Cannon Fodder Genius Game Producer - Chapter 28

Chapter 28: The 28th Day of a Blockbuster

Inside Bu Shu Studio, after a long day of busy work, Pei Shu ordered a simple takeout to be delivered to the office. In the gap while waiting for dinner to arrive, the few members of the studio enjoyed a rare moment of relaxation.

As the most direct victim of Lin Cheng’s plagiarism, Jiang Ziye held an extremely high level of vigilance toward him. On the Beijing University of Science and Technology forums, Jiang Ziye had once carefully reviewed Lin Cheng’s past posting history. In Jiang Ziye’s judgment, Lin Cheng was absolutely not someone with a deep understanding of games.

However, there was a strong sense of fragmentation about Lin Cheng. Despite his lack of understanding, he managed to produce the complete Crazy Graduation Season, pass a series of rigorous interviews at Jixing Studio, and successfully join the company.

The reasons behind this made it hard not to spark some strange associations.

Jiang Ziye was not originally the type of person to obsess over others’ private affairs. Now that the “True and False Producer” incident had gradually calmed down, and he was able to work on game production alongside his childhood idol Pei Shu and a titan like Wang Fei, he intended to let go of his personal grudge and focus entirely on his new work.

Yet, he didn’t expect that even within Bu Shu Studio, he would still hear news related to Lin Cheng.

When he heard Teacher Bu Shu’s prediction that Lin Cheng’s new game might be aimed at Bu Shu Studio’s new project, the same thought flashed through Jiang Ziye’s mind.

This premonition was so strong that it left him restless and highly inefficient during his work throughout the afternoon.

Pei Shu, who had been sitting across from Jiang Ziye typing out proposals all afternoon, naturally noticed his state of being “not all there.” Now that it was time to wait for food, Pei Shu called the dazed Jiang Ziye over.

“Don’t think too much about the Lin Cheng matter. Our game and his are clearly of different genres. Even if the genres were the same, his game is still going through the demo process within Universal. The time required to formally initiate a project, develop it, and go through the acceptance process is completely different from ours. Even if he wanted to compete with us at the same time, he would have to be able to accurately calculate the production time for both parties.”

“Ah, Teacher Bu Shu, I…” Jiang Ziye hadn’t expected Pei Shu to guess his worries so perfectly. Being seen through, he scratched his head sheepishly.

Pei Shu smiled and patted his shoulder: “It’s normal to worry, but don’t let his project affect your mood. What you need to do now is make our game well.”

Wang Fei, hearing Pei Shu’s words, also nodded: “Internal processes at Universal are complex. Lin Cheng’s project won’t move that quickly. Don’t worry too much.”

Seeing Jiang Ziye relax, Pei Shu smiled, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes—he had a very strong premonition that Lin Cheng’s game was indeed aimed at Bu Shu Studio’s new project.

Jiang Ziye and Wang Fei didn’t understand, but he knew that Lin Cheng had the support of the Plot Will and the system. If Lin Cheng were determined to pit his project against Bu Shu’s, it was not impossible.

In a head-to-head match between two games, what Lin Cheng wanted was inevitably to win a victory of some kind.

Normally, for two games to compete, they should at least be of similar themes. However, based on Wang Fei’s description, there was a significant gap in themes between Lin Cheng’s project and Bu Shu’s Project: Immortal Fate.

Currently, based purely on both being mobile online games, what are the ways to determine victory?

Download counts? Daily Active Users (DAU) or Monthly Active Users (MAU)? Peak Concurrent Users (PCU)? Revenue data? Discussion heat?

Pei Shu listed these possible comparison methods one by one in his mind, but with limited clues, he couldn’t pinpoint a specific probability yet.

However, Pei Shu always believed in one thing: the work speaks for itself.

Just like the previous Crazy Graduation Season, a game, as the crystallization of a creator’s heart and blood, will inevitably leave behind corresponding cultural traces.

And the birth of every game is deeply connected to the creator’s original intention.

Marketing methods and target demographics will change based on different creative intentions, product characteristics, and the traits of the targeted player groups.

Even if Lin Cheng could indeed rely on the system to continuously churn out products from the future, the same product—born at a different time and in a different cultural environment—might not necessarily meet a perfect end.

In Jixing Studio, Zhang Sui and the others were also discussing Lin Cheng’s game proposal in their small group.

In Jixing’s monthly proposals, the overall documents and the final management evaluations are open to internal members; they can be accessed and read on any company computer.

Before Lin Cheng’s Wasteland, Jixing Studio’s internal proposals hadn’t had a project approved for demo production in nearly half a year.

The internal members of Jixing admired Lin Cheng for being selected in his first attempt, and they were also curious about his Wasteland proposal. Reading an excellent proposal serves as a way to broaden and enhance one’s own sense for games.

As a senior member of Jixing, Zhang Sui naturally read Lin Cheng’s Wasteland proposal immediately.

This was an idle card game, considered one of the mainstream genres from last year into this year.

However, this idle game titled Wasteland did not focus on “pushing maps” like last year’s Sword & Flower & Magic; it was an idle management and cultivation game set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

The main body of the game was one of the last remaining cities in the wasteland. This city was currently facing a crisis—covetous eyes from other bases, an impending zombie tide, and terrifying monster attacks.

Players needed to use all resources to reinforce their city.

Inside the wasteland city, things weren’t absolutely safe either. There were spies, assassins, and instigators who had infiltrated; animals that could suddenly mutate into monsters; and zombie virus carriers who might enter because of lax inspection at the city entrance.

With internal worries and external threats, players have no room for failure. Every crisis outbreak could lead to massive destruction inside and outside the city. If players cannot repair everything in time, the city will eventually vanish completely.

Between different players, cities act like isolated island oases in the apocalypse. Players can choose to plunder each other’s resources or form alliances to resist external enemies. But even allies can plunder one another; everything depends on whether the player’s judgment is precise and whether they dare to trust an unknown friend on the other side of the network.

Beyond these complex elements, Wasteland also included card-pulling mechanics. The overall system design—including the player’s personal resource cycle and the numerical/gameplay design where high-level players must plunder low-level players to upgrade—was nothing short of exquisite.

Zhang Sui praised it in his small group: It is indeed a design worthy of making a pre-initiation demo!

Most other Jixing members in the group held the same view.

Interesting. Not bad, a game I’d want to play!

However, along with the praise, someone raised a question.

I see in Lin Cheng’s case, another key point of this game is “Absolute 0 Pay-to-Win (0-Krypton).” What does that mean?

I don’t quite understand it either. I looked at the numerical pace during the upgrade stages; the rhythm is exhilarating. It’s an excellent idle game early-stage numerical pace that easily pulls people in. But no matter how many “Liver Emperors” (hardcore grinders) there are, if you don’t allow any spending at all, even the Liver Emperors won’t be able to hold out, right? Plus, this isn’t a casual idle game. Based on this design, interactivity is very strong. Late-stage gameplay might introduce things like Alliance Wars, right? No spending? Pure grind? Can that work?

Probably not? I don’t see any top-up supplement plans in this case. Lin Cheng even specifically noted that they won’t introduce the “click-to-ad” model. In that case, with no top-up channel and no ads, and the download being free… where is the monetization point for this game?

Zhang Sui: Maybe Lin Cheng has other ideas?

Maybe… Anyway, the whole project looks solid, including the gameplay loop, numerical loop, interactive design, etc. It’s just the forced “0-Krypton” point that baffles me.

True. Even if you attract traffic with the 0-Krypton gimmick, if you can’t monetize it, what is that traffic for?

In the various small groups within Jixing Studio, people continued to discuss Lin Cheng’s purpose.

As for Lin Cheng himself—what was his purpose?

Naturally, it was to go head-to-head with Bu Shu Studio’s game!

When this Wasteland game was originally launched, the developer’s marketing slogan was “0-Krypton” Are you tired of the crazy, unlimited pay-to-win games on the market? Do you want to experience an absolutely fair game environment? Wasteland awaits the arrival of every apocalyptic lord!

Lin Cheng didn’t actually like this kind of idle game. When it originally blew up, he just happened to hear colleagues mention how exquisitely designed it was and how you could play happily without spending a cent, crushing so many whale-targeted games on the market.

This time, wanting to challenge Bu Shu Studio, he thought long and hard: to fight a “Krypton” game, didn’t it have to be a “0-Krypton” game to work?

Learning from the lesson of Crazy Graduation Season, this time, when Lin Cheng received the master design plan and the system asked, “Do you need to modify the master design content?”, he was careful.

He asked the system: Is it certain that this “Wasteland” is a 100% 0-Krypton game?

System: Ding—Detection shows that the Wasteland master plan contains a game top-up design proposal. Does the Host wish to adjust the designs related to game top-ups?

Lin Cheng hadn’t expected that this “0-Krypton game” actually had top-up designs. Thinking about his purpose for choosing this game, he immediately said: Delete it for me! Delete every bit of content related to game top-ups in this plan!

Back when introducing the system’s exchange rules for master plans, the system told Lin Cheng that it would record the most complete proposals related to classic games. The master plan might differ to some extent from the final finished product, representing adjustments or deletions made during the production process. The archived system plans were all designs with a certain level of value; the Host could use or delete them at their discretion.

Lin Cheng speculated that the top-up design was likely content that eventually wasn’t selected for the actual Wasteland game. After all, it was a 0-Krypton game; the planning team probably realized at the end that the game wasn’t suitable for top-ups, so they didn’t use it.

In short, Lin Cheng felt very righteous about deleting the top-up designs.

Good thing I learned from last time and didn’t pull out the entire plan directly, otherwise there would be problems again!

Lin Cheng was self-satisfied with his choice. After the project successfully took first place in Jixing Studio’s internal competition, facing the praise of the Jixing members, he couldn’t help but feel a bit “floaty” again.

After picking up his mood, Lin Cheng felt that in the novels he had read, didn’t those “Long Aotian” protagonists have some disgusting villains on their path to growth?

Why was the protagonist affected by a villain and failing missions today?

It was naturally so that after growing up tomorrow, he could trample the villain into an even deeper abyss of mud!

Just wait. Bu Shu Studio, Teacher Bu Shu… sooner or later, they will all be defeated by my hand!

In the following period, with Jixing Studio providing funds and personnel, progress on Lin Cheng’s pre-initiation demo was extremely rapid.

Meanwhile, inside Bu Shu Studio, after comparing the prices for individual commissions, Pei Shu, Wang Fei, and Jiang Ziye finally gritted their teeth and decided to commission work through the WG outsourcing platform to save a significant amount of capital.

However, while saving was important, Pei Shu and Wang Fei shared a common bottom line—quality must not drop.

Considering that none of the three were professional artists, Wang Fei used his connections to invite a Lead Artist he knew from another project. The Lead Artist didn’t need to produce work personally; they just needed to help audit submissions and provide clear, effective revision suggestions when the freelancers delivered their work.

Pei Shu originally intended to take at least 1/3 of the saved funds to pay as a fee for auditing, but the Lead Artist titan flatly refused.

“It doesn’t take much time; it’s just a matter of speaking, which I’m used to doing at the company every day,” the Lead Artist titan chuckled good-naturedly. “Besides, it’s rare to have Old Wang owe me a favor. He can just pay me back later!”

The “poor” Bu Shu Studio accepted this kindness with immense gratitude—saving another few tens of thousands was “rations” for renting servers later!

Thinking of this, Pei Shu said in a pleasant mood: “Mm, the money for the game publication number has been saved. By the way, Old Wang, our Immortal Fate demo version has iterated to the point where the core gameplay is basically confirmed as viable. Next, we need to push into the formal development stage. I hope we can pull out version 1.0 in about a month. The development version plan in your hands needs to be adjusted according to current goals.”

Pei Shu took a breath: “It’s the end of May now. So our plan is—strive to complete the development of Project: Immortal Fate 1.0 before July! Does everyone have confidence?”

Wang Fei pinched the bridge of his nose with a headache and ignored Pei Shu. Jiang Ziye, however, responded very supportively: “Yes!”

Pei Shu smiled: “Good. Then next, let’s continue at full throttle!”

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