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"Sword and Expedition: Departure" (hereinafter referred to as AFK2) was launched on the national server today.

So far, the game has rushed to the 12th place on the best-selling iOS game list and the first place in the free list. Frankly speaking, this achievement is not particularly explosive, and it is definitely not a god. However, the game is not an explosive card in the conventional sense, and pays more attention to long-term revenue, and the results of the first month may be more valuable for reference.

Considering that the game also has a PC side, the actual revenue may be a few chips higher than the best-selling list

It is also worth noting that many people should perceive that this AFK2 did not play a charter marketing with an unlimited budget like Lilith's "Sword and Expedition" or "Awakening of Kingdoms". This may also be due to changes in the traffic environment, and the buying volume price is getting lower and lower. The team did a lot of content marketing and brand-oriented actions, such as finding Liu Qian to make a video for the game.

The overseas results of the game still confirm the quality of the product - the turnover in the first month is estimated to exceed 300 million yuan, which is popular and popular in the overseas market. If the ratio of the game to the first generation of AFK is similar, the domestic revenue will probably be twice as much as that overseas, that is, 600 to 700 million yuan.

Regarding AFK2, Grape Jun has reported many times before, and I have also talked with Hongchen, the project leader. For Lilith, it is the first generation of self-developed products under the new strategy of "exceeding expectations"; For AFK, it is the first step in IP serialization.

Over the past 3 years, AFK2 has gone from 2D to 3D and added a big world adventure to the cards that have been placed in the cards, and AFK2 has taken a much more daring and radical direction than previous card products, and the product has also reaped considerable returns from the current market results.

And with the opening of the national uniform, Grape Jun can't help but wonder, will it become a pillar product of Lilith's new generation? How many opportunities are there for such a product in the industry? So a while ago, Grape Jun chatted with the project producer Jiang O again. I wonder if the team that has been making cards for 10 years can make AFK2 survive 10 years from now.

01

Speaking of the latest situation:

The owner didn't put too much pressure on us

Grape Jun: Do you have any expectations for the first month of the national service?

Jiang O: It's quite optimistic, after all, it has been verified in Europe and the United States. And this time's publicity strategy is not the same as that of AFK at that time, making more early appointments and focusing on the first wave. Our European and American servers are also the first wave of players to come in, and the quality of players is very high, and the data is also very good.

Grape Jun: How good are the overseas results?

Jiang O: The initial overseas data is very good, and it can be said that it has exceeded expectations, both in terms of market performance and user reputation. However, in the long run, we will also face the challenges of the season system and the long grass period, one is that the content is insufficient, the activity reserve is not enough, and players are easy to lose their goals, which has already been improved; The second is how to continue to create freshness for players, so that they can be retained for a long time.

Grape Jun: What will be the difference in the content of the national uniform?

Jiang O: We still adhere to the concept of global unified version operation, and the content of the national server will be consistent with overseas. However, because it has been in public beta overseas for a period of time, there are many new features, functions, and activities that players on the national server can experience when they open the server. Including at the beginning of the new season, the national server will also enter with overseas players to experience the latest content.

We wanted the content that all players were playing to be consistent, which was one of the core goals of the original Season system. Because at this time, what everyone discusses and cares about is one thing, which can generate greater product heat. For players, there will be no situation where the novelty will disappear because of the backward version.

And players don't have to worry about missing out on content, because the content of the previous season will be put into a memory-like module, and content such as world maps and story missions can be re-experienced, and there will be no development elements, which will not burden everyone.

Initial Season Map

Grape King: What is the morale of the team now?

Jiang O: The morale is not bad, because everyone is very excited about going to the national service. However, the season system is still facing challenges, and new solutions are being found. Frankly speaking, this project has encountered many similar challenges during the project, and there are many times when the data is not good, and we have become accustomed to this state of encountering challenges, solving problems, reaping positive feedback, and then meeting new challenges.

We used to think about the season gameplay very well, but if we didn't get through, there would still be a lack of a better solution to the product's long-term problems. Therefore, everyone still looks at this matter from a normal point of view, adjusts and improves, and strives to do it in place. Now the boss doesn't put too much pressure on us, mainly because we are putting pressure on ourselves and want to go to the next level.

02

Talk about R&D:

Behind the innovation are difficult problems to solve

Grape Jun: What major decisions did the project go through?

Jiang O: The game was prepared at the beginning of 2021, and the project was officially established in May, and four keywords were established at that time, big world, season system, content, and AFK evolution. At first, a team of more than 60 people was formed, and then it quickly expanded to more than 100 people. At first, I thought it was more radical, maybe it was a one-year beta test and two years online. It's also a 2D product.

However, after the first playable demo came out, we were hit hard by the feedback from the internal test - lack of art appeal, average core combat experience, duplicate content in the large world, poor map design, and a thin story.....

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So at the beginning of 2022, the project underwent a major change, from 2D to 3D, the core combat has also changed from simple card collisions to more strategic gameplay, and the big world 3C has changed from a click to a virtual joystick, including the world map rework, the plot rework, and so on.

Grape-kun: It feels like it's a rework of the entire game.

Jiang O: At that time, I felt that the quality of the product would be rotten in a few years, and it would not be truly competitive, and it was just a more advanced AFK. The art and content team also encountered a bottleneck at that time - to do plot performances, 2D vertical painting was very resource-intensive, so even though it was difficult, it was still greatly changed. And in 2023, after the game's first external limited number undeleted test, the novice map and plot content have undergone another rework.

After all, the team had never done anything like that before, and they didn't have any experience with questlines on large maps. This is not just a matter of writing the plot and throwing it into the map, but also considering how to design the player's mission line, where to run from, what to do along the way, how to intersperse battles, how many fights, and so on.

So for better results, we later recruited a new main copywriter and re-assembled the copywriting team. After the redo of the plot, it also means that other links will also have to start from scratch, but we are willing to accept this cost.

Grape-kun: How did you convince the boss to redo it?

Jiang O: I think it's a coincidence. The planning team wanted to change the combat to 3D, but the difficulty was to convince the art, who had already made a lot of 2D assets. But I didn't expect that the art side happened to encounter a bottleneck, and found that the road of 2D was not going through, and the main beauty also felt that it might be a good way to turn to 3D.

Later, we went to convince Don (who was in charge of Lilith's card line). As a result, Donggua was talking to Kenny about the company's product strategy at that time, which later became "exceeding expectations". They also very much agreed with our idea and thought that this direction might be successful.

In fact, Kenny has a lot of trust in our team and has almost no limits on resources.

Grape Jun: Why didn't you choose to make an AFK with better 3D and better art? Many people think that the logic of such a product will be simpler and more straightforward.

Jiang O: We've definitely thought about it, but in fact, the failure rate is very high. Many second-generation products on the market have made a simple 3D evolution of the first-generation products, and there is a high probability that they will be unknown in the end. Not to mention that after the product is established, it will take another two or three years to meet the players.

So we feel that just doing this is not enough. The big world of AFK2 is not just a gimmick, there are many design considerations, and from the perspective of gameplay, it can also bring more possibilities and expansion space in the future.

Fishing gameplay added in S1 season

Grape Jun: Is this project going well?

Jiang O: It's not smooth, the difficulty of development is too big compared to when I did AFK before. The project has also gotten bigger, and in addition to the business itself, the team is not so easy to manage. In the past, there was only one PM (project manager) at AFK, and then there were only two or three, but AFK2 used six or seven PMs.

In 2021, there will be more than 100 people in the team, and the PM team is not able to hold this scale, and I am also helping to bring it again, but after all, I am not a professional, so I can only sort out everyone's division of labor and standardize some processes first. PM is a job that requires a lot of time on your part, but luckily it didn't take long to recruit someone, otherwise I guess I wouldn't have been able to do it for a few more months.

Grape Jun: Where is the gap between the businesses?

Jiang O: I am particularly impressed by the fact that in the past, the technical difficulty of AFK was much lower, the engine was simple, and many problems were easy to solve. I often build a lot of bugs, so I come over on the weekend to work overtime and sprint, and the version can be directly on. If one weekend isn't enough, rush two. The problem can basically be solved. But by the time of AFK2, even if we predicted a certain problem in advance, we added two weekends in a row, and it was a weekend and a weekend, and the bug still couldn't be fixed.

AFK2 was a really bold attempt to merge the big world with the idle cards, so it was more challenging. Every decision and question in the R&D process is a new challenge.

03

Let's talk about the long term:

It's risky, but it has to be done

Grape King: When did the team decide to make Seasons a long-term solution to the game?

Jiang O: When we were preparing to set up the project in 2021, we decided to do it with a season system, and the idea was to make a game that could run for a longer period of time. If you don't choose a season system, the game can be done, but the life cycle will be much shorter.

But after all, there are very few season-based products on the card track, and this is the first time we have made such a product, and there are a lot of holes in the middle. What we originally wanted was that after some of the player's stats were reset, they would return to the same running line to re-experience the process of upgrading and clearing the wasteland, and you chasing me, plus a new big world, a new plot, a new level, and a new hero...... Freshness may be enough. But the actual results show that maybe this kind of freshness is not enough, and our thinking is still too conservative.

New Heroes May

Grape: How did you come up with this choice?

Jiang O: At that time, we looked at many long-term products on the market, such as SLGs, MMOs, and MOBAs...... Later, a more important conclusion was drawn that long-term operation does not require players to play in the game all the time, but when they want to play, they can come back immediately, and the cost of return is very low.

Like each version of "World of Warcraft", there will be some catch-up and reset mechanics, and then add new cultivation lines to compress the equipment values. And MOBA is like a short SLG season, like SLG, players work together to create game content and experiences. After these considerations, we wondered if the card could also be made into a season system to solve the various pain points encountered in AFK before.

Therefore, everyone agrees on the general direction of the project, but the specific season gameplay design plan has been iterating, and there can be about a dozen versions. For example, when does the Season Reset start? What needs to be reset? Is it to reset to 0 directly, or to expand first and then compress? This includes the threshold for players who come in at different times to enter the season, how new players can catch up with old players, and so on.

Grape Jun: Why does it have to be a season system for long-term work?

Jiang O: Like a content-based game, it keeps putting content, and the expansion of the value side does not need to be solved by the season system. However, numerical card games should be long-term and fresh, and it is inevitable to continue to give players new goals and new growth lines, but this will definitely affect the long-term of the game.

One of the problems that AFK encountered at the beginning was that after the players returned, they didn't know how to play in the face of many complex development lines and systems. So the season system is a way that must be tried. It's just that whether this direction can be done well or what it can be done is something we have to continue to explore.

My combat power has come to 94 billion

Grape: What are your current plans? It should not be realistic to simply heap content capacity.

Jiang O: The two most important directions of the current project are to use the new core combat mechanism to bring players a bigger and more different experience, and try some differentiated designs to make the players' combat experience in the new season fresh. Of course, there are risks behind this, but we feel that this is the right thing to do. The second is to continue to make efforts around social networking. We're doing some design around social in each version, including the Warzone system, which is also designed to solve the problem of ghost costumes.

But our games don't force players to socialize, and finding a balance in them is something we've been doing. For example, we pay a lot of attention to the actual experience of the players, because the players have invested money and time to raise some teams. We definitely can't just flip the table and make the player start all over again, but we need to add a new validation environment.

Grape Jun: But in fact, looking at the entire industry, it's rare for numerical cards to be able to grow into a long line.

Jiang O: It's really rare, and the card track can be long, and in the end, it often takes the direction of competitive PVP, because the values alone can't maintain enough freshness. I think the essence of the long term may still be social, or it is the most important point to keep the game sticky. All the categories on the market that are long enough, MMO, MOBA, and SLG essentially rely on social networking to create freshness for players.

Relying on content alone, the rule framework is limited, and it is difficult to create new things, but it is just constantly accumulating the amount of content. And this is even a burden for reshoring and new entrants, because players miss a lot and it will be tiring to follow the progress of the content. But the beauty of social is that it can bring some qualitative changes to the player's experience. This game is someone else to fly you, and the next game is you to take someone else to fly, and these two experiences give people a completely different feeling.

Grape-kun: So what are you going to do?

Jiang O: As I said earlier, we still want to polish the rules of the season system, use this as a framework to update the game content, and use social networking to do a good job in the long-term of the game. For example, we have a plan to revamp the world map, and we want to do some gameplay-driven dungeon design in addition to the current seasonal maps, and we have a bigger goal of making a truly shared map design, where people can really do a lot of things together on the same map, just like MMOs and SLGs.

Social Play - Answering Questions

Grape Jun: I feel that the industry is not easy now.

Jiang O: In the past, everyone made games with a foundation, or foundation, for example, before AFK, we had a lot of accumulation in "Xiaoice Ice Legend". But now that we are going to a new field to meet new challenges, there is not much to rely on. This is the same for the industry, the accumulation of the previous generation of teams has been consumed, and it will not be easy to do it further.

There are many people who envy manufacturers who make mini games. But in fact, it is not easy for mini game manufacturers to succeed, and they have made countless products and iterated countless times, not only to adjust the products well, but also to continuously optimize the purchase strategy. There are very few people who can succeed in such a volume market in China, but most of the people who fail will not notice.

04

Talking about cognition:

The accumulation of the previous generation has been used up

Grape: Have you grown up rapidly in the past few years? Is there any knowledge worth sharing?

Jiang O: This is my first time as a producer, and this project is also the first time to try from 0 to 1, and I have really gained a lot of knowledge. Let's talk about an interesting point - internal logic and table logic.

The team's design idea is logic, and how players understand and receive this thing depends on table logic. This is something that we have neglected before, but it is actually an important point. Some designs are well thought out, but they may only be 70 points when communicated to the player, and if they can be better communicated, the player may feel 140 points for the experience.

For example, the S1 season dream mode has added an additional leaderboard, and the general feeling of players is "why did I fall off the ranking", but in fact, the original rewards are still there, and the player's income has not been affected or even increased. This is the problem caused by the design not being communicated properly, and we are supposed to make the player feel like this thing is an additional ranking bonus.

A good game must not only be clear in the logic, but also the logic conveyed to the player. Sometimes the more you think about it, the better it gets. Of course, this degree is quite difficult to master, and it takes a lot of work to do and constantly absorb player feedback.

Grape: How did it feel to be a producer for the first time?

Jiang O: I felt that the challenge was huge, I wanted to start with a small project and get used to it, but I ended up doing such a big project as soon as I came up. There is a lot of difference between what the producer has to do and what he used to do as the main planner. The business may be fine, but the difficulty is more management problems, especially after the team is bigger, there will be all kinds of unexpected things.

If there is a problem in the business, I just go down to work and solve the problem, but management is not like this. For example, there was a time when the project lacked a PM, but it wasn't something I could do well if I did it. You still have to find the right people.

There are some cross-departmental things that I also need to coordinate or make decisions, such as localization, audio, marketing, etc. For example, I have to find a way to solve the management problems within the team, the reconstruction of the copywriting team, the cooperation of different types of work, and the morale and mentality of the team.

Grape Jun: The amount of decision-making has gone up.

Jiang O: Yes, and in the past, it was more about making decisions within the planning, and it would be clearer to know which might work better. But after becoming a producer, I found that a lot of problems are not necessarily about right or wrong, but probably more about trade-offs. You need to consider the cost-effectiveness of the choice, its cost, its effectiveness, and how to convince the other party of your choice.

Grape Jun: How can I make good decisions?

Jiang O: Even if you talk more and practice more, there is no particularly good way. Of course, the most important thing is to have a unified understanding within the team. You have to know what people really care about. For example, which art effects are non-negotiable to the art team, and which gameplay designs are needed by the planning team. Finally, let everyone have a common big goal as the premise of the project, for example, some time ago, Lilith often said "exceed expectations".

Grape King: What do you mean by "exceeding expectations"?

Jiang O: Explaining the concept of "exceeding expectations" is complicated, and it can come from all levels of the game, and the focus and path at different levels are different. However, I have a very concrete scenario in mind to judge whether the product has exceeded expectations, that is, when players play the game, they will let out more "Oh!" And not "that's it" sound.

Grape-kun: Did AFK2 do it?

Jiang O: We have definitely done this in many ways, because our own experience and the evaluation of overseas players have proved this. But as I said at the all-hands meeting, we have a long way to go, we have stepped through one challenge after another, but there are always more challenges to face and solve.

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