Chapter 18 (1/2)

Translator: Exodus Tales  Editor: Exodus Tales

Translated by Coldtaco

Edited by Aelryinth

Chen Mo woke up the next day at nine o’clock. After grabbing a shower, he went out to buy breakfast.

1Chen Mo woke up late because he liked sleeping, only feeling a hundred percent when he got enough sleep, due to habits from his previous life.

3In his previous life working in the video game industry, he would often need to work through the night and his start time at work was later than normal. His sleep schedule wasn’t adjusted to what would be considered normal.

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After having breakfast, Chen Mo returned to his office to brainstorm his first game.

1Chen Mo had numerous games in mind, but he still had to give some thought to which one he was basing it off.

9In this world the cost of starting the development of a game was quite low. There was no need to rent an office or hire a programmer, saving any starting capital required to start game development, though it didn’t mean there weren’t any associated costs or limits with game development.

1One of the bigger limiting factors was art resources.

Video game background music could be solved using money by hiring someone. As long as the quality wasn’t too bad, gamers usually wouldn’t nitpick too much.

6However, the visuals of the game were different. If Chen Mo wanted to develop a larger game, the characters, models, and scenes all might need to be done from scratch, and the free resources from the game engine might not be suitable.

Moreover, those cost quite a bit!

Using a simple example: graphics for playing cards for a mobile game. The lower end would be eight to nine hundred RMB, at the other end of the spectrum it might cost seven to eight hundred. Higher standards were available for a higher price. Just the cost for the art would be a huge sum of money.

2Moreover, there were the models, animations, special effects, and so on. These wouldn’t be any cheaper than the art, and were quite troublesome to make.

The game engine did have large amounts of free resources, but the majority of them were just free resources of average quality.

Flappybird was able to use publicly available art because it had a simple art style. After hand drawing the bird, everything else could be found and used without much, if any, modifications.

However, if Chen Mo wanted to fully recreate a large game from his previous life, the art would need to look the same as the original. That would be troublesome!

As for why the art needed to be the same, it was because games were quite delicate, like an intricate pocket watch. If any one of the parts were swapped out, it was not guaranteed to run smoothly.

Of course, that ignored the crude knockoffs, games never meant to take off.

The games that did take off always had their playstyle, art style, music, etc. in perfect harmony. They were the ones picked out among dozens of ideas by a designer.

Any changes Chen Mo wanted to make had to be thoroughly thought out. Otherwise, like changing a poem, changing a word might make it seem like the work of an ameteur.

Therefore, Chen Mo would try to the best of his abilities to preserve every single detail of the classics, including identical art styles.

3The second biggest barrier was Chen Mo’s own abilities.

Although Chen Mo was the producer, he had his own specializations, so he wasn’t good at everything.

Coding and level design had their own more specialized engineers. Although Chen Mo knew some of it, he wasn’t super well-versed in it.

Some games might seem simple, but in reality the requirements were quite high. For example, Anipop! Although the rules were quite simple and seemed quite simple in design, it actually had very high requirements for their level design. Every level was more difficult than the last, while keeping up the tempo. This was not doable with his current abilities!

Some of the Chinese pay-to-win games might seem like they had low development requirements, but more than half of the skill requirements were on the coding side of things.