Game Development Giant

Jester didn’t know that before his Japanese branch was officially established, the head of the Japanese branch, Tamahide Yoshiro, relied on a bowl of cheap street ramen to sell Naka Yuji, one of the most important figures in the rise of Sega in the future. Taken into his arms.

If he knew that his company had done such a thing while Nakayama Hayao was in the United States, he would probably laugh like crazy.

Although Yuji Naka in this time and space may no longer have any intersection with Sega.

The entire Mars Entertainment now has more than 40 designers, not including those who have nothing to do with game development. In the past month, it has recruited more than a dozen new people one after another.

Except for the research and development team directly led by Mark Cerny and named 'the-king' by their own vote, which is working hard on the problem of "Avengers" in isolation, the remaining more than 30 people were summoned by Jester. He got up to discuss the project of his air combat game.

First is the discussion of names.

Of course, Jester took full consideration of Americans' urinary nature. He sneered and warned these designers who always like to be whimsical and energetic, not to propose some names that are too spoofy.

The characteristics of the game name were simply summarized into three points by Jester. First, it is easy to understand. Second, because of the background of the game, the name must give people a feeling of upward, bright, and hopeful. The last point is that the character must be high. .

It makes people feel a sense of superiority as soon as they hear it.

After much discussion, the proposal of a young artist who had just joined the company was approved by the vast majority of people.

"Dawn".

Although Jester felt that the name was a bit bad, he really couldn't think of a better name. In addition, most people unanimously praised the name, so he officially established the name of this game. It's called "Dawn."

The team that the four protagonists belong to in the game plot has the same name as the game. Of course, it is also called Dawn. This has been set in Jester's setting collection.

The young artist who proposed the name "Dawn" was recommended to him by Jester's grandfather. His name is Cao Kairui. He just graduated from college two years ago and had been doing some odd jobs in a comic company before.

He is also a Chinese. His father came to the United States after the founding of the People's Republic of China. Before the founding of the People's Republic of China, a printing press was opened in the country. Many major newspapers of the southern generation were printed by his family's printing press. At that time, the head of his family and the Wulian Mr. De was a good friend and even owned part of the shares of "Liangyou". However, later on, the family business was absorbed in the wave of nationalization of private assets. His family moved to Hong Kong and came to the United States and continued to work in the printing industry. In other words, his family As the saying goes in China, one is born in the five black categories.

If he hadn't run so fast back then, he probably wouldn't have ended well in the ten years of catastrophe.

Cao Kairui graduated from the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. This school, Jester has heard, is very good in the field of art. It is one of the three major art academies in the United States, along with the New York Academy of Art, the School of Fine Arts, and the Alfred Academy of Fine Arts. In later generations, It has been ranked among the top three art colleges in the Usnew university rankings all year round, and he has a good family background. His grandfather is a master of Chinese painting and studied under the Eight Masters of Jinling. His father also inherited his grandfather's mantle. Naturally, he also I have been influenced by this aspect since I was a child.

Jester has seen some of his works, and they do have a very personal style. They are almost impeccable in terms of momentum, composition, and color matching. The most important thing is that he has the characteristics of a concentrated Western painting style. This is What Jester values ​​most.

Even Jester had some plans. After letting Cao Kairui participate in the production of several games, he would formally establish Mars Entertainment's own exclusive art design team, Sons of Mars, modeled after Blizzard's "Storm Sons" in later generations.

And there is another thing that surprised Jester. In this era where hand-painting is still the mainstay, Cao Kairui also likes to use the drawing software on the computer to do some creative paintings. However, he often has problems with the functions of the drawing software that comes with the computer. Not complaining enough, I am currently discussing with some people in the company who have the same hobby whether to write a special drawing software to create more complex and detailed pictures.

This reminded Jester of a later famous image processing software, which later almost became the ruler of the computer graphics world.

Therefore, Jester did not stop him when he heard the news.

He fully understands how much role this software called photoshop will occupy in future game creation.

However, the historical prototype of Photoshop in his impression was when Thomas Noll was completing his doctoral thesis on Apple 2 in 1987 and found that Apple's computer could not display grayscale black and white images, so he wrote it himself A program called display was used to achieve this effect. Unexpectedly, the effect turned out to be very good.

If it weren't for his brother, perhaps this program for his convenience would end up being forgotten on the computer's hard drive, until its designer would forget that he had ever made such a creative little thing.

Thomas Noel's younger brother is called John Noel. Jester has heard of this name because John Noel was the visual effects director of Industrial Light and Magic in later generations. He later won an Oscar. After he discovered this program of his brother , who was already working at Industrial Light and Magic, he immediately became interested in this small program.

So the brothers began to continuously improve the program called display, and gradually turned it into a powerful image editing program. Finally, they accepted a user's suggestion at an exhibition and renamed display to photoshop. At that time, PS was already a powerful program with functions such as level, color balance, and saturation.

As for whether the software that the employees in his company are making can achieve the status of PS in later generations, Jester doesn't know, but a dedicated computer image processing tool is indeed what he needs.

The ensuing discussion was also very lively. First of all, everyone agreed with the issue of the sense of substitution in Jester's setting. They unanimously believed that choosing a character as the player's experience object is much better than choosing an airplane. Although There is essentially no difference between the two. Players still have to control a cold aircraft when playing the game.

But this change is psychological and players can feel it.

However, Sean Dabbili, who is now the person in charge of "Original Point", put forward different opinions on this. It was bloody, and the differences could not be reflected in different characters.

Then Jester suddenly realized that in order to reflect the personalization of DIY, he set up a self-selected weapon system. In this way, each character that could best reflect the character differences would have a completely different weapon system. You can no longer design.

This makes these four characters identical except in appearance.

"This is a problem. Let's write it down for now. Let's not discuss it now. We are mainly discussing the shortcomings of this game that I initially set. How to modify it will be decided next time." Jester said so simply.

Then the discussion on the weapon DIY system was received with a very warm and unanimous welcome that Jester could not have expected. Even Dabbili, who had previously said that characters have no differences except for their appearance, said that even if the differences in characters cannot be solved, this Weapon DIY must also be retained.

This groundbreaking design cannot be neutered.

Great idea.

Even many designers use such high words to evaluate - this makes Jester a little embarrassed, although he also agrees with this view, not that he is great, but that he deeply knows that the personalization of future generations will be the game mainstream of development.

Because players always want to develop a character that is different from others when playing games. I want to become different from others. This is personalization.

This greatly improves the playability of the game.

In the following discussion about levels and some effects, Jester is not the main force at all. He specializes in the art. Naturally, there are technical dogs who have already sharpened their skills in both hardware and software to criticize some of Jester's ideas. .

After all, "Strider 1945" is still ahead of its time. The base board on which this game is equipped is a 16-bit base board. It is much stronger than today in terms of memory, video memory, and CPU calculation speed. It can easily complete some tasks. It will be very difficult to achieve the effect on an eight-bit substrate, although it is not impossible.

But it will be very troublesome. In the mouths of these technical dogs, it is a stupid idea that the gain outweighs the loss.

So, basically the rest of the discussion was a meeting of technical geeks who were full-throated about Jester’s ideas.

Jester, who was sprayed with blood, could only hide aside and listen silently. From time to time, he took notes and wrote down some technical dogs who said that it could be done under the premise of not affecting the smooth running experience under the current hardware. The finished effect.

Jester is not angry about this. This is the purpose of his brainstorming meeting. He can make good settings and design excellent levels based on the excellent games of later generations, and make other things orderly and fun. gameplay, but he was not sure whether these things could be completed now.

For example, before Naka Yuji designed Sonic, he had an idea of ​​a rabbit that could pick up things with its ears and attack enemies. However, this idea seemed to be a very simple effect in later generations, but it was difficult to achieve at the time, so it was later Classic Sonic image.

Of course, he must know that it is absolutely impossible to complete a sandbox game now, but he cannot tell the difference between a 16-bit substrate and an 8-bit substrate except for the popular improvements in computing power, color, number of colors displayed on the same screen, etc. A more detailed difference.

After all, he comes from 2014, and the development of hardware is changing rapidly even ten years apart, let alone thirty years.

If you don’t understand, leave it to those who understand. This has always been the principle that Jester believes in. In his opinion, the best investment target after rebirth is actually people. Under the butterfly effect, a lot of history may change, but A person's abilities don't change.

If a person was successful in the previous world, then he can still be famous and successful in this world.

If a discussion is filled with Jester talking about how good my game settings are and how great it is to play, you only need to program my ideas without considering the hardware at all. Whether the desired settings can be completed under the conditions, and his programmers can only sigh, admire and flatter, saying long live the boss, the boss is mighty, you are the only genius in ten thousand, and they cannot treat some things that are obviously beyond the scope of the hardware. , or negate the effect that is beyond the scope of personal ability and impossible to achieve.

That's still the same sentence. If the game this company makes is real-time strategy, it will definitely not be SC, but "Blood Lion". If it is an adventure, it will definitely not be Shenhai, but "et". If it is If it's an FPS, it's definitely not "Call of Duty", but "Extreme-Paintbrawl". If it's a fighting game, it's definitely not "Street Fighter", but "Shaq- fu), if it were a stealth game, it would definitely not be Metal Gear Solid, but...

The above lists are all super masterpieces and super bad games in history. For example, the 1998 game "Ultra Loud" was given a six-point rating by "PC-World" magazine. Well, The full score is 100 points, which is also the second lowest-rated game in the history of "PC-World".

And the company that makes this kind of game will definitely be spurned by players.

But maybe, some games can also rely on this seemingly high-end and classy game setting to trick some brainless fans into supporting it, just like the ones produced by John Romero after he left id-software. It's the same as that game called "Big Knife".

The setting is simply much more magnificent than what the authors in many novels can imagine with their imaginations. There are many things in it that even Jester was stunned to read in 2014 and called Luo Melo's ability to slap the head is simply unparalleled.

But the idea of ​​patting the head is just a pat on the head after all. Although Romero is still a talented programmer, this cannot prevent the unrealistic ideas from eventually causing the game to fail completely and Romero to lose his reputation.

Therefore, Jester, who understands this, knows that making a game must be based on reality.

Using mature technology to think in parallel, this sentence Yokoi Gunpei's insights into hardware research and development throughout his life is equally effective in software development.

Because software is based on hardware.

In the final analysis, games are no different from other programs, they are just software that looks slightly better.

In short, Jester looked at the technical dogs who were getting more and more excited as they pointed at his settings set, but on the contrary, he showed a look of satisfaction on his face, because he knew that these were a group of designers who truly loved games. division.

They love this industry.

If you don’t spray, you won’t make progress.

ps: Please vote for recommendation! ! Darkning, the role you want is given to you.