Lin You’s perception of games was completely overturned the first time he played *Journey* in his past life.
The intense yet gentle art style, using only a limited number of elements, created stunning visuals and awe-inspiring grand scenes.
No weapon or item system, no leveling up, monster fighting, or money-making.
The only controls were movement and jumping, triggering mechanisms. All you had to do was move forward, towards the snow mountain at the end, and witness everything on your journey.
The entire game used no dialogue, successfully shaping a magnificent and fluctuating plot through the changing scenery from the sand sea, underground, towers to the snow mountain, along with some ruins and remnants, giving a strong emotional impact.
This game had countless shining points: simple yet endlessly fun cape gliding, the gradual progression of levels, the destined chance encounters with other players, the emotional guidance and rendering, the epic background music… and so on.
Not large in size, not long in process, yet it allowed players to completely immerse themselves in the flow state it created, experiencing loneliness, Zen, encounters, and farewells.
Whether casual or core gamers, or even those playing a game for the first time, could easily experience the game’s fun and beauty.
This kind of work allowed Lin You to perfectly leverage his strengths and avoid weaknesses, avoiding a lot of cumbersome designs, and magnifying the two core points of “scene experience” and “travel feeling” tenfold or even a hundredfold.
Even just controlling a character to sandboard in the monitor brought such pure joy; if players could experience it in person, wouldn’t they be ecstatic! He even found himself looking forward to it.
But before starting work, he had to briefly respond to NetDragon.
Life hack: Before slapping someone, try to raise your hand as high as possible; this way, you can use your whole body’s strength when you slap.
It wouldn’t take much time anyway.
“Xiaomeng, help me post a status update on Lingxi.”
“Xiaomeng is here! Ready, what does Master want to post?”
“Although your words are insincere, and your blessings sarcastic, I still magnanimously accepted them. I hope you won’t cry too loudly in a few days.”
A monitor and a keyboard appeared in front of Xiaomeng, and she started typing rapidly.
In fact, Xiaomeng only needed to control her phone to directly input the content and then post it; she didn’t need this whole scene of typing.
To a certain extent, this scene was equivalent to a loading screen, completely unnecessary, pure waste of computing power…
Lin You sighed helplessly again: “Forget it, forget it, you do what makes you happy.”
“Xiaomeng is done! Does Master want Xiaomeng to read the comments?”
“Please absolutely don’t!” Lin You could imagine how chaotic the comments were without even looking; he didn’t want to make himself unhappy.
He didn’t plan to look at online comments until the new device was released.
Reality matched his guess perfectly.
This confident response made countless netizens very unhappy.
In their opinion, Lin You, a college student, already had black spots, and he also actively provoked, rubbing shoulders with a big company, insulting netizens. Now that the big company responded, the contrast was so great, the result was already obvious.
But he was stubborn, refusing to admit defeat.
And what online bullies liked most was forcing people to admit their mistakes.
So, as expected, the comment section was flooded again.
“Such a big face, still accepting blessings, are you worthy?”
“This is called, ‘not seeing the coffin, not shedding tears,’ not feeling the sharpness of the axe until your neck is broken.”
“I say, why bother with this, just sue for damage to reputation, see you in court.”
“Upstairs is right, we’ve seen too many of these kinds of people who are just trying to gain attention, they’ll immediately back down when they see a court summons!”
“@Lingxi Official, why haven’t you banned this person yet? Saving them for the New Year?”
Lingxi Official would certainly not ban Lin You. Large enterprises could easily see through the surface to the essence; NetDragon buying paid trolls, paying big Vs to set the rhythm, their intentions were obvious, their motives were impure.
Besides, for social platforms, right and wrong didn’t matter, only traffic mattered.
They watched the battle between NetDragon and Lin You escalate, traffic soaring, wishing they could directly give Lin You a two-year membership as a token of appreciation.
Banning? Impossible! Lin You ignored all of this and started working on *Journey* with Xiaomeng.
The first step was simple: with Xiaomeng’s help, slightly increase the neural signal strength, stimulate specific memory neural areas, copy and store all memories about *Journey*, and then Xiaomeng would replicate the scenes and build the initial framework.
Then moderately extend the spatial range. With the original game’s two or three-hour length, playing on a monitor might feel just right, but walking it in real life would be too compact.
After all, if you see the next objective from a high place, then walk for three minutes to reach it, then the next objective is five minutes away, then the next is four minutes…
The game might become a boring journey, always moving towards the next objective, ignoring the scenery in the distance, losing the mood, and greatly diminishing the fun.
So the distances needed adjusting, and the distribution of runes and murals needed fine-tuning. Guidance was needed, but it didn’t need to be too precise, allowing players to explore and immerse themselves.
After all, the “journey” was the meaning of it all.
After finishing this step, Lin You needed to adjust the music according to the changes in the spatial range, making the music adapt to the changes in space and enhance the atmosphere.
Once the game world was built, the hard work was just beginning.
Because at this point, the world was still empty, the sun had no warmth, the sand wouldn’t flow, the wind wouldn’t blow the clothes; it was still a soulless world.
And the next step was the most crucial: the injection of feeling.
Xiaomeng found the most fitting parts from Lin You’s sensory memories and injected them into the game scenes.
Lin You stood there, feeling the sun’s warmth, the dryness of the desert, the flow of fine sand, the hot wind carrying rough sand blowing through his hair…
“Wait, Xiaomeng, reduce the heat by one-third, reduce the sand blown by the wind to one-tenth. And the desert must be clean, sand can’t get into clothes and shoes. Clothes can be dirty, but no sand, we must ensure the player’s comfort.”
After all, they were inviting players to play the game, to “play,” not to practice asceticism. Ascetics were a different story.
“Okay! Xiaomeng is modifying it!”
The softness of the sand, the depth of sinking into quicksand, the height of jumps and glides, the speed and wind changes at different heights, the movement method and intensity of vibration after the interaction of mechanisms, everything needed careful adjustment.
Otherwise, one overlooked detail could cause problems.
For example, when Lin You was testing the long scarf glide, he got his arms and legs tangled in the scarf in mid-air, and his gliding method was to vibrate the cape with his arms.
As a result, he fell headfirst from a height of more than twenty meters, only able to scream while futilely waving his arms, scaring himself half to death.
(End of Chapter)