Text/Qiuqiu

The planner of Hucang Studio told me that they had not been able to pay their salaries for a long time.

Hucang Studio is a solo team formed by several college graduates. Their work "I in Chengtu City" (hereinafter referred to as "Chengtu City") has won many awards in solo game competitions held by Tencent, CUSGA, IndiePlay, etc., and has also won an exclusive contract with TapTap and a well-known manufacturer's distribution.

They also have excellent resumes. Many of the team graduated from Jiaotong University and Gome, and received Hit Academy's game-related development and design courses. Before graduation, Sifang also received an offer from miHoYo's new project; One of the TAs of the team, who used to earn 200,000 yuan a year from "Minecraft" in junior high school, has now attracted many practitioners from large factories in the technical courses he offers.

However, they should have started the game, but they were hit hard by reality. Chengtu City, which is favored by many people, has achieved quite dismal commercialization results, with only more than 9,000 copies sold for 8 yuan on the mobile terminal; There are only more than 20 reviews on Steam on PC.

In the words of Sifang, "Even if it sells better, it can't cover the cost." ”

The fiasco of the project also exacerbated the team's lack of funds. So far, they have been holding on to Shanghai for three years, and four or five of their projects have stopped developing one after another, and they have moved offices several times before and after, and even the financial break seems to be a bit commonplace. "The main creative team no longer gets a salary, after all, even if it is the lowest wage standard here, it has to pay 3, 4,000 yuan of social security."

"In the most difficult time, we ate and lived at home, borrowed money from our parents and friends."

"In order to save money, some people only eat steamed buns three times a day."

The team saved money so much because they wanted to bring the next game to the table as soon as possible. "Borrow money and fight for the last one."

01

A story of failure?

The Quartet has always said that they are lucky.

When he was in college, his family supported him to get into the game industry, and during college, he took a game development course offered by Dialect (founder of the Collegiate Game Development Alliance, Hit Academy, and Dynamic Game Incubator), where he met some of the main creators of Hucang, and then they founded the studio together.

"The incubation and implementation of our project, the establishment and operation of the team, and the later signing and issuance and getting investment are all inseparable from the help of Mr. Fang, TapTap, K&D Core and other nobles."

The smooth sailing experience strengthened their confidence in starting a business alone. After the establishment of Hucang, they have set up four or five projects: including Chengtu City, which has not yet been developed, the parkour puzzle game "Life Road", the suspense game "Her Diary", and the strategy tower defense game "What Birds", ...... At that time, their idea was simple, to put what they thought was fun into practice.

Demo of GameJam's "The Road of Life".

Among them, Chengtu City tells the innocent story of a young boy exploring the city, the art is hand-drawn comic style, and the gameplay is to use visual dislocation to fill in the light decryption of the squares, and the overall flow experience is similar to "Monument Valley".

But to be honest, unless there is an elaborate gameplay and narrative design like "A Dream in a Cage", or a touching plot performance like "To the Moon", it is difficult to rely on the so-called "touch" in exchange for good commercial performance.

In the end, sales in Chengtu City were not satisfactory. Sifang said that the game's sales of thousands of copies on TapTap were still due to the latter's exposure and resource support, and the game's PC, iOS and other Android versions had almost no revenue - plus the version number was delayed, the losses brought by Chengtu City have long been incalculable.

Talking about this, the Quartet sighed with emotion, "Although the words are hard to hear, the biggest commercial value of Chengtu City is that it has brought us an advance payment of hundreds of thousands of yuan." ”

But neither the advance payment nor the investment in K&D Core have allowed them to last longer.

In terms of life, when they started their business, they happened to encounter the special period in Shanghai, and when they ran out of food several times, they relied on them to borrow money and pay out of their own pockets to survive. "Even if we can save more and more, the comprehensive cost of the team is about 100,000 yuan per month."

In terms of projects, "Her Diary" has been shelved twice due to the change of R&D personnel, and it has to start crowdfunding on Modian; Other projects were also forced to be suspended, and the whole team focused all their energy on the "lone seedling" of "What Birds".

In 2023, Hu Cang once emphasized the importance of making money for solo travel teams at a sharing meeting

02

A life-or-death fight?

The Hucang team and the mentor dialect are very optimistic about "What Bird", and the Quartet also hopes that it will sell 100,000 copies after it is launched.

"I know this may be an extravagant hope, but the most important thing is that I still hope that 'Whatever Bird' can support us to make our next game."

Hu Cang's confidence in "What Birds" comes from two aspects.

One is the potential for game design and gameplay.

"What Birds" is an online game of tower defense + simulation management. Players need to collect resources and build assembly lines, while using props and weapons to fight against the Zerg until the defense turns into an attack and breaks the Zerg lair. The gameplay of survival building sounds similar to "Terraria", "Oxygen Deficiency" and "Rattopia", and the automated assembly line is like "Factorio" and "Phantom Beast Paru".

Although it looks a little stitched, the game doesn't look like this at first.

Originally, they wanted to make an action-adventure game similar to Metroidvania, with a portal company to explore the world and several worlds with very different styles...... But when they spent more than a month making a demo, they found a lot of problems, "The game is very fun, but whether it is the theme or the gameplay, there are too many predecessors before us who have explored it, and it is difficult for us to play an advantage." ”

After some trade-offs, they let go of their initial expectations and chose the prehistoric technology world (using plants, stones, etc. to make buildings and weapons) in several worlds, and the gameplay became more accessible and cost-effective tower defense.

Featured plant weapons

How to play tower defense

As for the automated assembly line and multiplayer online gameplay, they are the functions they extend to lower the threshold of experience. "Players have to manage buildings and tower defense, which is more energy-consuming, so we want to make these automated, plus multi-person collaboration, so that both the experience threshold and the differentiation of the game will come out."

Multi-person collaboration

assembly line

When it comes to differentiation, Hucang has also optimized a lot of experience details in the game.

For example, the tower defense gameplay is not just a simple "defense", but with the erection of weapons, players can continue to counterattack the underground world, explore underground resources, dungeons, and finally fight all the way to the Zerg lair and win, a bit like "StarCraft" RTS games that fight and loot.

For example, the difficulty setting of the game is also very fine, and the single-player experience and multiplayer will have dynamic adjustments in terms of resources, values, and automation; Players also have an out-of-game cultivation system, and after getting together a set of god costumes, they can even cut all the way to the hive without building, and other players can also invite these masters to help clear the level and speed up the pace of cultivation; Even if you don't notice that the base is blown up by the Zerg, most of the equipment will stop running, and you can make a comeback if you restart.

Dynamic difficulty adjustment

The second is that they make games that they like and that players like.

The Quartet said that although they are locust players, they will often play games such as "Seven Days Kill", "Terraria", and "Lack of Oxygen", so they know the interesting points of these survival and construction games, and think that "Any Bird" can complement the above masterpieces in terms of automated assembly lines, online games, tower defense, etc., so that players who like this type can find a good meal replacement.

"Lack of Oxygen": A new work from the manufacturer of "Don't Starve".

The feedback from the market and players also confirms their idea of meal replacement. The Quartet said that when they tried offline games such as nuclear fusion before, most players occupied the computer and played very devotedly; Although the community including their games is only a few hundred people, most of them are veteran players who have played hundreds or thousands of hours.

At the same time, they believe that the likes of this group of players can bring the freedom of the game to a new level. "Before going live, we will make two or three sacred trees (large dungeons) to ensure that players have a complete experience of hundreds of hours; After launch, we will open up mods, editors, and workshops, so that players can build their own sacred trees and dungeons, and experience more different kinds of fun. ”

Although the current situation of "Any Bird" is still relatively difficult, for example, the development progress of the game is only two-thirds; The team didn't find a suitable publisher, so they had to do it themselves, but the four parties said that the current player and market feedback of the game is in line with expectations: the first exposure of PV has nearly 30,000 views without investment, and several rounds of offline trials have gained hundreds of core players and thousands of wishlists...... These achievements may not seem like achievements to outsiders, but they have brought them a lot of confidence.

They also participated in Steam's open-world survival crafting game festival

03

No regrets?

I asked the Quartet if he regretted his original decision and regretted giving up miHoYo's offer.

Before I could finish asking, he said that if he accepted miHoYo's offer, he might regret it even more.

He explained that he made the decision to start his business overnight. "If you miss this time, you may never get a chance again. Many people will say that it is not too late to start a business after two or three years of working in a large factory, accumulating capacity and economy, but I feel that after two or three years, I may not be able to come out. ”

There are many people like Quartet in Hucang, such as their TA who rejected the olive branch of Dachang; The top 5% of the members of Jiaotong University and Gome also gave up the interview, "The students whose grades are not as good as them have successfully entered Tencent, NetEase and other companies." ”

You may feel that since they have chosen to start a business, they will definitely show the correctness of their decisions. But on the other hand, they made their choice at the time and still haven't given up, so there is no reason to deny their enthusiasm.

It's just that the current environment of independent games is not as good as imagined, everyone says that this year is a big year for independent games, and only in the first half of the year, there are popular games such as "Clown Card", "Fog Lock Kingdom", "Mountain and River Travel", "Hungry", "Backpack Brawl", "Animal Well", etc., but think about it carefully, how much accumulation and coincidence are behind these hits? Perhaps, there is no shortage of struggles in the gaming industry, but success is still only seen by a few geniuses or madmen.

As for Hu Cang, they now seem to realize that they are not a smooth success story, and the team members have experienced big ups and downs and their mentality has calmed down a lot-

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