Text/Black Cat
Lead
Galaxy Castlevania games believe that many players will not be strangers. In the middle of last year, a "Shadow Torch City" allowed domestic players to see the technical strength of the domestic development team, and also made this ancient game category enter the vision of mass players.
Compared to other game genres, the traditional Galaxy Castlevania is relatively hardcore, and the combat and storyline are not too prominent. However, with the development of recent years, the new galaxy castlevania game that integrates more elements has gradually opened up the market.
Recently, the game teahouse interviewed a domestic indie game called "Awakening Blade", and the core members of the development team are from the industry "veterans" who have been in the industry for 15 years. On the basis of the traditional Galactic Castlevania, they have made a lot of innovations, greatly enhancing the game narrative and combat, introducing the setting of parallel spaces, and adding sci-fi elements to allow players to get a different game experience.
Teahouse: Please introduce yourself briefly.
Hansen: Hello everyone, I am Hansen, the producer of Awakening Blade, who has worked for a first-line game developer in China and is also a "veteran" who has been in the game industry for 15 years. I originally chose the game industry because I loved games and could take interest as a job, which was typical of "pain and happiness".
Teahouse: What kind of game is Awakening Blade?
Hansen: Awakening Blade is a Galactic Castlevania type action game developed by Black Pigeon Studios, but we have innovated a bit on the basis of the traditional Galactic Castlevania, creating a huge sci-fi worldview where technology and magic blend, while maintaining the classic Galactic Castlevania gameplay and feel, and strengthening the action and story parts of the game. This Galaxy City is the first step towards our first-line action game development team, and I believe that in the near future, we will be able to achieve the goal of "making high-quality action games the first echelon and harvesting the favor of players around the world".
Teahouse: How is the team so far?
Hansen: There are three core founders at the moment, and in addition to me, there are two iron brothers who have been in the teens. The three of us entered the game development industry around 2004, with more than 15 years of experience, which is also a wave of long-term employment. We also have two new classmates in the studio, and now we are a relatively stable team of five.
Teahouse: You've been in the game industry for 15 years, have you had any experiences or products that have impressed you?
Hansen: We started the game industry in 2004, when it was also a very early stage of Chinese games. Including from Java, to smartphones, stand-alone, online games to today's indie games, we have almost all experienced it. There have also been many projects, including when we did MMO, when the monthly recharge could exceed one million, the highest DAU when doing chess and cards exceeded 300,000, and the daily recharge reached 1.2 million. However, each era has the characteristics of each era, so it is not easy to make a general comparison.
If you say that the more impressive product, it may be "Journey to the West", when "The Big Boss" was just on fire, we did "Journey to the West", the art investment alone was 1.2 million, and now you can see a lot of art materials on the market, which we made at that time.
Teahouse: Why did you choose to do indie games?
Hansen: Mainly because I've been in the business for so long, I really love games, and I've been in business for a few years, and I want to start a company to do what I really like. We ourselves prefer action games, we have done many similar products before, we are also very familiar with this category, we have done a more detailed analysis, we think that the development threshold of action games is relatively high, we have the confidence to be able to achieve a relatively high quality, can screen out a lot of competitors, more likely to stand out from a large number of independent games.
Teahouse: What do you think is the essence of Galaxy Castlevania? How is this game genre understood?
Hansen: Actually, in the early Galactic City games, the main gameplay was based on collecting. However, today's players prefer the fast-food game experience, so the modern Galaxy Castlevania will appropriately add more guidance, while greatly enhancing the thrill of fighting in the game. Therefore, on this basis, we have strengthened the story of the game to a certain extent, while strengthening the combat experience, so that the player can play more purposefully.
In addition, I think the essence of Galaxy Castlevania has a few points, one is the ability lock, players will continue to unlock new abilities as they explore the entire world, and then use new abilities to explore new areas, which is basically a general framework for the overall gameplay of Galaxy Castlevania.
The other is exploration, if you think of the map of Galaxy Castlevania as a small open world, then the exploration of each area is actually very free, players can follow their own ideas, the entire area can be explored, which is very different from the traditional linear game.
Teahouse: Compared to other Galaxy Castlevania games, what are the innovations or features of Awakening Blade?
Hansen: We've combined a lot of the strengths of Galaxy City games in recent years, such as a certain enhancement in narrative and combat, providing a variety of ways to move quickly, avoiding the player from repeatedly running the map. In addition, we have added a parallel world setting, which will appear in the game with some time fragment items, allowing players to experience different plots on the same map through exploration on time fragments.
In terms of combat, we have designed a relatively simple battle mode to reduce the output operation of the player, avoid remembering moves or wrong moves, players can combine a lot of move changes through two buttons, with the free switching of a variety of weapons, can choose the right routine in battle, thereby greatly improving the pleasure of the battle.
Teahouse: The protagonist of Awakening Blade is a woman, which is rare in the traditional Galaxy Castlevania game.
Hansen: Actually, we created an alternate worldview with a lot of characters in it, and we just think that the female protagonist is more suitable for connecting the whole script, and understanding the entire game worldview through her perspective, the player will have a more sense of substitution.
Another factor is that there are more male players in action games, and the expressiveness of female characters will be more in line with their aesthetics.
Teahouse: There are a lot of text fragments in the game to supplement the plot and setting, but the traditional Galaxy Castlevania game is actually not too focused on the plot, how to look at this problem?
Hansen: The traditional Galaxy Castlevania has actually evolved a lot so far. I don't think it's that galaxy castlevania games don't care about plot, but how to use the plot to make the whole world more full, so that the player can understand what I'm doing, what I'm going to do, and make him more targeted.
In fact, we put a lot of fragmented information to allow players to understand more events in the game in a variety of ways, in the traditional galactic castlevania, many times the player is running from point A to point B, the process is actually very boring. If you can use a variety of ways to let players get a story that matches the environment at that time, such as a big war here, a group of people living here, etc., players will get interesting information at any time in the process of exploration, so that the whole process of exploration will not be so boring.
Teahouse: At the end of the Demo, there will be a side story of a little girl, and it is not common to do a side story alone in Galaxy Castlevania, why do you do that?
Hansen: We did one of these branches to enrich the player's experience during the exploration, and the other way to make the player more aware of our entire story. For example, our little girl side line, in fact, in the demo is not completely over, it may run through the plot of the next few chapters, we can through a wealth of side quests, with a large number of collections and fragments of information in the scene, so that players can go deeper into the background and full picture of the game world, so that players can better understand the characters and understand the story.
Teahouse: In the game, I found that there are a lot of collection elements, including some memes and the like, which is somewhat similar to the message of the soul class.
Hansen: Yes, this is similar to the Message of Dark Souls, the player can collect the emoticons, and simply spell this emoji to make a road sign for other players to see. Of course, this road sign does not support custom text, but we designed a lot of interesting expressions, players can understand the expression, design some specific road signs in the game, for example, some players who like to spoof can put some false information, and some more honest players, you can put some useful information, equivalent to providing a weak social play.
Teahouse: Awakening Blade doesn't seem to support multiplayer games, so how did you implement this feature?
Hansen: We'll do a cloud save, and through the server we'll grab the information boards that the player left behind, and then sync it to other players on the network. There will be some weak networking features, try not to let the player network in real time, he may grab some from the server every time he enters the game and put it into the current game.
Teahouse: I noticed that the combat system in the game is very rich, including bounce, stop,each weapon has a separate skill move, what efforts have been made by the development team?
Hansen: Action games themselves require a long period of accumulation, and we have done a lot of action products before, so we have done a lot of accumulation in development and auxiliary tools, and these tool materials are convenient for us to make adjustments. Each action in the game we can accurately design a special effect for each frame, including sound effects, collision frames, etc. Each frame can be designed with a different hit effect.
Teahouse: The art style in the game is very distinctive, with sharp contrasts in the style of each area, including a scene with all eyes very Cthulhu style.
Hansen: "Awakening blade" itself is a dark fairy tale type story that combines technological and magical elements, so at that time we felt that we should show the atmosphere of fairy tales as much as possible in the art style. Therefore, the colors in the game look more vivid, and will not have the darker feeling like other games.
But initially we considered that it was a dark fairy tale in itself, so we designed some Cthulhu-style scenes to make the style of the whole game not seem so abrupt. The characters and monsters in the game, we have adopted a more realistic design, not a cartoon rendering style, in order to let players have a more sense of involvement in watching the story and game experience.
Teahouse: Galaxy Castlevania game will have a strict definition of each area, including the environment and art of each area will have obvious changes, how you distinguish between areas in the game.
Hansen: In the game, each scene area corresponds to a story, through this story, it will have a general scene description, we will use this description to personalize the scene design, and then the style of this scene is fixed first, it can be said that each scene we will have a separate scene original painting to design it, rather than just casually taking the quality to spell out the scene so simple.
Teahouse: What is the current development progress of the game, how long has it been developed, and when will it be online?
Hansen: We have been in development for more than 10 months, the development progress has been about 40% complete, we will try to launch on most of the game platforms within next year, and we hope that all of you who like Galaxy Castlevania games will continue to pay attention.