Text/Nine Lotus Treasure Lamp

On the plane from Shanghai to the G-Star Game Show in Busan, South Korea, Grape Jun came across a familiar figure: he was wearing a black short-sleeved shirt and carrying a khaki military-style backpack, looking for his place.

Because I've watched enough live streams, I recognized him at a moment - Yu Zhong, the creator of the "Girls' Frontline" series and the CEO of Scatterblast Network.

I have a preference for this IP. Many years ago, it was because I was moved by the world view of "Girls' Frontline" that I began to pay attention to the track of "two-dimensional games". In the industry, this game has also been the second game enlightenment work for many people. When I was in Korea last year and I was talking to the local producers of the second tour, they said that they had been more or less influenced by "Girls' Frontline".

But under the expectation of everyone, "Girls' Frontline 2: Chasing" has become one of the most controversial second games in China. The plot of the game was accused of "betraying old players", and after that, various claims became more and more noisy, as if the first 2 teams made this game just to disgust users.

Now, nearly a year has passed since the many controversies of "Shaoqian 2", and the audience has gradually dispersed. The discussion about this game has gradually changed to "they seem to have changed a lot of things in order to win players back". Although there is still a mocking mood, it seems that everyone agrees that this game is finding its place and direction.

At the end of August, with the official launch of the game's character "Kolukai", many former "commanders" around me began to think about returning. On August 26, the game reached No. 41 on the App Store's best-selling game list, which is their best result since January 25. Since then, the game has started to level off with each new card pool. Recently, they also released the news that they will soon be launched overseas.

Now Yuzhong's expression looks much more relaxed. In Busan, he not only gave product-related speeches at the exhibition, but also took photos and interacted with many players and practitioners after the exhibition.

Since the announcement of the closure of "Shaoqian 1" in China, we can think that the project of "Shaoqian 2" will become the company's top priority in the future. But how much can it change? So I decided to "torture" Hazhong, how did he feel and think after such a turbulent year? What does he expect from the future of scattering?

We had the following conversations:

01

"Nobody likes to be scolded every day"

Grape: Why did you come to G-Star Games?

Hanaka: I was invited by the organizer to attend the G-CON conference and share the topic of game development as a producer. I haven't been here for a few years, and the last time I came here was to promote "Young Front 1".

Grape Jun: Do you feel that there has been any change in the Korean market? Do you have confidence that "Young Men 2" will be launched in South Korea?

Hanaka: There are definitely changes, and the competition is obviously more fierce than before. However, our core players are still very supportive of Shaoqian IP, so our confidence in the new product is still quite strong.

Grape: How are you preparing for the overseas launch?

Hanaka: We hope to launch all of our planned overseas markets within this year. Regions like South Korea, which have a deep IP base, are looking forward to our games.

Going overseas is a huge challenge for us, it has multiplied our workload by four or five times, and it has also exposed us to a lot of work that we have not experienced. Take localization, for example.

Some character names need to be adjusted. Like Klukai, whose prototype is the German gun HK416, the name should be as German as possible, but not make the word look like something else, and take into account the cultural habits of local players.

In the plot, there may be puns in some passages, which is difficult to translate.

Grape King: After the national server was launched at the end of August, some players said that it was "the Empire's counterattack". How do you feel?

Hanaka: We're slowly recovering. But Lu Kai's version should be regarded as a combination of various optimizations in the first half of the year, hoping to use this popular character to attract everyone to come back and take a look.

Judging from the number of users, retention, and ARPU and other data, that version has become an inflection point, whether it is player reputation or the actual content of the game, the situation has improved significantly.

Grape Jun: Will the mentality of the "Young Men 2" team be better now?

Hanaka: We are in a state of "moving forward with weight".

"Young Ones 2" did suffer some setbacks at the beginning. Externally, there is a public opinion attack, or some other wind direction; Internally, it was our first time to make a 3D game, and many pipelines and processes were also crossing the river by feeling the stones.

If you play "Shao Qian", then you must also know that we haven't had a few days of so-called "good days", so we are quite good at experiencing setbacks. We need to grasp the main contradictions, figure out what the real players want, and solve the most serious problems possible.

Now we've pulled some versions to a level where players have expected, and some have even exceeded expectations.

Grape: During the worst of the situation, did your mood suffer?

Hanaka: Nobody likes to be scolded every day, so it must have been a difficult time. But from the perspective of a producer or a company manager, I have to rationally analyze what mistakes the company or team has made, and then solve the problem.

The biggest enemy of rational judgment is emotion. When your emotions are shocked, some irrational thoughts tend to pop up. It's like playing some souls-based game, you have to keep yourself under control in order to win against the enemy, or you might die without knowing how to die.

We were stunned for a long time when we encountered that extreme situation, and it would be a lie if I said that there was no self-doubt. But we didn't lose to the point of being self-defeating, but we were in a state of mind that was open to criticism and self-criticism, and I think it was an improvement for the team and for myself.

Grape: How did you come out of your state of confusion?

Hanaka: Because the project is pushing you forward, you are not allowed to spend too much time on self-pity. I have a lot of work every day, and I usually work until two or three or even four in the morning. In the process of such high-intensity work, there is no time to think about the mentality.

Of course, every time I do this, I get physically and mentally exhausted, and I may be able to divert my attention a little bit and relax. For example, playing games, driving for a drive, or chatting with family or having dinner with friends. But sometimes you're in a worse mood after a dinner with your friends, because they'll talk to you about the project.

Grape Jun: Was there a point in time when you felt that the team atmosphere was significantly better?

Hanaka: We're still on the climb, so we can't open champagne yet. For the team, there is no such thing as doing something and everyone can get excited all at once.

If you have to talk about nodes, each version is a node. When you see your efforts turned into actual online content, you will have a certain sense of accomplishment. If the player thinks it's good, everyone's confidence will grow.

Grape Jun: Specifically, what methods did you use to enable the team to carry the load?

Hanaka: We've done a lot of work.

The first is to clarify the product direction. After learning about the user's voice, we quickly re-evaluated the product direction and adjusted accordingly.

In the beginning, we focused on the game of chess, but after going live, we found that the market had a limited number of players. Therefore, after the launch of the service, we brought our core competitiveness back to the content.

Some levels that are not reasonably designed, or gameplay that is too complex and difficult, have a very low user engagement rate. They're draining our production capacity and making players think of us badly, so we're going to get rid of all of that.

The second is to design a lot of time nodes for the whole year, what we should do in what time period, and what goals we want to achieve. We want the team to know that while it's going to be tough, we can come out of it.

For example, in May, we asked the team to speed up the overall development schedule, from a release in 35 days to a release in 21 days. From May to August, we emphasized the optimization of the overall gameplay and optimized the operation experience.

We've released a number of new features, revamping the beginner's tutorial, levels from the prologue to the first 5 chapters, and the player's growth path from level 40 to 60; In addition, there are some technical underlying problems, and we spent nearly 6 months reconstructing the entire battle underlayer to solve the problem of player backtracking stuck.

Grape Jun: What kind of ideas do you do so much optimization?

Hanaka: Our optimizations are all based on the positioning of the game. In our imagination, "Young Men 2" has a perfect appearance, it should be quite different from other games, and it also has its own advantages in quality, and the content is more avant-garde.

We've put a lot of effort into building an art pipeline, and it's top-notch, but it's also made us realize that in this day and age, you don't just have to excel in one place. You have to always take into account the barrel effect, from the very beginning of the concept to the quality of the end.

We didn't do that very well at the beginning, and that's my regret. This is because the direction of some content can only be clearly answered when it is user-facing.

Grape Jun: What will be the focus of the future development direction of "Shaoqian 2"?

Hanaka: In the previous stage, we broke some hard bones and reconnected them, so now we need to continue to exercise and make the new parts stronger.

Specifically, it is divided into two aspects, one is to consolidate the existing modules. For example, the core gameplay, the number of characters, and the art effects can be further improved.

The second is to integrate the overall experience of the game. Our current experience of the entire game is a bit scattered, with gameplay, plot, character collection, and various side gameplay, not converging into a complete flow experience.

I wanted the player to be the commander, and no matter which module he played, it would be relevant to our overall story. Everything the player does has a corresponding reason, and it is fed back into the shaping of the plot and IP, which is what I want to do in the long run.

Grape Jun: The national costume of "Shaoqian 2" will be one anniversary soon, do you have any plans?

Hanaka: The anniversary celebration will definitely be a relatively large version, and the amount of plot and dubbing in it will be relatively high.

We will release some relatively popular characters at that time, and at the same time, we will also let the characters who have appeared throughout the year have more opportunities to show their faces, and create a feeling of year-end party for everyone. In addition, we will also organize some corresponding activities offline.

The anniversary celebration and the launch of the overseas server will be in December, and we hope to increase everyone's attention to the product as much as possible in that month, so that the popularity of the game can be increased.

02

"The games we make will have a special taste."

Grape Jun: In the first half of this year, Scatterblast also launched a buyout stand-alone game "Reverse Collapse: Operation Bakery", how much did you participate in this project?

Hanaka: I was the initiator of this project and a screenwriter, and I wrote most of the plot myself. In addition, I will also give my own opinions on some experiences in the game.

I'm quite happy with "The Bakery". It was originally just a work that we did during the fandom period, and it was able to expand to its current size, in addition to having some feelings, but also integrating some game concepts after the establishment of the company. This game is more of a gift to me and to the team.

Grape King: Why did you take the old game "Operation Bakery" and redo it?

Hanaka: On the one hand, as an early work, we still hope that it will have a greater impact on the entire IP. I have been writing the script of the bakery for a long time, and I want to bury a lot of information in it, which will also lay the setting and world view level for our other works in the future.

On the other hand, we are also considering whether there can be some new breakthroughs in addition to the IP line of Shaoqian. If we want to do something else in the future, "The Bakery" can be developed as another line.

Grape Jun: You have taken on a lot of screenwriting work in the company. Specifically, to what extent will you be involved?

Hanaka: For example, in "The Bakery", I wrote from the outline to the end of the pen; In the case of "Young Former 2", I did the outline in the early days, and then gave feedback on some texts. Later I found out that this caused some problems, so I'm going to get a little deeper for now.

But in terms of time, I was not allowed to write the entire event plot by myself as before. So I'm basically a firefighter now, and where I can't stand it, I'll go and top it.

Shomae is a big story. In "Young Men 1", we started with a single-line narrative, and found that players didn't like it, so I took over from the sixth chapter at that time, and buried the dark line in it, turning it into a kind of double-line narrative, which was the first time we made plot adjustments.

We found that there was a noticeable increase in the discussion and tolerance of the story, and then we moved back to multi-line storytelling. Not only does it have more lines, but it also has a coupling relationship that makes the story more complex.

This places high demands on our level of writing. The advantage of it is that it looks more interesting, but the disadvantage is that it is too difficult to write, and it feels like people are going to die after writing it.

Grape: How did you first come up with the worldview of Shaoqian?

Hanaka: I wrote some rudiments when I was in school, but I was naïve at the time. Later, I went to do fandom creation, because I needed to make some works in a down-to-earth manner, so I began to supplement the worldview content in it.

It was in 2013, and after we finished the first generation of Operation Bakery, we started to think about how to move to commercialization. In the years that followed, a number of corresponding stories were added.

The highlights in the world view are very happy to write, but it is very painful to make up the details, and you have to think about all kinds of logic, whether the plot is reasonable, and whether it is interesting. It may take you 10 times as long as the outline to fill in a detail.

Yunaka is a fictional historical setting for the world view of the young man

Grape: Why did it take so long to do this? Will anyone pay for it?

Hanaka: Our team loves Hideo Kojima. Kojima's work is usually based on a realistic view of the world, but there are things you can't explain, which are just a response to what he wants to say.

We like this form of architecture very much, so when we were doing Shaoqian, we wanted to make a world view that was more realistic, with wasteland and Cold War flavors, but there were robot beautiful girls in it. So in what form should they reasonably exist? We deduce step by step, and finally get a relatively closed-loop logic, which becomes the bottom of our story.

As for whether anyone pays for it, we don't think about that. At the time, it was just a hobby, because we were all military nerds, so you would see some creators in our games that wanted to express themselves.

For example, some characters and plots have nothing to do with commercialization, and even have a negative impact. There are some gameplay methods that we will do with a relatively strong world view packaging, which makes the development more difficult, and will indirectly affect the frequency of product updates. If you save this time and do something else, maybe the business performance will be better.

But I think the game industry has a little bit of an artistic component, and there are many places where the value cannot be quantified. This is an attitude and cognition that we uphold in the process of creation, so the games we make may have the so-called "chef's hand sweat", which has a special flavor in it.

Grape Jun: Judging from the current public opinion, pleasing users is a direction that must be kept up with the same. Have you ever doubted the value of art in the past few years?

Hanaka: That's our underlying logic. If this logic is removed, then our game may become something that anyone can do.

We've also been listening to our players and considering their feelings. Don't think of art as an antithesis to serving players, players are willing to play our games, and that's a sign that they like our tone.

The foundation of what we're based on is that we can create something that no one else can create, and that includes our ideas and thoughts, and I think it's a higher level of service that allows us to stand with the players in the long run.

Just like KFC and McDonald's, everyone has some unique skills of their own. If everyone just sells fried chicken wings and the taste is similar, then they will fall into a price war, which is not good for themselves and the industry.

Grape Jun: The number of ACG users has increased a lot in recent years, do you think you and these new ACG users can understand each other?

Hanaka: We've been observing the changes in the community, and we can understand and feel the reasons for this.

I think that today's users usually have higher requirements than in the past, because they are attracted by some high-quality works, but there are few companies that can make such products. If the players and the development team do not match each other, it is easy to have conflicts.

This is just one example, and there are many contradictions caused by different perceptions. The difficulty of making the game now may be 100 times worse than that of "Young Former 1". But I believe it's a positive change, and we're adapting to it.

03

"I just want to eat McDonald's today"

Grape Jun: You have gone from working in a group of the fandom community in the early days to managing the entire company now, do you think your identity for the former IP has changed?

Hanaka: There will be some changes, but only the nature of the work will change. From a fully deeply involved creator, it is slowly developing in the direction of management and coordination.

There may be some conflict between these two identities, the most important of which is time, so you can only try to make trade-offs. At present, I still prefer to manage more, and usually mainly do deployment planning and let the team do the corresponding content production. Maybe as I just said, there are really projects that can't be topped up, so I will participate in some creations.

If IP wants to go further, it cannot be achieved by individual strength, it must require a mature team to do well.

Grape Jun: What do you think is the difference between managing other people's creations and creating your own?

Hanaka: Management will ask you to look further. When you create by yourself, you don't have to think about a lot of things so clearly, you can write it first, and then the inspiration comes out, and you can naturally connect it.

But when you ask the team, you have to think through everything in advance, and make sure that the process doesn't go off the rails and that you get what you want. This is very difficult, because the probability of deviation can be seven or eight percent.

I saw that some players in the community complained, saying that Yuzhong is not fishing every day, why don't you do this and that, but it is precisely because this is done that you have done it, so it takes more time than before.

In the past, if you just wrote a script script, you might come out after a week of retreat. But if you also have to manage project progress, overseas situations, and company personnel, it's different.

And many things are not isolated, for example, the plot, you also have to think about how to perform, what the cost budget is, and what kind of resources are in the level...... This is not like "Young Front 1", even if you write, you can add at most a background or character portrait after writing. You can't do that now, the cost is so high, you have to consider the cost performance.

So everyone will think that when "Shaoqian 1", it seems that we changed a lot of things quickly, how did "Shaoqian 2" become crooked? Because of the 3D development project, it is a larger team behind it, and the development method of a small team is different.

Grape: Do you still have that passion from the early days?

Hanaka: I can't call it passion, I think I have a desire to express myself.

If you really have a lot to say to the player, you can't stop it, you have a lot to write. When you have nothing to say to the player, there is nothing to write at all, you can only write some routine plots, then there is no point.

That's why I say that serving players and self-expression are not in conflict. We've also tried a few times, and if you write some non-nutritious industrial saccharin, players won't approve of it. It's like cola, you can't just add sugar desperately, how much sugar you give, how much carbonic acid you give, the right ratio is good to drink, you can't just put it blindly.

Now that we have encountered this kind of blow, we still insist on doing it, you can say that it is a kind of conceit. We think that if we don't do it, probably no one else will do anything like this.

We still recognize our content from the bottom of our hearts, and we may not do a good job in some areas in a short period of time, and we don't make players feel what we want to express, so we can adjust it.

Who can get everything really good right out of the box? There may be such people, but certainly not me. I believe that we can get to the point where everything is good, it just takes time and space.

Grape Jun: What are your plans for the future of scattering?

Hanaka: For now, we will still focus on the young front IP.

There are two reasons for this, one is because the growth of IP needs to be constantly irrigated, and you need to constantly produce new content to dangle in front of users' eyes so that everyone can remember you. Since we take shaping IP as our corporate goal, we must let this IP continue to have new works.

On the other hand, it's because we don't have enough experience in other fields. When our team's capabilities and technology become more mature, we may try some other IPs, such as we consider "Bakery" as another line. But it is also related to Shaoqian, after all, it is really difficult to shape an IP from scratch.

So now our focus is still on how to do the things in front of us well.

Grape Jun: The current second tour track has been raised to a new height by some products. As an early entrant, would you regret not making that level of product?

Hanaka: What kind of market position a product can achieve is positively related to the team's ability and project positioning.

If you talk about team ability, then I have regrets. For example, the growth rate of project management and technology research and development, we are indeed relatively weak. If, in the same amount of time, others can achieve 100 points, and we can only achieve 60 points, it must be our own fault.

But from a strategic point of view, what we wanted to do was more unique, so I don't regret it that much.

Whatever goals you set, you will be in the same position. Since we don't plan to make that kind of product, we don't need to regret that others have reached that position.

Let's take McDonald's as an example. KFC came out with a delicious set meal today, but I just want to eat McDonald's today, then I won't regret it, as long as I buy McDonald's, I have achieved my goal.

I think that when others succeed, we need to learn from the successful experience and then use it for our own goals. Instead of what others do, I do what I do, and I can't do it every day because I think about why others can be so successful, and then I say over and over again in the chat group, people don't have to live like this.

Grape King: It's almost 10 years since the explosion, how do you feel now?

Hanaka: When we first started our company, I didn't really think that we would be able to go so far in 10 years, and I didn't expect that the story of Shozen would continue for so long. We just did what we wanted to do.

But now, we've developed so many games, and we've had players who have been following us and giving us a lot of feedback. We've been improving over the years based on their needs, and I think we're really going to be a bit more mature than before.

Of course, there are still a lot of things that can be improved and a lot of regrets, but I am also happy to be able to bring happy memories to players in various ways.

I hope that the progress and achievements we have made over the past few years will serve as a basis for continued progress in the future. If we want to make our game accessible to more people by creating deeper stories, more immersive character building, and other multi-faceted developments.

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