Recently, a number of domestic mobile games with the theme of cultivating immortals have been released online, and "My Sword Diary" is one of the most eye-catching ones. "My Sword Diary" is a monster comprehension card mobile game developed by Yuefu Interactive Entertainment based on Cocos Creator. It was launched on all platforms in May, and the turnover exceeded 50 million in the first week.
"My Yujian Diary" is the first work created by Yuefu Interactive Entertainment founded by the core team led by Cheng Liangqi (Old Wolf), the original chief producer of the "Small Three" series.
The project was established in 2020, and the research and development cycle is close to three years. As an exploratory comprehension card game mainly played by young people, the concept of "monsters also cultivate truth" was put forward. Different from traditional comprehension, which takes "people" as the main body, in this work, monsters are the main force of cultivating immortals. Players will lead a group of monsters to practice and practice.
Pushing pictures through the main line every day, developing cards and solving puzzles through experience plots are the two core gameplays of "My Sword Diary".
In the early stage of the game, players can first learn various skills and gradually understand the gameplay of the game by following the main task, so as to bring a better game experience in the later stage.
Of course, the tasks of the game are divided into main tasks, side tasks and combat tasks. After completing the tasks, you can get a lot of gold coins and experience points, and you will also encounter adventures and treasure boxes to help players quickly upgrade and unlock more resources and skills.
In terms of game combat, the core combat is an automatic turn-based system, with five enemies and five players each acting in order.
Different from traditional self-cultivation fighting alone, the player leads four monsters to fight, and the monsters of the four tribes in the world can be matched freely, and can be matched with a variety of fighting styles such as group attack suppression, single-point blasting, poisonous fire double attack, etc.
As a game with the core slogan of "cultivating immortals with pets", "My Sword Diary" has designed rich content for players and demon spirits.
For example, the five development goals such as the sword seal and the natal magic weapon correspond to different gameplays, which are especially attractive for players who are familiar with the theme of cultivating immortals.
It is even possible to cultivate the demon spirit as "another self". Most of the demon spirits come from the "Shan Hai Jing", and their skills and vertical paintings have certain textual research.
In addition, the game also incorporates a magnificent large-scale map experience gameplay, with a high degree of freedom of exploration, and supports players to explore the large world map to find adventures. It is hoped that the design will allow players to bid farewell to the boring meditating on-hook, lying, sitting, handstand... Even sleeping is practicing.
It can be said that "My Yujian Diary" has received extensive attention from the industry, the market, and players from the closed beta to the official launch. What are the creative and R&D concepts behind the game? We interviewed the project team of Yuefu Interactive Entertainment "My Sword Diary" and talked about the story behind the game development——
Make a cultivating card game that makes players happy
First, the interviewed team is asked to give a brief self-introduction.
We are the "My Sword Diary" project team of Yuefu Interactive Entertainment. Most of the team members are the main creators of the original "Three Kingdoms" series of games (including planning, art, technology, publishing, etc.). Everyone has worked together for many years, some even more than 10 years, and there is a solid foundation of trust between them.
At the same time, the team has also absorbed many senior players in the game industry to work with us to develop their favorite game projects.
Please introduce the R&D team and project background of "My Yujian Diary".
Originally, I wanted to do a small project of a text-based comprehension game. On the one hand, I would run the team and go online quickly; on the other hand, it could also meet my personal preferences-many people in the team like comprehension themes, including Laolang.
However, the suspension of the version number later disrupted our plan, and finally we were forced to make it into a medium-to-large project, which is now "Yujian Diary", and the team size has changed from more than ten people in the original DEMO period to the current scale of sixty or seventy people; the development cycle is close to three years.
Why did the team choose the theme of cultivating immortals, how to understand cultivating immortals games, and what are the gameplay and highlights of "My Sword Diary" that attract players in similar games?
From the boss to the producer, to the members of the main creative team, everyone is a deep user of Xiuxian novels and animations (the boss, Lao Lang, was the first to write Xiuxian novels), so he hit it off and chose this theme.
Xiuxian in "My Sword Diary" is more of a power system and an expression of the concept of worldview. We are actively trying to re-express the theme of cultivating immortals, and completely find a new way to express the content, making it more joyful and relaxed, so that young people like it more. This is also one of the current trends in mainstream comprehension games.
In traditional card games, the main plot revolves around linear levels. In order to adapt to the theme of cultivation, we changed the linear level into a large map for free exploration, which can also be considered as a small world of cultivation.
Yujian is actually a cultivating immortal card, but it is different from the orthodox and serious cultivating theme. Yujian is younger and more joyful in terms of art and theme expression, and is more in line with the demands of young players today.
In the large map, there are not only main storylines for players to experience, but also resource points such as minerals and herbs to explore.
In addition, there are many random events on the map. For example, when opening the treasure chest, you may encounter guardian monsters and enter the battle; you may also encounter traps and puzzles that need to be solved.
Through these designs, the game experience is as close as possible to the experience of cultivating immortals that users are familiar with, creating a relatively real and immersive world of cultivation.
In terms of different themes, Yu Jian Diary's main label "monsters also cultivate truth" overturns the previous concept that cultivating immortals is a single person fighting alone, and makes the concept that cultivating immortals is "a carnival of a group of people (monsters)", and reinterprets some monsters and strange beasts in Chinese myths and stories.
"Cultivation" is essentially an RPG development system that emphasizes the linear growth of individuals, so in related works, except for the protagonist and a few people, others lack recognition.
But this is contrary to the design of the card game, which needs to focus on "multi-role and multi-person growth" rather than a certain individual.
Therefore, how to balance the relationship between comprehension themes and card categories has become another major problem in the early stage of research and development.
Fortunately, when I was working on "Three Kingdoms", I designed a similar protagonist system. It is independent of the conventional card development and can meet the player's needs for individual linear growth.
Therefore, this accumulation was applied to "My Sword Diary", and a series of adjustments were made to the subject matter, increasing its proportion in the cultivation system and highlighting the sense of growth brought about by comprehension.
Based on this consideration, the game also appropriately reduces the depth of combat gameplay, avoiding too cumbersome operations and too much decision-making cost, so that players can focus on the growth of the cultivation system: continuously improve their own realm, refine stronger magic weapons, and collect more mental methods to satisfy their fantasies about the subject matter.
What kind of game experience or feeling does the team hope players can get from "My Sword Diary"?
The core is to let players experience a joyful immortal cultivation game, because similar immortal cultivation products have been launched together this year, most of which are orthodox immortal cultivation, with a lot of jargon.
So we had to change our approach. At the beginning we set the tone of cultivating immortals with ease, but later found that the direction of ease was too broad. Some people referred to novels, and some referred to TV dramas. Everyone could not agree on it.
But if you are happy, everyone will soon reach a consensus on how to be funny. For example, after the player finishes the first battle, the protagonist will say "Finally won, the five of us are really good (I am the best)."
When the player receives the hang-up experience, the following will display "During the few hours you left the game to fish, you got..."
At the same time, visually, we also used some interesting emotional faces of the characters, and some real-time animations in the big world map to increase the expressiveness of the story.
The game has achieved quite good results at the beginning of its launch. What is the current operation progress and data? What are your plans for the near future?
50 million turnover in the first week of launch. In the near future, it is planned to usher in the first new version at the end of June and early July, and launch a brand new GVE avenue battle gameplay and new characters.
During the summer vacation, we will actively try to cooperate with external IPs, such as aerospace rockets (My [Royal Arrow] Diary), etc. (anime, novel, game IP + cultural technology IP).
As the first product launched by Yuefu Interactive Entertainment in China, what is the goal of "My Sword Diary"?
The goal is to be able to operate for a long time, and gradually accumulate its own core players, to do research and development and user reserves for the next product.
At the same time, I also hope that Yujian Diary can become the leading product of the card track, and I also hope that Yuefu Huyu can become one of the leading companies of the card track.
Technology selection, optimization and application sharing in game development
What are the criteria to be considered in technology selection? Why did you choose Cocos Creator?
In the early stage of project selection, we based on the type of the project (mainly 2D cards) and possible platforms in the future (based on the native platform, there may be small games).
Combining the technical advantages of our team (engaged in the development of Cocos-related technologies for many years), we finally chose Cocos Creator.
The version used when the project started was 1.9.x. After several version iterations, it was finally stabilized at version 2.4.6, and only official bugfixes were merged later.
Of course, it is undeniable that for technicians, the attraction of open source engines is the first to bear the brunt. Problems encountered can be traced to the source to ensure that there will not be too many black box problems.
At the same time, the engine supports free optimization and expansion is also a feature that our team values more, and official seamless communication and technical support also provide us with basic guarantees.
In addition, Cocos Creator is based on Electron, which facilitates the development of various auxiliary tools and has advantages for later unified tool chain development.
How is the engine experience? Which ones are doing better?
The engine is open source: easy to expand and easy to trace the source.
Data-driven: Component-based development facilitates reuse and improves efficiency.
Multi-platform: One-time development, multi-platform release, the best cost-saving tool.
For card games, during the development process, are there any game optimization methods worth sharing?
After the development of several Cocos-based card projects, we have concluded the following significant and effective optimization methods:
1. Componentization: improve the reusability of functions through componentization, and improve the degree of freedom through combination rather than inheritance.
2. Improve the efficiency of plug-ins: Even if the efficiency is only increased by 10%, we must try our best to do it. After all, game development is a team project.
3. Rendering optimization: The experience of the game comes from all aspects. What technicians can do is to make the user feel smoother, without lag or slowness. Conventional batching is enough.
4. Object memory pool: High-frequency UI components are integrated into the memory pool for permanent residence, which significantly improves efficiency.
5. Make good use of memory: The memory usage is not as low as possible. Reasonable use of device hardware ensures optimal performance. Memory swap time is a good strategy.
What aspects of the game will be optimized in the future?
After nearly three years of development, the amount of code and resources has been relatively large. It is inevitable that there will be some functions and codes with poor readability and maintainability. We will gradually optimize them according to the version.
At the same time, functional integration and reconstruction are also one of the necessary means to solve performance and efficiency problems. Finally, the editing efficiency of the editor directly affects the development efficiency, and we will focus on breakthroughs next.
How do you view the application of AI technology in game development? Is there any specific practical experience within the team to share?
At present, AI in the team is mainly used in the technical and art teams to assist in improving efficiency. The technical team mainly uses AI to prompt code implementation, and the auxiliary method realizes code review to improve the efficiency of code review.
The art team mainly uses AI to quickly provide art prototype resources that meet the requirements for rapid iteration, which is of great help in improving the efficiency of original paintings and icons.
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