376. What era is this?

"Make a PC game first," Cao Yang said, "I call it "Minecraft"

"My world?" Li Lanyun asked in confusion.

"Yes, my world." Cao Yang said, "I want to make it a pixel-style sandbox game where players can freely explore, obtain materials, and build the buildings in their minds.

At the same time, it provides various monster-killing and collecting elements to enrich the gameplay of this world."

Damn it!

Li Lanyun was so surprised that she was as if she had eaten a grenade, and her internal organs and six lungs were shocked.

What?!

Pixel wind?

Sandbox game?!

You heard it right?

What era is it, and you still have to go back to make pixel style?

If Li Lanyun hadn't seen Boss Cao's serious expression, he wouldn't have believed that this would be what Boss Cao said.

Now Bomi's "God of War·Wukong" can achieve a very high picture quality level. Even the "Gun Girl" released before is enough to make you pay for its picture quality and character settings.

Now Boss Cao is actually going to go back and make a Pixel-Win game.

You should know that the pixel style was about 20 years ago. In the 1980s, because the hardware level of game consoles was relatively low, the art had to use these pixel blocks, which looked like mosaics to create games.

The most typical ones are "Super Mary" and "Dragon Quest" on FC. The entire screen is filled with small blocks...

Because in this case, performance consumption is minimal.

But now with the continuous improvement of hardware level, the graphics card and CPU have been upgraded by N levels compared to the game consoles of that year. People no longer need to compromise on the hardware level. Now Boss Cao actually says he wants to make pixel-style games.

Is this crazy?

still--

Pure for nostalgia?

Should the target group be targeted at the post-70s and post-80s?

Li Lanyun doesn't understand this very much.

"Yes," Cao Yang said with a smile, "You heard it right. This is a pixel-style game. It looks rough, but it is actually its advantage."

Minecraft is a sandbox game developed by Sweden's Mojang Studios in 2009.

This is a pixel-style game. It seems a bit incredible to become popular in 2009, because the screen is full of characters, scenes, props, monsters composed of various blocks...

All are pixel-style.

You should know that in 2009, the highest image quality level could already reach the level of Need for Speed ​​13, and it was quite realistic and detailed in road and scene simulation and racing details.

Especially the scene lighting effect makes you feel a strong sense of substitution.

While almost all games are rushing forward on the road of pursuing [higher picture quality], Mojang Studios is like a retrograde on the highway.

By the way, there is another very famous company in the island country called Cairo Games.

But even such a [mosaic type] game has caused a [Minecraft] trend.

The main reason is that it creates a very rich and illusory world for people, full of infinite possibilities.

In the game "Minecraft" developed by Mojang Studios-

Players can create and destroy all kinds of blocks in the three-dimensional space in the game, and even experience different game modes in multiplayer servers and single-player worlds. In a high degree of freedom, players have created their own gameplay, large and small, creating exquisite buildings, creations and artworks.

The game focuses on allowing players to explore, interact, and change a map dynamically generated from blocks of one cubic meter in size.

In addition to blocks, environmental monomers also include plants, organisms and objects.

Various activities in the game include collecting ore, fighting hostile creatures, synthesising new blocks and collecting various resources found in the game.

To be precise, in addition to the virtual world, "Minecraft" developed by Mojang Studios also satisfies countless people's childhood dreams and experiences, which is equivalent to putting Lego toys in electronic games.

And these [Lego Toys] have very rich functions, and the corresponding monsters also have very powerful AI functions.

Minecraft is not the first sandbox game, but it is "the lowest requirement among 3D sandbox games" and is also "the only 3D one in small sandbox games".

This is the first to win.

It meets the needs of 3D and low-end configuration at the same time.

As a 3D game, MC rarely abandons the existing physics, architecture, materials science, dynamics, and astronomy. At the cost of angering the lord Niu, players can concentrate on realizing their huge architectural dreams in their hearts - which child has never dreamed of being a princess and living in a palace of 300 million square meters?

How many children have never dreamed of building a huge railway network, building the snowy plateau, and seeing all the flowers in Chang'an in one day? In this way, the digital Lego began to enter everyone's vision.

...

How popular was "Minecraft" in his previous life?

The official figure is that by 2021, there will be 600 million players around the world.

But no one can explain clearly how many of them are. And according to the above statement in the previous life, there seem to be 1.1 billion people playing "Minecraft" around the world, but most of them are playing pirated versions.

However, even if there are 600 million players as the official statistics are, this is already a terrifying number.

Only Tetris can match it in history—

Tetris has 3 billion players worldwide, and almost everyone has played Tetris.

"Minecraft" is divided into international servers and Chinese servers. The national server is represented by NetEase, and the number of registered users alone exceeds 200 million.

The biggest difference between national and international servers is that

The national server is free, while the international server sells 165 yuan soft girl coins. Even so, many players abandon the national server represented by NetEase and go to play the international server. The main reason is that NetEase is optimized more rubbishly.

And [the free one is the most expensive] Although the Chinese server does not rely on the game itself to charge, there are many paid props in it, which is also a point that has been criticized by players.

NetEase's version of "Minecraft" does not charge any fees and can be played directly, but the slow update speed has been criticized by players.

NetEase was not wrong at the beginning. It is normal to have a slow update speed. After all, NetEase can only update after the international version is updated, so there is no doubt about this.

However, what is most unacceptable is that the in-app purchase of NetEase version is a lot of things that need to be purchased in the seemingly free "Minecraft" and even some large-scale MODs require fees. This is not friendly to student players who are already financially struggling. Therefore, the popularity of NetEase version of "Minecraft" has dropped rapidly.

...

Cao Yang carefully described to Li Lanyun what kind of gameplay "Minecraft" is and what elements are there in the sandbox game.

After listening to Cao Yang's explanation, Li Lanyun fell into deep thought.

"Indeed, this gameplay sounds very attractive." Li Lanyun thought about it carefully and found that he had already begun to describe what Cao Yang had-

The free and open world was moved.

In this world, players can perform almost everything, constantly collecting resources to create a truly own [Minecraft World], and you can also visit others and invite others to visit [Your World].

The social functions undertaken by this game can be said to be too powerful.

"There are several benefits for pixel wind," said Cao Yang. "The first is that because of the younger age of pixel wind, it can bring more and more widespread people in. The audience of this game is much larger than all the games we have done before."

Your game style determines the size of the basic user group. The more unique and realistic you are, the fewer the audience will be.

And this kind of pixel-style game can be said to be popular all over the world, but it is just not very beautiful.

"Then, the second point is performance overhead. We want to make a world game with such high degree of freedom and random assembly and creation. It is actually the best to use pixel style.

One is that the combination has a high degree of freedom, and the other is that the performance overhead is less."

In fact, from Cao Yang's professional perspective as a gamer, "Minecraft" is very pleasing to do this-

First of all, in the initial version of the Pixel Wind game, all scene objects, including characters, monsters, and props, are made of blocks.

Pixels are simply too easy for art and programs to handle.

There are 6 faces in a square. If you achieve a game like "Assassin's Soul", a character may have tens of thousands of faces.

Art deals with 6 faces, which is a matter of minutes. It takes two weeks or even one month to process a model of tens of thousands of faces.

The consumption brought by the program is very small. The smaller the number of faces, the less overhead it will be to process. The more faces the more refined the number of faces, the greater the pressure on the program performance.

Moreover, pixel blocks are equivalent to playing Lego. The ways in which Lego can be spliced ​​and combined are very variable, and it is difficult to do this if it is replaced by non-pixel games.

The degree of freedom reaches the level of Zelda Breath of the Wild, which is actually equivalent to the official model of all the props combined in the game, so it is easier to splice blocks.

The freedom of "Minecraft" can be said to be the highest among all games, and you can almost do anything here.

"The most important thing is," said Cao Yang, "After this game is made, we will open the relevant production modules to players. Just like the editor of war3, players can edit in-game through the editors provided to them by Minecraft.

At the same time, the official will hold regular selection activities to absorb some excellent modules and become part of the official version.

This means that this game will be created by all the outstanding game developers around the world."

"Open the module?" Li Lanyun hesitated for a moment. Although war3 has this precedent, the official battle games will not be open to producers all over the world for production.

However, Cao Yang's design really broadened his entire horizon.

Li Lanyun is already conceiving a free world [led by players].

Players can create and upload their own modules, and other players can download modules through the official platform. These modules have more, richer and fun functions.
To be continued...