deltrittennovels #482 - The project has another weird BUG!
#482 - The project has another weird BUG!
And so, under Liu Mengyuan's leadership, the entire team seemed to bathe in the spring breeze, reinvigorated once more. Everyone chimed in, dividing the work, and began diligently crafting the game content with tireless effort.
During this process, Liu Mengyuan would occasionally inspect everyone's work like a casual observer, offering appropriate guidance. The atmosphere of the entire team became much more lively, and even the company's corridors and lounges gradually filled with whispered discussions about the game system.
"I say, should we increase the HP of this Boss a bit more? That way, players will have to grind it more often, and they'll have to spend a lot of money for the ultimate weapon."
"Great idea! And we should also make the drop rate extremely harsh, so that everyone suffers to get orange equipment!"
Under Liu Mengyuan's leadership, 'Whale Simulator: Laid-back Life' seemed poised to stage a two-pronged approach of 'glorious content' and 'external exploitation marketing'...
Inspired by Liu Mengyuan, the entire project team seemed to rekindle their fighting spirit, and began tirelessly adding various interesting content and game mechanics to the game. They hoped to add more fun to the upcoming 'exploitative experience' in this way.
First, in terms of the combat system, they followed the concept of 'making players linger for ultimate equipment' and made many innovations to the original design:
For example, they made extremely large adjustments to the values of BOSS monsters: Although the HP of ordinary mobs was very low, from the fifth stage onwards, the HP and defense values of all elite monsters and BOSSes soared to terrifying levels. Some BOSSes even had tens of millions of hit points, making it impossible for ordinary players to kill them with single-player auto-attacks.
"In order to obtain those orange equipment, players must exhaust their resources and painstakingly grind materials, and then constantly strengthen their equipment," the system designers explained. "We estimate that the equipment will have to be strengthened at least 20 times before its level can overcome the defense of these monsters."
At the same time, the setting for weapon and equipment drops has also become extremely cruel. It is understood that the drop rate of all rare orange equipment has been reduced without limit, and even if orange equipment is dropped, its attributes are far from ideal. In order to have a real ultimate divine weapon, players will have to repeatedly strengthen their weapons dozens or even hundreds of times with a large amount of money.
"We designed it this way to make players feel like they are being ruthlessly slaughtered!" the engineer said triumphantly. "Without spending thousands upon thousands of dollars, it is impossible to collect a complete set of ultimate divine weapons. When players are forced to pay again and again for the orange equipment they desire, that feeling of being physically and mentally exhausted and helpless is the real 'feeling of being exploited'!"
In addition to the combat system, the plot design also put a lot of effort into the 'exploitative experience'. According to the producer, the game's main storyline is divided into hundreds of side quests, and before each side quest can be completed, players must spend money to purchase some 'advanced levels' or 'advanced equipment' to unlock it.
"In the main storyline, when players are forced to pay to see the following content, I believe they will definitely feel the despair of being completely 'content-kidnapped'!" the plot designer said. "But in the end, when they finally understand the whole story and see the metaphors that satirize social reality, I believe they will definitely applaud!"
At the same time, the game's social system also focuses on allowing players to experience the joy of 'dog-abusing social interaction'. The system stipulates that if you want to chat with other players, you must first purchase a certain amount of 'magic chat stones' to prepare. Moreover, even if you buy chat stones with money, if you don't upgrade to a certain friend level, you can't turn on the voice function and can only use text to strike up conversations.
"We want to consciously cultivate that 'social anxiety' experience!" the designer explained with a smile. "We hope to force players to spend money like crazy for the sake of friendship through this suffocating feeling of half-communication!"
In addition, the game's character images have also been designed with 'exploitative' elements. To be fair, the entire game, except for the slightly eye-catching female character images, is basically large-scale oriented. The swordsman character is bare-chested and heroic, while the mage character is only wearing a top and boots, and the lower body is completely naked.
"The current players, to put it bluntly, are already aesthetically fatigued with all kinds of large-scale clothing and body reactions," the girl in charge of art said. "So we can only start from the extreme and adopt a marketing strategy of 'using sex as bait' to force players to buy various rare fashion props in order to appreciate more exciting clothing or figures!"
Of course, these are just the tip of the iceberg. As a masterpiece that claims to 'reshape the exploitative experience', other aspects of the game have also been designed by the team to the fullest. For example, the achievement system requires money to unlock, the pet system requires paying for maintenance fees, and the guild function must also be purchased. In short, every aspect of the game seems to be 'exploiting' the player's wallet.
"We spent more than half a year designing enough 'exploitation points' to drain players for each system," the game director said with a smile. "As long as it is released, I believe there will definitely be a large number of players who will experience the pleasure of being personally exploited, followed by word-of-mouth promotion and a long-selling hit!"
And so, with Liu Mengyuan's strong support, Lu Yu's two-pronged strategy of 'exploitation marketing' and 'game content contrast' was slowly implemented to the end. As the release date approached, whether this game would achieve another extreme in 'exploitative experience' would soon be revealed...
Just as the entire team was tirelessly adding various 'exploitative elements' to the game, an embarrassing situation arose - rampant bugs, which almost caused them to fall short.
In fact, from the beginning, Lu Yu set an unprecedented slogan of 'lying flat': In order to reflect the theme of 'low-cost exploitation' of the game, he required all members to achieve 'the minimum requirements during the production process, and absolutely no overtime is allowed'.
"We want to create a standard 'worker exploitation' environment!" he said. "We must clearly not make any more contributions to the company, just like the workers on the factory assembly line, stop work and go home immediately after eight hours!"
At first, everyone was still skeptical. After all, for a game of good quality, teams usually need to work overtime and make a lot of hard efforts. But after following Lu Yu's concept of 'to show the feeling of being exploited, you must personally make exploited products', everyone once made up their minds to 'lie flat'.
As a result, something went wrong quickly. As the game development progressed, more and more bugs began to wreak havoc in various systems, affecting the normal game experience. But when faced with such serious quality problems, no one on the team was willing to work overtime to deal with them.
"That's not possible! How can we provide extra labor to the company?" the planner shook his head. "That would violate the original intention of lying flat!"
"That's right, that's right, didn't President Lu just want to create a state of employees being exploited to the extreme," the programmer echoed. "You want us to fix the bugs, doesn't that mean we obediently listen and become honest workers?"
So, gradually, the atmosphere of the entire team became somewhat slack and lax. During meeting discussions, everyone didn't mention the game's own bugs and performance issues, and the whole process was spent nagging about Lu Yu's theory of 'how workers should improve their revolutionary awareness' and so on.
And whenever someone mentioned the progress and quality of the game, someone would arrogantly retort: "TMD capitalists are exploiting us again! Have you calculated how much money we make per hour, penny by penny? They don't even pay overtime!"
The most embarrassing thing is that even the artists are no exception. They simply stopped polishing and optimizing the 3D models regularly, and only completed a 'preliminary' model before hastily putting it into the scene.
"We are standard assembly line workers, okay? We'll do whatever the capitalists ask us to do," someone said理直气壮地说, "If we start working overtime privately here, what's the difference between that and being exploited?"
In this way, under the complete dominance of the 'lying flat worker' concept, the game's quality problems became increasingly serious, but no one on the entire team was willing to stand up and solve them.
In the end, this situation was no less than a huge BUG - the facial details and animation effects of all art models in the game showed all kinds of bizarre distortions and distortions! In the plot, you may see the male protagonist suddenly open his mouth with an exaggerated strange face, and even some characters twist into a ball when walking.
"Does this game want to show the exploited game experience, or the exploited worker experience?" some players sighed after seeing it, "Why do the game characters look so Low?"
Faced with the impact of this BUG, the team was once in an uproar. Some people have realized that if this kind of hard injury occurs after the game is launched, then all previous efforts will be in vain.
"Everyone cheer up! Our game will suffer if this continues," someone yelled anxiously, "If we don't hurry up to optimize it, even if we do enough exploitation experience, players won't buy it!"
"But you want us to work overtime to optimize the game, doesn't that violate President Lu's requirements?" another person asked in return, "We should insist on being a standard exploited worker, okay?"
Just when everyone was arguing, Liu Mengyuan stood up in time and gave everyone a 'compromise' suggestion that made everyone suddenly realize:
"Everyone, I understand now. We shouldn't fight against Lu Yu's claims, that would easily put us in a passive position. Why not change our thinking and secretly work hard to make the game good, too!"
"Just treat it as an opportunity for everyone to give full play to their residual heat. You see, he keeps saying that he wants to make the game into that kind of exploited product, doesn't he just hope that we can make it well with our hearts!"
"So now working overtime to optimize the game is just secretly supporting Lu Yu's concept. As long as we don't show it and do it quietly, I believe that when the game is launched, everyone will definitely be very happy!"
Under Liu Mengyuan's mediation, the originally tense atmosphere gradually eased. Those who had doubts about the 'lying flat' concept finally rekindled their fighting spirit.
"Mengyuan is right, we secretly make the game better, which can be regarded as unintentionally fulfilling Lu Yu's wish!"
"Let's do it, everyone take time in private to work hard, don't let that guy look down on us!"
So, under Liu Mengyuan's call, the entire team secretly launched a 'secret movement'. Everyone squeezed out private time to optimize and add various details to the game without attracting attention. Some people worked overtime to debug the code, while others quietly sculpted exquisite models.
And with everyone's tireless efforts, the game quality was finally pulled back unknowingly, avoiding the serious BUG that affected the experience. Lu Yu seemed unaware of all this, and the whole process was carried out secretly behind the scenes.
The latest novel is first published on Liu 9 Shu Ba!
And so, as the release date approached, the game 'Gold Krypton Simulator: Lying Flat Survival' seemed to be secretly given a dual meaning of 'exploitation' and 'being exploited' in terms of both content and experience...
Faced with the serious BUG of distorted and deformed character models in the game, the entire team was once lost. Fortunately, Chu Xiong, the company's technical director, stood up in time and guided everyone to a magical path that could perfectly solve the BUG.
"Everyone, we have an artificial intelligence artifact that can help us cleverly package this BUG into a game play!" Chu Xiong announced, "That is Melissa AI, it is good at turning all kinds of accidents into game mechanics!"
It turned out that Melissa AI is a game artificial intelligence system independently developed by the company. It is trained to identify all content in the game that seems to be a BUG or abnormal, and automatically analyze whether this content can be reasonably woven into new game play.
Once Melissa AI determines that it is feasible, it will immediately generate corresponding new rule settings for the game, turning the original BUG or anomaly into a new and interesting game mode. For the R\u0026D team, this is undoubtedly a time-saving and labor-saving solution to bugs.
"In this way, we don't have to worry about the problem of abnormal character models anymore," Chu Xiong said with certainty, "As long as we hand the game over to Melissa AI, it can automatically package these 'abnormalities' into a brand new game experience!"
After saying that, he immediately started the Melissa AI system and imported the entire game into it. In the next few hours, this AI began to quickly analyze every abnormal content in the game, and judge and classify it.
In the end, Melissa AI made an unexpected classification judgment on the BUG of abnormal game character models: It believed that this distorted and deformed behavior pattern can be completely interpreted as a brand new "expressionist" game experience!
Therefore, based on this judgment, Melissa AI generated the following new rules for the game:
"Expressionism Mode: In this game, all character models will show different degrees of exaggerated deformation in specific situations to reflect and show their inner emotional fluctuations at that time."
"Specifically, if a character is currently in a state of anger or high tension, their face and body will exhibit bizarre distortions, representing inner turmoil; conversely, if the character is in a peaceful or relaxed state, the model will remain normal, expressing inner harmony."
"Players can gauge the pressure and emotional intensity a character is experiencing by observing the degree of deformation in the character model. When the model deforms to a certain extreme, it indicates that the character has lost emotional control to the limit."
After seeing the rules generated by Melissa AI, the entire team couldn't help but marvel. The character model bug, which was originally considered a significant flaw, had been magically packaged into a brand-new 'expressionistic experience'!
"This is simply subverting our understanding of game interfaces and visual presentation!" someone exclaimed. "To be able to intuitively feel the inner world through character deformation is incredibly creative!"
"Exactly, isn't the selling point of our game to reflect the feelings of the exploited class? Now, showcasing the inner ups and downs and struggles through this form will undoubtedly push the immersive experience of exploitation to a new peak!"
In this way, Melissa AI cleverly used artificial intelligence to transform a previously troublesome bug into a completely new and avant-garde gaming experience. And with the help of the entire team, this gameplay experience, permeated with 'expressionism,' was incorporated into the final version of 'Gold Mine Simulator.'
In the story mode, whenever a character faces story pressure or suffers severe blows, their model will exaggerate into a distorted, grotesque face, and even the body lines will be twisted almost beyond recognition. Only when the story pressure is relieved will their model return to normal.
Players can observe the degree of character deformation to feel the magnitude of the mental stress the character is under. If the deformation has reached its extreme, it means that the character's emotions have reached the edge of losing control.
At the same time, the same expressionistic technique is incorporated into the combat mode. When a character is in a passive defensive position, their model will deform into a shrinking and twisted posture, representing fear and anxiety; while in active offense, the model will transform into a hideous monster image, interpreting inner rage and ferocity.
In short, through Melissa AI's repackaging, the seemingly low-level BUG in the game has become a huge creative bonus, providing players with a unique inner experience interaction.
The staff couldn't help but applaud this, saying: "It's truly the magical use of artificial intelligence! It not only saved us a lot of optimization time but also gave our game such a brilliant selling point!"
"That's right, this idea of reflecting the inner world through visual deformation will surely be praised. I believe this will definitely become a humanized highlight in our exploitation-themed game!"