In less than a year, the revenue exceeded 500 million, and after being laid off by a large factory, they wanted to make a comeback in Tencent Games
Text: Yan Jinyan
In the past year, Silver Heart Studios has experienced one of its darkest moments.
Their first product, Dragon's Breath: Silence, was featured at Apple's annual developer conference in 2023 as the only domestic game, and was covered by many media outlets at the time. The goal and ambition of the product is also very big, to make a D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) Western fantasy theme season-based big world card. After the game was officially launched overseas in September last year, it cut 98 million turnover in the first month.
What caught people off guard was that on November 27 last year, ByteDance suddenly announced that it would adjust its game business, which made Silver Heart Studio, which belongs to the Love Division, become shaky in an instant.
However, more than half a year has passed, and they have miraculously overcome the difficulties, not only "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" has opened the first test of the national server, but Grape Jun also learned from people familiar with the matter that Silver Heart has become a second-party studio under Tencent Games.
Last month, I came to Silver Heart Studios and listened to their stories over the past few years.
01
The first core member I met at Silver Heart was Natsume, the head of PM, and many of my friends affectionately called her "Sister Na". She told me how the core team met in the early years and later started their own business together.
Most of the core members of Silver Heart are from NetEase's Galaxy Studio. In 2011, at the beginning of the formation of Galaxy Studios, their first work was to use the Unreal Engine 3 to make a MOBA project "Three Kingdoms of Heroes". Sagi, Sister Na, Code, now Silverheart's technical director, and Cos, the producer of Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence, are all members of that team.
In the past eight years, the team has experienced many large and small projects together, from "Three Kingdoms of Heroes" all the way to "Decisive Battle!" Heiankyo. During this time, even though the studio has undergone two major break-ups, this core team has remained the same. It is not difficult to imagine what a deep affection has accumulated between them.
It's a pity that later Sagi decided to leave NetEase with Cos and go to Tencent Games due to the choice of direction; Sister Na also moved to other projects due to project pressure. Code recalls me, "After everyone left, it seemed to mean that this era was over, and I thought that we would make another product together to prove our combination." ”
It wasn't until 2020 that things took a turn for the worse. At that time, there was a lot of hot money in the market, and more importantly, excellent works began to blow out: "Black Myth: Wukong" announced the first trailer, and "Genshin Impact" was officially launched...... Seeing these products, Sagi also decided to start a business together and make a game that he really likes after discussing it with his former friends.
Code told me that the reason why he left Dachang and agreed to Sagi's business offer was because of his trust in the past and his desire to work with his former friends again. Another reason is that in the past, everyone seemed to be steered by the company's strategy, and now he wants the team to have more autonomy.
In the course of the discussions, the direction of the project was quickly determined.
First of all, the team has accumulated a lot of experience overseas, and they want to make a product for the global market more than in China. Secondly, most of the members at the time were keen on strategy card games, especially RAID: Shadow Legends, and combined with the global direction, they quickly associated with the D&D genre that could carry multi-hero design. In addition, the team has accumulated in combat in the past, so it is best for this product to also be semi-real-time, similar to auto-chess.
Sagi also knows that the first product of the business must be long-term operation and can continue to deliver cash flow to the team, otherwise once it falls into a loss, everyone's operation will be deformed. So, in order to extend the life of the cards, they came up with the idea of a season system.
However, they may not have imagined at the time that they will pay a lot for it in the future.
02
Everything went back to starting from scratch. It's not a simple matter.
The team must first find the investment. After comprehensive judgment, they decided to join Youai first and belong to the Byte banner. On the one hand, they hope to improve the success rate of their products through the construction and distribution capabilities of large manufacturers. On the other hand, under the banner of a large factory, the team members will also have a stronger sense of security.
After the studio was formed, the project also needed to overcome many difficulties.
Byte is different from NetEase and Tencent Games, which has the accumulation of countless successful project experience and resource exchange, while Silver Heart's technology can only be built from scratch, starting from the first line of code. For program students, they have to dig out the code accumulated in the past ten years at NetEase from their minds again, and at the same time learn the commercial engine from scratch.
However, the solid foundation of the technical team has brought a stable foundation to "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence". After the game was launched on multiple overseas platforms, it was rarely criticized by players for optimization problems. Code told me that the best program team is the program that is not remembered by the players.
And in terms of the specific production of the product, they also spent a long time exploring the art style.
Now Kristian, the main beauty of "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence", told me that at the beginning, everyone positioned the project more lightly, and wanted to borrow the form of "Gods of United States" to deconstruct the mythological characters of the past in a modern way, so the style of painting will be more European and American cartoons.
But after doing it for half a year, they felt that if they wanted to take the global route and provide a pure Western fantasy experience with a strong sense of substitution, they still had to take the route of realistic painting style. So, they spent a few more months, referring to products such as "Diablo 4", and finally settled on the style of oil painting and realistic brushstrokes.
In this process, they also took some detours, and tried to refer to products such as "Humiliation" and "Love Death" to make a more stylized realism. However, when it came time to make it, the team found that the threshold for understanding this art style was too high, and few people could accurately grasp it, considering the stability of the mass production stage and the fact that European and American players prefer a pure realistic style, they still decided to reduce the proportion of stylization.
Later, they further established the art and content production pipeline, and established a detailed production white paper, with detailed research and background settings for each character race.
For example, the tiger people who lived in the desert region chose Baghdad in the ninth century as the base civilization, and refined the worship of the great river as the core of their religion, and the cyclical and dynamic water was the core of the teachings. Under these foundations, they will look for specific elements from the entire Baghdad civilization to design characters. For example, the Mage's Scepter is combined with the characteristic instrument of the oud, and the Assassin will display the enchanting scimitar dance. You can feel that the team cares about content.
When I first saw "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence", I thought it really didn't look like a domestic game, because their restoration of Western fantasy and D&D themes was really a bit more realistic.
The most iconic design is the D20 dice. If you've played Baldur's Gate 3, you'll be familiar with it. In Dragon's Breath: Silence, these dice are interspersed with random events, such as stealing, cooking, and so on. Of course, it doesn't change the gameplay experience as drastically as a single-player game, but for a mobile game, the randomness is enough to make people smile.
The game's sandbox world is not perfunctory, and the team has designed many side quests, adventures and puzzle solving content. What impressed me the most was that the big world was full of "unbeliever statues" that would ask weird questions from time to time. For example, "What are you?" The answer to this question is "a sorrowful human creature."
Abstract, but really on the flavor.
Even, when you frequently answer incorrectly and scratch your ears and cheeks, it will give you a "can't afford to lose medal" and taunt you nakedly.
As for the gameplay level, to put it simply, it retains the pre-battle strategy elements of traditional card games, and players have to team according to the character elements. At the same time, it also incorporates a design idea similar to auto-chess, such as each character not only has an element classification, but also has an identity tag with different effects: "Dreadnought" characters will have a combo effect when they attack normally, and "wild" characters will strengthen their skills through roll points.
In addition, the enemy mechanic is also extremely challenging for the character's position on the board. For example, some enemies will copy the nearest player character, while others will explode themselves. When the season changes, the combat mechanics and team building ideas may also change. It's easy to see that the game is meant to be fun through strategic gameplay, rather than just numerical intensity.
However, as the studio grew, the project grew larger, even exceeding the team's initial expectations. In the planning at the time, Sagi had already planned to provide a total of 20 hours of single-player experience in the open beta version, and players would adventure in 4 sandbox worlds, each with its own main race and event.
During this period, some colleagues raised concerns that the pressure on content production would be too high under the update frequency of a season in March. Sister Na also thinks that putting so much energy into making content is not due to the pressure of the overall strategy of the morning and night light years, and she is too eager to pursue high quality and the ultimate. However, Sagi believes that this reason may only account for 30%, and the other 70% is because the product chooses the D&D theme, which needs solid content, otherwise it is difficult to build a reputation.
In the end, they produced nearly 800,000 words of plot text and more than 300 heroes in a few years. During this period, they also appeared on the Macbook display section of Apple's conference with good porting technology. Later, after some domestic manufacturers saw it, they mistakenly thought that they were overseas manufacturers and sent English emails to seek cooperation.
In short, everything looks like it's moving forward in an orderly manner. However, as the project approaches, the crisis lurking beneath the calm waters is about to erupt.
03
On November 27, ByteDance officially announced the business adjustment instructions of Chaoxi Lightyear. This is undoubtedly a devastating blow to "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence", which has just been launched overseas for two months.
At that time, the game was about to launch its second season in December, and the sudden change caught Sister Na off guard. "The list of bugs is endless every day, and everyone has no mind to work anymore. Of course, this is very normal, and in our core internal group, we can't wait to refresh the latest news in two hours."
The team was in a state of panic. Kristian told me that every day we come to our desks with pens in our hands and stare at blank sketchpads on our computers, not knowing what to do.
What's even more difficult is that although "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" cut 98 million turnover in the first month, some of its problems were also exposed.
Sagi and I reviewed that they optimistically estimated how difficult it would be to make a product - usually a successful product only innovates in one or two ways, but they challenge the established model of strategy cards in terms of content, combat gameplay, and business cycle.
Even if the first two aspects are generally okay, the framework of the season system not only puts forward extremely high requirements for content production efficiency, but also affects the early experience of the game. According to the habit of card players, the server is always slammed first, but because of the design of the season system, "Dragon's Breath: God's Silence" puts the rewards behind, resulting in the loss of some players in the early stage.
It's not that these issues are unsolvable, but when the studio's life and death are uncertain, it's easy for teams to amplify anxiety due to a variety of factors. Some members even feel that if the product is a little better, or if the proportion of content is reduced and the commercialization is stronger, then the studio will not face the crisis of layoffs.
After discovering the internal friction and vacillation of the team, Sagi soon held a general meeting of the studio, systematically reviewed and reflected on the past few years, and reorganized the communication mechanism.
As for the follow-up development of the project, he also realized that his ability was limited, and it was impossible to be the head of the studio, busy with external communication while also taking care of the status of a producer of multiple projects. So, he began to delegate power and handed over the producer of "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" to the original mastermind Cos.
Under this series of adjustments, the team members quickly regained their strength. At the same time, good news is pouring in. In January of this year, the version of "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" passed the review, which means that they will have a chance to re-emerge in the national server. As for the survival of the studio, Grape Jun learned from other sources that after a round of interviews, Silver Heart quickly reached a two-way trip with Tencent Games' Northern Lights Studio Group.
04
After more than half a year of adjustment, the national server of "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" finally announced the first exposure PV on August 23, and opened the first test of the national server on October 15. I was invited to participate in their media seminar when I came to Silver Heart Studio.
Sagi told me that there was not much criticism of the gameplay and content of the product by international server players before, and the main problem was still focused on liver krypton.
Therefore, in the national server version, they have done a lot of burden reduction. For example, the cultivation level of each hero is canceled, and all hero levels directly follow the protagonist; Players go online every day, so they don't have to spend a lot of time brushing up on duplicate dungeons; Even the unit price of the gacha card has been reduced to less than half of the international server.
In other words, it's time for teams to think more clearly about their numerical and strategic gameplay decisions. They try to put the strategy gameplay experience in front of the experience to entice players to stay.
At the same time, it also leads to some solutions to the problem of the season system. Previously, in order to provide motivation for repeat plays, the game would reset all of the player's equipment as the season changed, and the sense of loss was severe, but now most of the equipment has been retained. At the same time, in the early part of the season, they will increase their benefits, such as in this test, they will give away 100 draws in the first week.
Sagi bluntly said that if he had done it himself, he might have been more conservative, but under Cos's leadership, the team's decision-making courage has become more daring, and he both admires and agrees with this change direction.
During the few days I spent at Silver Heart Studio, I also audited an internal art demand meeting.
I hadn't been to a similar conference before, and it was a fairly new experience. According to my observation, the theme of the meeting was a novice scene made for the national costume, during which they talked about dozens of places that may need to be optimized, including cutscenes, character design, appearance methods, scene colors, etc., and even the appearance and placement order of items in a scene were discussed for a while, in order to see how to do it more in line with the narrative logic.
At the same time, Kristian told me that in order to adjust the product to a version suitable for the national server, they will adjust the existing game art style. For example, in terms of character design, in the past, international costumes would pay more attention to tough structural turns and do some block design, but in the oriental aesthetic standards, they would add more delicate and soft brushstrokes. At the same time, they are also designing more heroic characters from Chinese mythology.
Character tweaks comparison
The White Ape is a welfare hero in the National Server Open Beta
In the scene construction of the sand table world, the international server version may still have the problem of insufficient polishing. Now they're re-optimizing the lighting and vegetation distribution to give the overall picture a more focused visual focus, including clearer directions to the route. In terms of architectural design, they have also made more intuitive adjustments, taking Goblin Camp as an example, many players may not understand why the camp is a cave in the plains, and now they are reinforcing the concept of camp artistically.
Comparison of the big world before and after the adjustment
Through this demand meeting, I also found that Silver Heart now seems to have returned to its normal work trajectory, and it is difficult for you to perceive that this is a team that was uncertain about its life and death half a year ago.
Kristian told me that when the incident first broke out, he could only arrange some short-term feedback for everyone, such as drawing an original painting, instead of doing cultural combing-related work, otherwise it would be easy to be distracted by information from the outside world. Fortunately, everyone's working state has now returned to the previous period of peak combat effectiveness.
Recalling his experience six months ago, Kristian said, "Sagi later said something at the plenary meeting: People are in advance. We believe that as long as our group is still around, the work behind us will not be difficult for us."
05
epilogue
Of course, Silver Hearts are not successful at the moment, and they still have a long way to go. In Sagi's words, they have only survived the most difficult moment of the studio and regrouped, but if they want the team to truly usher in a transformation, they may have to wait until the national service blossoms.
In my opinion, this is already very rare. In the past few years, there have been too many entrepreneurial teams that have not resisted the changes in the environment, even if some teams rely on start-up products to be in the limelight for a while, but they quickly fall silent, and finally cannot escape the end of disbandment. After going through everything, Silver Heart still maintains a good creative desire and original intention, and this team momentum should be able to give people a lot of confidence.
At the same time, "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" is also a product with a unique temperament, and its theme and content expression are differentiated enough. Its innovation in the card category is also in line with everyone's demand for high-quality games - focusing on gameplay, not just numbers. It even has the opportunity to solve the problem of long-term operation of the card category through the season system. More directly, until August this year, the cumulative revenue of the game overseas has exceeded 500 million. From these perspectives, the national service does have a certain market potential.
On the last day of Silver Heart, Code told me that the team had come all the way and it was not easy for everyone. Sagi is the engine that unites the team, he and Cos are the engineers who solve specific problems, and Sister Na is the big housekeeper to ensure that the team does not take risks.
Finally, there was one thing that I forgot to say. The English name of Silver Heart is SGRA, which is the abbreviation of Alpha Sagittarius, and Alpha Centauri is also the center of the entire galaxy. Perhaps they had already figured out from the beginning that the Silver Heart represented both a group of people from the old Galactic Studios, and at the same time a distant and long interstellar voyage.
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