nycdaug Chapter 11 Plants vs. Zombies Re-planted Version
Chapter 11 Plants vs. Zombies Re-planted Version
Plants vs. Zombies, as the name suggests, is a game about a bunch of plants fighting zombies.
One day, a zombie virus outbreak occurs, and we, as the protagonists of the story, only have some magical plants at our disposal.
The terms "replanted version" and "remastered version" are synonymous, a small pun.
Tang She frowned more and more as he looked at the game.
This game looks ridiculously simple. Let alone 50, it could be made completely for 10 if not outsourced.
How can this be?
Tang She would not accept such a thing.
Of course, there are expensive ways to do things, such as shooting live-action cutscenes, using AAA-level art assets, and having a symphony orchestra record the game's theme song.
However, it goes without saying that Ren Wei would never agree to such an excessive request.
If you can't achieve a 3A level, you can still do it by spending as much as possible within your budget.
But that's still far from enough.
With a budget of 50, he could spend it all even if he rolled around in a tangle of money, as long as he didn't make any unreasonable demands.
You can't lower the quality by endlessly piling on content, because if the quantity goes up, people's requirements for quality will actually increase.
Completely clueless, Tang She could only log onto the largest gaming forum in China to see if he could find any inspiration there.
Discussions about the game "Three Kingdoms Kill" remain heated, but this is, after all, the largest gaming forum in China.
There is still a group of people who are not interested in the Three Kingdoms Kill game and are discussing their own games.
Tang She flipped through the posts, but still couldn't find any inspiration. Just then, Tang She came across a post with a "featured" tag after its title.
[The year is already halfway over, who is your pick for the Golden Defense Award winner?]
Tang She clicked directly into the post, where he saw a long article and a voting interface.
1. Age of Flint. The latest canned game from Fishpond Games. Forget the screenshots, if you ask me to find any difference between this game and their other games developed in recent years, I can't. Sigh, but at least it can be considered a game.
2. Xiaoyao Ke (逍遥客). With rising domestic consumption power, several shoddy games that exploit the nostalgia of Chinese gamers emerge every year. They pay foreign game reviewers to say a few good things, and then easily fleece the Chinese market. Ha!
3. Shadow Reconstruction. The author's main job is game reviews, and given Tangren Games' popularity in China, their new game is a must-play. After testing the game, only three thoughts remained: Where is the shadow? Where is the reconstruction? Where is Tangren Games' mother?
4. Illusion. Enough said, Teacher Han is awesome!
5. Three Kingdoms Kill. If this game wasn't developed by Tangren Media, it probably wouldn't be on this list.
Apart from the two games produced by Tangren Games, Tang Shuo knew absolutely nothing about the other three games. He randomly selected the first one, completed the vote, and unlocked the function to view the vote count.
I don’t know, I’m scared.
The fourth-ranked game, "Fantasy," far surpassed other games with 96.7% of the votes.
The votes for Three Kingdoms Kill barely reached double digits, while the votes for Shadow Reconstruction were relatively high, but still only accounted for about one percent of the total votes.
Why can others get a flood of negative reviews, but I can't?
I want to see what this "Illusion" is all about.
A direct search for "Illusion" on the forum yielded fewer posts than Tang She had imagined, only three to five pages.
The topmost post alone had over a hundred pages of replies.
The post's title was: "Fantasy, a live stream: When will I be able to escape this planet?"
Tang Shuo clicked on the post, then selected to only show posts by the poster, and began reading.
As the title suggests, this is a live stream post of a game, broadcasting the entire process of the poster "Han Zhiyun" playing the game "Fantasy".
At the beginning, the game's protagonist, controlled by the poster, is in a deep pit and needs to collect enough materials to build a ladder to climb out of the pit.
The protagonist also has his own unique health bar called "battery".
All actions consume electricity.
As the battery level decreases, the field of vision will become increasingly blurry.
Once the vision becomes blurred to a certain extent, the game can no longer continue, and the player can only watch as the robot's battery runs out and the game ends.
And once the game ends, it has to be restarted, and all the previous efforts will be for naught.
Most people fail at this hurdle, but the poster did not give up and, with great effort, successfully climbed out of the pit.
In Chapter Two, the protagonist needs to find rocket blueprints in the desert, then collect materials and electricity to start the rocket and leave the planet.
Whenever the poster succeeds, the game will go into a black screen state, and the official team will urgently release a new patch.
Every time the poster finishes updating the game, what awaits him is not a rocket launch, but a new target with several times the material consumption of the previous target and a reset of the task progress.
The poster did not give up and completed the in-game tasks time and time again through hard work until the demand for each material reached 10,000.
However, he did not give up. Instead, he wrote a short script to continue the game's content.
After he finally collected all the materials to build the rocket, the system told him that he also needed to collect materials to repair the 3D printer.
The amount of materials needed to repair this printer is ten times that required to build a rocket.
With the help of the editor and the scripts he wrote, the poster completed the "task" once again.
Of course, that's not all; he's about to face new tasks and objectives that can't be accomplished with scripts and mods.
However, none of this could stop Han Zhiyun. Through his own efforts, he overcame the difficulties posed by the game development team.
In the end, even the official team, who had been engaging in verbal sparring in the game's comment section, chose to concede defeat. Compared to the original poster, it seemed the official team was too lazy to even change a few lines of code.
Our game's protagonist stands on a simple white rocket and utters a line that shocks everyone.
"Hey, congratulations on beating the game."
There is no one-to-one replica of the solar system, no masterpieces far ahead of their time, and not even an animation of a rocket launch.
This left Tang She completely bewildered.
Can this even be considered a game?
After turning off the option to only show posts by the original poster, Tang She decided to check out the players' replies.
"The trolls won, the fantasy is dead."
"Seeing everyone cursing it makes me feel relieved. There are different levels of trash games, but Huan is different; it's pure crap."
"How many marketing accounts are supported by a trash game and a hardcore gamer?"
"The developers are geniuses. They should have used the time to criticize players and brag to make more games."
Players' anger stems not only from the highly repetitive and perfunctory content, but also from the creators' boastful talk and sarcasm.
"So what they hate is sarcasm, half-finished products, and highly repetitive content?"
Tang She continued scrolling through the replies, pondering to himself.
But Plants vs. Zombies isn't that kind of game; in fact, you could say it's very well-developed. To exceed the budget, Tang She had to add even more features.
Just then, as Tang She clicked on the next page, a "GG" message suddenly appeared on the page.
"If you're a true brother, come and fight me! I'm Zha Zha Hui, waiting for you in Shacheng tonight at 8 PM!"
As Tang She moved the mouse to the red X in the upper right corner, just as he was about to close the webpage, something suddenly occurred to him.
I understand now, that's how it works. Watch me do it!