saying: "developers have given up a generation of simpler and effective monster fusion mechanisms and are obsessed with the search for new ways of playing."

These criticisms have forced HideChara to think about factors other than game development. In his view, to some extent, these problems are thorny issues to face "beyond the idea".

In Legend 2, HideChara tries to make the game more complex and three-dimensional, a superposition of ideas, adding new ideas and a lot of content that comes with them.

The early development of Legend 2, which looked a bit like the criticism of the Magic Tower series, made him look at himself, and he realized that when developing a sequel, he had to consider not only his own ideas and superimposed content. but also to consider the ideas of the players accumulated in the previous work itself-it's a bit like testing a developer's understanding of the market, which is exactly what he lacks.

This is one of the "transactional problems" that independent game developers have to face. They should not only play games well and give full play to their creativity, but also have the ability to be versatile in issues such as distribution. HideChara is not very good at this, or, for him, these parts are not fun.

For example, the Legend Biology series makes extensive use of public art materials, on the one hand, for cost considerations. For HideChara, which develops games alone, if you draw the material yourself, the whole development cycle may be extended by more than 1 / 3. In addition, there is little relationship between art and game play, so it is reasonable to use free materials. On the other hand (and perhaps more importantly), HideChara thinks that the early stage of making art material is very pleasant, but the process of refinement after painting is very painful, which is also the reason for him to give up homemade art material.

Of course, Legend 2 still plans to make up for the two problems mentioned above in a later update.

He plans to update the endless mode similar to a generation of "tower climbing" for the game, so that players are free to choose the way they like to play. At the same time, the creative workshop of the game will be launched later, and players will be able to customize the values and skills of monsters according to their own wishes, or adjust the difficulty of the game, which is also a relatively realistic means for independent game developers.

Games will be released in the future. The future will be a tough year for independent game developers. Ten years ago, independent games began to sprout in China, and developers developed stand-alone games with feelings. By 2023, the environment of the entire stand-alone game market tends to mature. Players are also more demanding, and in such an environment, many independent game developers will become more conservative-for HideChara, he hasn't figured out what he's going to do with his next work, perhaps the legendary creature series, but is more likely to switch to something else instead of the idea of "walking on his own" for a while.

"in the current environment, if you have obvious shortcomings, you may get a lot more scolding than before. Maybe next time, I will make up for the deficiency of art. Following the trend is indeed one of the problems that independent developers have to face."

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.