Game Development Giant

There are many things discussed at this meeting, such as the completion of the post-production of "City of War", the setting of "Real Estate Tycoon", etc., but these are not what Jester needs to pay special attention to now. PC games In his eyes, it can only be regarded as a means of training the team, and he will definitely transplant these two games to his home machine. In addition to training my subordinates, I made it on PC first for some other reasons.

For example, "City of Guild Wars" was an impromptu idea to promote a game magazine, while "Monopoly" came about when Jester saw his employees playing this tabletop game that has been popular for decades during their lunch break. A sudden inspiration. In fact, many games in this era were born by accident. Very few, like Jester, first clearly defined a goal and set it before starting development.

Jester's research and development ideas are more like the way game companies will produce games in the future. They first do market research to see what games current players like, and then make plans and start formal research and development. After all, at that time, The complexity of the game can no longer be supported by a simple idea.

However, these two games, Jester, plan to be released during the Christmas period. Judging from this speed, "City of War" will have no problem at all. After all, the production has been completed. The next step is to start large-scale advertising coverage and invite some players to play. A larger-scale test will do. I have already conveyed this message through "game" before, and doing so will also help deepen the loyalty of my company's fans.

This is also Jester's first large-scale recruitment of such a test experience after proposing the principle that a game must be tested by a group of players before it is released.

You must know that in this era, you can experience the game content before the game is released, and the game company may even make modifications based on your opinions. In the minds of many players, it is as if they have personally participated in the game. Production is the same.

This sense of accomplishment is indescribable.

As for "Real Estate Tycoon", because it is a new team, the progress is not very fast.

Although the core of this team completed "City of Battle" under his leadership, the game was mainly made by himself. In order to ensure speed and quality, he copied the game with the same name that he remembered in his mind. The content of classic games is mainly content, so apart from letting them understand how a game should be made, the real improvement for these designers is not very big.

But this "Real Estate Tycoon" is completely different. Jester has basically decided not to participate in this game and let them make it themselves. Firstly, it is to see what the real capabilities of this new team are, and secondly, Because there is an original tabletop game as a reference, the playability of the original version is already very good. Even if it is copied, it will be done well, and Jester does not need to worry about the quality.

As for the arcade game "Chief Balotelli", it is the only one that Jester plans to release in November.

And Jester, the team of Seve Dabowater, also plans to personally lead it for a period of time and start making the scroll-type flight shooting game that he wants to carefully prepare for his home console.

Although the game "Chief Balotelli" is not too outstanding in Jester's eyes, others do not think so. This game has been kept secret during its production and has not participated in the previous few games. There will be player trials, but in the company's internal trials, the response was very good, and the vast majority of people spoke highly of this game.

Jester has no doubt about this. Although it is not the first time that a shooting beat-'em-up game has appeared in arcades, "Chief Balotelli" is indeed the most outstanding one. Of course, it is So far.

However, what Jester was comparing before was a textbook-level masterpiece in similar games like "Contra", so naturally there were many things he was dissatisfied with.

To a certain extent, Jester even feels that this game does not capture the essence of this type of game.

So his evaluation of this game is only good.

As for Hu Weili, who came from China, Jester decided to let him take language courses for half a year because of the language problem. During this time, he would help the team of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. After all, music is common and also You can let him get familiar with the work Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. After half a year, it will be almost time for him to officially start making his own motherboard "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles".

Fu Zan’s English is not a big problem. He has been in the United States for a week. Since Jester personally found him, he has no specific work arrangements. He is just asked to follow the game "City of Guild Wars". Post-production can be regarded as familiar with the game production process. Jester was very satisfied after hearing about this. Moreover, the official version of "City of Battle" contains a lot of Fu Zan's understanding of this game in the future.

In other words, this game Jester plagiarized many of Fu Zan’s ideas.

Sure enough, after Jester asked the person responsible for the post-processing of "City of Battle", the person in charge was full of praise for Fu Zan's performance, saying that Fu Zan knew a lot about the game as soon as he came into contact with it. Deep, helped them solve a lot of troubles in post-processing.

This was also what Jester expected.

However, Jester has no intention of letting Fu Zan continue to do post-processing in Scavenger. He intends to let Fu Zan join the research and development team he personally leads and participate in the development of a game from beginning to end. This will be beneficial to him. Growth is very helpful, and the same goes for Sakaguchi Hironobu, who will arrive in the United States in a few days, but Sakaguchi Hironobu Jester plans to take him with him for a while longer.

In his eyes, Sakaguchi Hironobu was much more important than Fu Zan. Fu Zan is just a seed he planted unintentionally, and the harvest will be more than ten or twenty years later. But Hironobu Sakaguchi is different. This is how he can fight against Nintendo and its lackey Ai in Japanese RPGs in the future. The Knicks' greatest magic weapon cannot be missed.

As for the music rhythm game he thought of when he was bored in mainland China, after consulting his hardware department staff, they regretfully told Jester that his idea is currently difficult to realize. Just as he had thought before, it was not difficult to process music with a 16-bit CPU. The biggest problem was that the hard drive was too expensive.

In the eyes of these hardware developers, it is unwise to make such a game when the price of hard drives is so high.

Regretfully, Jester could only give up this idea temporarily. In his impression, the substantial improvement in hard disk storage technology was due to the giant magnetoresistive effect discovered a few years later. Jester was not a tech geek, so he knew a lot about this. Not much, he just read a report about the Nobel Prize later, which introduced that the two scientists who discovered the giant magnetoresistance effect won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2007.

The person who wrote this article was a domestic researcher who highly praised this discovery in the article. At that time, the researcher's statement was still fresh in Jester's mind.

"Look at the storage capacity of your computer's hard drive and you'll know how big their contribution is."

The problem was that Jester didn't remember at all that it was the giant magnetoresistance effect discovered by the two scientists, so he could only wait slowly.

After the meeting, Jester returned to his room, took out paper and pen again, and wanted to sort out his plan from the beginning, especially regarding his home game console.

First, and most importantly, the name of the home console.

Marcus, the leader of the previous home console R\u0026D team, only used x as the code name. Although many people in the company, whether involved in the R\u0026D or not, gave this home game console, which was in the final debugging stage, the name It has a lot of names, and there are also nicknames like 'Flying Saucer' based on the round appearance that Jester designed for this console. However, its official name has not yet been determined, and Jester doesn't want to choose it himself. The name he thought of was an initiative taken by Microsoft when it launched Xbox.

Let players participate in naming the game.

Of course, Jester wanted to be even more open than Microsoft at that time. He decided to let "Game" magazine conduct a collection of game console names. Everyone can write to them and tell them the name of the game console they want most. The finalized name will be announced at the CES show, when the new console is unveiled to the public for the first time.

And the selected one will get a specially customized game console signed by all the developers, and will also get the first game cartridge signed by all the game developers. Of course, there will also be a bonus of 5,000 US dollars.

After thinking about the solution to this matter, Jester put a check mark behind it, and then continued to write the following questions.

About the launch game.

This is actually a difficult thing to handle and decide. After all, our console was released a full year and a half later than Nintendo's FC. During this year and a half, Nintendo and the game developers under FC They have produced a large number of games for the FC game console, and when the American version of FC, which is the NES, is released, Nintendo will easily come up with a large number of games. In other words, when its own game console has just been released, At that time, in terms of the number of games, it would definitely lag behind Nintendo.

This gap can only be made up with the passage of time, so you should not compare the number of games with Nintendo, but the quality of the games.

But the problem is, this is also difficult.

Nintendo in this era is almost synonymous with high-quality products, and the games of their co-developers also need to pass Nintendo's quality certification. Games that can pass Nintendo's quality certification will basically not be bad.

Of course, as they enter the U.S. market, some game manufacturers like Rainbow Factory that frequently produce bad products will inevitably enter Nintendo's R\u0026D camp. This was also a concession that Nintendo had to make in order to open up the US market, but this happened later.

But throughout the FC period, and even the SFC period, Japanese manufacturers were the core for Nintendo's survival.

Can these games of my own really compete with those Japanese manufacturers of this era?

While thinking about it, Jester drew a question mark behind the question, and then he started writing on the paper several games he planned to launch. He had written it once before, but that time was in the early days of his business. Many of his ideas were very immature, and now they are a bit whimsical, so they can only be used as a reference.

For example, he planned to make "Contra" at the beginning. In fact, some people who had never made a shooting beat-'em-up game made this game, unless he directly took out the real "Contra" for them to make. Do this, otherwise, the core rhythm of the game "Contra" is difficult to explain in words. Not only does it require Jester himself to know what it feels like, but it also requires everyone to know what it feels like. The people involved in the development know what this feels like. Only by letting them personally make a shooting beat-'em-up game and letting them have a deeper understanding of this type of game will they have the skills to make "Contra". game capabilities.

Let’s ignore these for now, but the games Jester wrote this time are different from last time.

First of all, it can be transplanted from previously completed arcade games.

Transplanted games are easy to make and cost-effective, and because of their previous reputation, sales will not be very low. Some games with high reputation will even show incredible vitality on the new platform, which is the most representative. The only thing in history is that "Tetris" could still sell five million copies on FC even with an arcade version.

"American Cube", "Bubble Bobble", "Zuma", and "Snow Brothers" can all be transplanted to home consoles. As for whether "Bejeweled" should be transplanted, Jester hesitated. This game is in Before touch technology, you couldn’t experience the pleasure of using a controller at all. That’s why he designed that weird arcade frame with a curved mouse. But if he had this on his home machine, Gaming means that you need to add a mouse peripheral to your home machine.

Should we do it or not?

Jester has not yet decided on this point, so he put a question mark behind this game, which means that he will not make a decision for the time being, but this means that even if he really wants to do it in the future, then this This game will no longer be in the lineup of launch games. After all, time is running out now and we must race against time.

However, except for "Snowman Brothers", which is a masterpiece of the same era, the other four transplanted games can only be regarded as minor and belong to the elimination category. Although the quality of the games is very high, it is very likely that There are good cartridge sales, but it is still unable to compete head-on with Nintendo. The most critical thing is that the genre is too single and unable to compete in all aspects.

This has a great impact on the sales of a game console. Not many people buy a game console just to play one type of game.

For example, Nintendo, their puzzle games include not only their own "Donkey Kong" and "Mario Brothers", but also Hudson's "Dugger", "Bomberman", and even Namco. The arcade masterpiece "Pac-Man" will be transplanted and released in November this year, especially "Pac-Man". This game has a huge audience that other arcade games can hardly match. Jester remembers that in later generations According to statistics, "Pac-Man" has sold a total of 300,000 substrates, which is several times more than the second-ranked game.

Even the total of the four arcade games he has released now is not more than one-third of the size of "Pac-Man".

In the sports category, Nintendo has "Motocross" and "Baseball", which are among the top ten sales in FC history, as well as a pseudo-3D racing game "F1 Racing" that they will release in November this year. This game has sold very well in the United States, with more than one million copies, once again proving the rumor that Americans like mindless games, but they don’t have any sports games.

Thinking of this, Jester wrote a movement on the paper, and then drew a zero at the back. This was an aspect that he had to add.

So what kind of sports game do you want to make? Jester was a little confused. He really couldn't think of how to make sports games in this era. Only relying on the simple computing power of eight-bit CPUs and the current level of image processing, it was simply impossible to make sports games that reflected the characteristics of sports games. The characteristics of competitive charm come.

After much thought, he could only think of making a racing game similar to that of Nintendo. This is the best competitive game to make right now.

There is also a sports game that he once played on Nokia's Symbian system. It can be operated by continuously pressing buttons that appear randomly on the screen, and the player's results are judged based on the speed they press, such as sprinting. , the faster you press, the fewer mistakes you make, the faster the character will run and the higher the score will be. There are also long jump, javelin, and other types, all of which have almost similar operating systems. It is very interesting. At that time, Jess It was quite addictive when I played it by myself, and now that I have made it, some players will also like it.

Jester will never give up on this kind of game no matter what. Even if he can't do it right now, it's still good to just accumulate skills. After all, it will be the three major cancers in the future.

There are also fighting games, which have very high requirements on hardware. It is difficult to make high-quality fighting games on an eight-bit CPU. Konami's "Kung Fu" to be released next year is this type of game. The originator of this type of game, and basically the pinnacle of this type of game in the eight-bit era. In the eyes of Jester, who has played countless fighting games of later generations, this game is terrible and simple, and there are no restrictions on the development of this type of game. It's not about how to make an excellent fighting game, but whether the fighting game I want to design can be completed with the current hardware.

For example, after having cps1, Capcom launched "Street Fighter" that shocked the world almost at the same time.

Therefore, you can put this type of game away first, or make a game similar to "Kung Fu" to let the team become familiar with fighting games, and then wait until your 16-bit baseboard matures to directly produce a classic fighting game, but There is no need to rush this type now.

Jester thought for a while and drew a check mark on the back of the fighting game written on the paper.

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