Text: Yan Jinyan

On July 23, a tosatsu-themed war chess game called "Under the Clear Sky" was first revealed. It's more hot than I expected.

I thought that the Kamen Rider type of special effects theme, coupled with the game of chess, should be a double niche debuff, but I didn't expect it to be the first exposure CG animation at station B, and it has reached 7.35 million views so far, and it has reached the third place in the whole site rankings.

This heat ...... The tokusatsu fans finally stood up

As the barrage of station B said, it is really difficult to find fault with the quality of this CG animation alone. It has a lot of nods to the classics, but it also shows the character design and tonality of the game itself.

"Under the Clear Sky" also officially released several character design drawings, all of which use large perspective compositions and exaggerated character poses. At a time when you are accustomed to seeing the celluloid cartoon animation style, this set of sharp concept art presents a different visual stimulation. Regarding this art style, there have been industry insiders who have specially analyzed and dismantled.

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What everyone didn't expect was that such a dark horse that suddenly ran out, in the days after the first exposure, released a symphony live video of game music and a real machine PV one after another.

In short, it doesn't look like one of those products that grabs attention with a concept and then drags on for a few years. In fact, "Under the Clear Sky" also got the version number as early as last year, and the test will start in the second half of this year.

The number of plays is not low

After further attention, Grape Jun found that the developer of "Under the Clear Sky" was Yingche Network, which had launched the two-dimensional game "Millennium Journey".

"Millennium Journey" was first revealed at the end of 2020, when it attracted a lot of attention because of its extreme art volume. But after four and a half years of long-term research and development, its public beta results last year were not good, and it was even controversial because of a vicious bug on the day of the launch. It is not difficult to imagine that its follow-up performance is also the same as most of the second tours in recent years.

Because of this, I am even more curious, why did Yingche suddenly want to make a game like "Under the Clear Sky"? After talking to their CEO and project leader, Zeta, I was even more shocked: they currently have 3 projects in research, the company has nearly 350 people, and they are even making stand-alone products.

The following is a collated conversation (the content has been adjusted to take care of the reading):

01

The world is one

Huge grass platform team

Grape: What was your background?

Zeta: I've been studying abroad since high school, and I only came back in 2017, and I stayed at home for a year, planning to start a business, and I wanted to get acquainted with management and the people in China as soon as possible.

In terms of the choice of entrepreneurial direction, due to my own academic main direction, it was not particularly compatible with the mainstream finance and IT classes in the entrepreneurial market at that time, and I played a lot of games since I was a child, so I had the idea of becoming a game company at that time. Considering that the game is more explicit, each version of the demo can be played, which is convenient for me to make decisions on business promotion, so I chose the game field.

Grape Jun: And then you founded Yingche?

Zeta: yes, I was posting online and looking for a team. I've been approached by quite a few producers, the most mature of whom is "Block Wars", and they came out with the source code after falling out with the shareholders of the original company. Considering that the maturity of the project is very suitable, I set up the company in April '18, intending to go live quickly after a round of product tuning.

Unexpectedly, later encountered the suspension of the issuance of the edition number, the progress of the project came to a standstill, and I wanted to go to sea, but I didn't find a willing release. At that time, the whole team was demoralized and stopped for a while. In the end, I was able to lay off some of the people and start a new project.

Grape Jun: How did you think about the new project?

Zeta: I grew up playing a lot of games, like SimCity, Three Kingdoms, and Clash of Clans when mobile games were just emerging, so I thought about seven or eight different directions depending on the genre I was familiar with.

But then my dad said that I had failed one project in the previous one, and I should be cautious about the second project, otherwise I wouldn't do it. This reminded me to pay attention to the market, just 19 years ago, "Tomorrow's Ark" came out, the second dimension was a mess, including "Blue Route" and "Onmyoji" are all in full swing, when I was studying in Japan, my roommate has also been playing "Honkai Impact 3", and I told me how awesome Mihayou is, and then I think, or do it a second dimension.

Grape-kun: But do you have a lot of contact with the second dimension yourself?

Zeta: I didn't actually play two-dimensional games at all, I prefer the type of product that is strong in social interactions.

Grape: How did "Millennium Journey" come about?

Zeta: It's also a team that was taken back from the outside. At that time, they had just come out of an artificial intelligence company, and they had already made a small Demo, and the art level was very good, it was not the pan-two-dimensional kind of "Onmyoji", it was a turn-based product with more nuclear two, more similar to "FGO", I think although we don't have IP, but the art performance may be stronger than "FGO", maybe there will be opportunities.

But it is precisely this idea that makes the follow-up of the project fall into a big misunderstanding, that is, emphasizing art over technology. The original server-side master program resume was fake, plus the original producer was from an art background, he didn't know much about planning and technology, and he didn't have industrialization and management experience, so the R&D front was very long, and he did it for more than 4 years, and he has been repeatedly changing.

Grape Jun: It feels like the world is a huge grass platform...... Did you notice something wrong during this time?

Zeta: In the early stages of the project, I didn't really intervene too much in the project, because I didn't understand the second dimension, and I couldn't interfere with the creation of an insider as a layman. However, after the third beta of the game, I gradually discovered a lot of problems and did a potential minefield warning before the open beta. After the original producer and some members ran away, I also took over the project tuning work myself, but unfortunately due to the history of the project, we couldn't directly do major surgery.

Now "Millennium Journey" has just completed its anniversary and has entered the stage of stable operation.

02

The goal is to be the top 1 in the war chess category

Grape King: When was "Under the Clear Sky" established?

Zeta: Thoughts I had at the beginning of '21. At that time, it had been almost a year since the first exposure of "Millennium Journey", but I was not good at interfering with R&D, and I was only responsible for making money every month, and I felt that I was almost no longer part of this company, so I wanted to set up some new projects.

It was at the end of '21 that the project officially began, and now there are nearly 120 people on the team.

Grape King: Why did you choose to play chess?

Zeta: Let's start with the categories you understand. At that time, I had three directions, one was Hearthstone-like TCG cards, the second was COC-like SLG simulation, and the third was "Fantasy Simulation"-like war chess.

It happened that I met with a former producer of the Cell, who was more experienced in numbers, and he ended up choosing war chess.

Grape-kun: Then you chose the special effects theme, also out of preference?

Zeta: Yes, but we actually thought about mechs at first, because we also love Gundam.

At that time, "Super Robot Wars DD" had just been launched overseas, and some people came to ask me if I wanted to take the domestic agency rights, and some people said that the machine war had a certain market share in China.

But then I investigated it and found that tokusatsu may have more opportunities, because so far, there have been no good products in this field, and this is not a blue ocean, it belongs to a blank.

Grape Jun: War chess + special effects, it's just hanging down, aren't you afraid of being too niche?

Zeta: Some of our colleagues have thought about whether to find a third party to do market research to see how much audience Tokusatsu has in China. But then I felt that it didn't make sense, because there are no high-quality tokusatsu games at all, so how do you do research? Do you want to believe the data of the survey? On the other hand, most people on the market have played Genshin Impact, so can you rest assured that you can do it in the second dimension?

Moreover, I think tokusatsu and war chess are actually quite compatible. In Kamen Rider, the roll call is an important and classic element, and if it's an action game, the player stops and waits for the character to sing for ten seconds, which is sure to drag the pace. And if it's a numerical card like "Three Kingdoms Fantasy Land", it doesn't have enough gameplay depth, so in comparison, war chess is the most suitable.

In this blank market, I think that even if there are few users, it is enough to support a project team. We didn't want to make "Under the Clear Sky" a big hit with an adult income of 5 billion, my expectation is to be the head of the war chess category.

Grape-kun: That's a pretty high goal.

Zeta: It's quite high, but when the project is established, there is always such an expectation, if you can't come up, you will go to the tenth place, and the last one that comes out may be to go to the twenty.

I told the team that our goal must be the top 1 in the category, whether it is art or gameplay, even if it is not as good as "Dream Simulation War" or "Heaven and Earth Tribulation", but it can't be worse than it, otherwise players will definitely not choose you. Our vertical paintings are all of high specifications, the scenes are all in 3D, and I personally participated in the design of the plot and world view.

Scene artwork

Grape: How did you decide on your art style?

Zeta: One is that we don't want to use a two-dimensional art style anymore, and we don't want others to label us as two-dimensional. Second, we want to be a global market, and art should be closer to globalization.

I also hope to build a more cutting-edge stylized art team, and I hope that in the future, the art style of each of our products will be completely different.

Grape Jun: How long will you have to play such a role?

Zeta: About a month. We're going to spread out several lines, and several characters are doing it at the same time.

An SSR character will have four forms, divided into a body and three forms after transformation, which is actually equivalent to 4 characters in other games, each form has different art and skill design, and some character forms need corresponding cultivation resources to unlock.

Now that we have made more than 80 character forms, we expect to be able to complete all the art content required by the open beta in October this year, and we will start to stock up on the content after the open beta.

Grape Gentleman: What is the background of the game's worldview?

Zeta: Because I like some of the deeper human nature in Gundam, and I'm usually interested in the systems of countries such as North Korea and India, I wanted to do some deeper discussions in the game.

At the time, we were thinking about what was readily available in everyday life, but in the game it might have become the exclusive domain of the aristocracy, and then we thought of sunshine.

We can bask in the sun every day without anyone's consent, but in the world view of "Under a Clear Sky", because after a major war, the sky is 80% obscured, and excluding sea level, there may be less than 10% of the land with sunshine. In this context, ordinary people do not even have the right to get the sun, and they are under the haze all their lives.

From this premise, we can derive a lot of discussion. For example, green has become a symbol of nobility in the game, because it is difficult for ordinary people to see green plants, and they will believe that they are given to the world by God, and there are even rumors that "green leafy vegetables can cure all diseases".

We wanted to do some black humor and satire in this exaggerated, dramatic way.

Grape Jun: Your first CG animation was nearly 7 minutes long, and a live video of the symphony of two songs was released later, and it was rare for a game to invest so much in the early days of publicity.

Zeta: I've played a lot of successful games before, such as League of Legends, and it has a lot of audiences, but maybe they didn't think about going long-term and making big IPs at the beginning, so the world view and character settings are all about wanting to play one out at a time, and they often eat books, and they can't justify themselves. Even if the results of "Battle of Two Cities" are very good, they can only write stories around a small area, because once the system is put into the entire "League of Legends universe", the world view collapses, and the combat power settings between heroes are too mismatched.

And we hope that "Under the Clear Sky" will be a long-term IP, and we have even begun to think of possible IP works behind it, which is why we have to determine the setting and production specifications of "Under the Clear Sky" from the beginning.

Grape Jun: Let's talk about the gameplay, "Under the Clear Sky" is still a classic Japanese war chess?

Zeta: Yes. We also thought about whether to do semi-real-time, but then we found that this requires a certain cognitive cost and has a threshold for players. After all, we still want to accept war chess users in the market.

In our project team, many people are still playing "Dream Simulation Battle", "Heaven and Earth Tribulation" and "Ganglan", the birth of the three products covers most of the gameplay needs of users in the war chess category, and in terms of subject matter, the gameplay of two-dimensional war chess such as "Wuhua Mi Xin" is very different, and "Under the Clear Sky" may be able to find an entry point in the Red Sea.

Grape: How do you play with a game that's more similar to Fantasy Simulation?

Zeta: We combined the transformation of the tokusatsu genre and made some micro-innovations. Characters can consume a certain amount of special energy to switch forms during the battle to achieve certain strategic significance.

For example, there will be some public energy facilities in the scene, players can use the movement power of the machine to quickly seize and obtain energy, and when the opponent comes to snatch, you can use the energy to switch to the form of restraint to fight.

Because the strategic value of switching forms is great, energy gauges will be precious, and when to transform, which character to transform, and whether to fight for public facilities, will all become strategic points in the game. When the energy gauge reaches zero, the character will be forced to return to the body state, and the attributes will be greatly reduced, which gives the player a key role to consider whether to set fire to a key role.

Grape: What has been the feedback from players so far?

Zeta: We did a small player test in June, with a split split between the core users of War Chess and Tokusatsu users. At that time, the demo still only had the core gameplay, and there were no plot performances and animation performances, so many tokusatsu lovers felt that the game was not enough tokusatsu enough, but in the eyes of the other half of the players, it was already very special effects with a transformation.

We are also relatively satisfied with this result, after all, the product is still a little more popular. And now with special effects and performances such as roll call, it should also be able to meet the needs of special effects fans. If you want to pursue the ultimate again, you can really do the roll call performance for tens of seconds, a minute, we think you just can't bear it no matter how much you like it.

Overall, players gave that test a score of 8, and considering that the core players' scores may be inflated, we feel that the actual score is around 7, which is in line with expectations.

03

When everything is done to the best of its ability,

There's no reason not to make money

Grape Jun: What do you think of the second tour now?

Zeta: Needless to say, miHoYo has led to technological advancements in the entire gaming industry, and I admire them. But if I'm going to be brutal, I think they've also degraded the game for 10 years. This is not to say that miHoYo is not doing well, but that they have brought a lot of people into the ditch.

For example, miHoYo has made an all-round emasculation of the social module, and only does the art, technology, and content very well, to a certain extent, this is against the development process of online games, and it has become less focused on gameplay.

Therefore, in the past, a large number of second-game companies went bankrupt because they were always thinking backwards about the success of "Genshin Impact" and "Ark of Tomorrow", thinking that players don't seem to like PvP anymore, don't like social anymore, and only like the so-called content, but in fact, this is not strongly linked to success.

I think that if you don't have miHoYo's skills and strength, don't copy the path of Genshin Impact. The reason why Kuluo can do "Singing Tide" is because people have technical accumulation.

Grape-kun: So you won't be doing two-dimensional in the future?

Zeta: I'm not going to make a mobile game that only emphasizes the experience of single-player content. I've also laid the groundwork with players before, and in the future, Yingche's game will definitely have PvP and socialization, if not, why don't I play single-player? A 648, what stand-alone masterpiece can't I buy?

Grape: Is it because you have a different upbringing, and you prefer the pleasure of socializing, so you can't understand the demands of second-hand players?

Zeta: I've discussed this with my company mates. I think it's not that the current players don't like the previous game genres, but that there are currently fewer products that are out of the circle for everyone to get in touch with. For example, if you want to play "World of Warcraft" again, it is estimated that many people will not be able to accept its picture quality, but this does not mean that it is not good enough.

Moreover, how many of the top 10 games on the current ranking are secondary games? or "Glory of Kings", "Egg Boy Party", and even "The Fifth Personality". If young players don't like PvP, then why has Onmyoji been popular for so many years?

So it's not that players don't like to play, it's that it's easy for everyone to fall into the information cocoon built by manufacturers, preconceived that some games are not good, and then be led crooked. There are also players who commented on "Wuhua Mi Xin", saying that there is nothing interesting about war chess, but this is actually directly filtered out, and they didn't try to experience it at all.

I think we still have to be looking for gameplay and gameplay. I've always told the team that when you make a game that's fun, good-looking, and sound-sounding, there's no reason why it shouldn't make money, and if it doesn't, it's just a problem with your own cognition. But don't worry about whether it's two-dimensional, or whatever.

Grape: What other projects are you working on right now?

Zeta: In addition to Under Clear Skies, there are two other projects, one is a Hearthstone-like TCG card, and one is a stand-alone project like Three Kingdoms.

Grape Jun: Is it because you like "Three Kingdoms"?

Zeta: Yes, I've always felt that it's a pity that Koei doesn't do "Three Kingdoms" well, so I want to do it myself and make up for it.

Grape Jun: How many people are in the company now?

Zeta: About 350 people.

Grape Jun: How do you think about the company's future planning?

Zeta: Last year, we began to transform from pure R&D to self-developed and self-initiated enterprises, firstly, we had early involvement in the project development process, so that we could face players earlier, better and faster, so as to assist in product development; Second, in the company's development pipeline, the capacity and throughput can reasonably match the issuance resources to improve the company's operating profits.

That's why I also founded Thunder Games as the company's publishing business brand, and this year we will take small steps to promote the distribution business. At present, we are a publishing team based on globalization, and in the construction of zero-to-one distribution, we will require the coupling of distribution and R&D to promote the project, and seek a more suitable distribution method in the mainstream market.

Grape Jun: The first exposure of "Under the Clear Sky" this time is good, how much promotion did you buy on station B?

Zeta: Judging from the overall data and user popularity so far, we are fortunate to be liked and recommended by most users. Less than half of the volume was brought in by this promotion. Now the first exposure CG has been played more than 7 million, which is difficult to achieve by promotion. We've always wanted to change the stereotype of tokusatsu through some extreme original content.

Grape: That's a bit more than expected.

Zeta: The cost of this CG animation itself was very high, and I did it for more than half a year. But like I said, when you pile everything up to its best, there's no reason not to make it.

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