The engine is like the heart of a game, or like the propulsion system of a rocket.
While it cannot completely determine how good the final result will be, it is responsible for delivering power to each component, ensuring that everything operates stably.
The "Star Moon" engine is small in size, just right for VR games of around 20TB.
Ming Yan estimates that the new game will be between 10TB and 20TB in size.
It's dozens of times larger than Minecraft, so of course its profitability has to increase exponentially.
Mingyan is very confident in this.
That night, Mingyan started spending money lavishly online.
He still has five million in hand from the profits of the first month of the previous game.
Mingyan first rented a server for tens of thousands of yuan a month, intending to use it to operate the official website of Blue Star Studio.
The website needs to be outsourced to a design company. The design requirements have been clearly stated in a document, and the agreed price is around 200,000 yuan. Half of the payment has been made as a deposit.
Then there's the money I spent hiring headhunters to recruit people; only tens of thousands of yuan are left as the final payment.
The headhunter found two decent young people, but neither of them was willing to start a business with Mingyan.
One is a seasoned gamer who can start by testing games. He has a full-time job but only signed a part-time contract, and is paid based on the duration of each test.
The other is a technical artist who hasn't graduated yet and is looking for an internship. He's mainly here to gain experience, but his academic performance is quite good. This person will only be here for six months, but the monthly salary is only two thousand, which is quite cheap.
Then, Mingyan bought a mid-range VR workbench online, which can basically be understood as a high-end version of a work computer.
Developing games is not something that low-end devices can handle.
To ensure the speed of game graphics and special effects production, Mingyan bought a second machine specifically for rendering.
This alone cost nearly a million dollars.
Finally, there are the materials needed for the new game.
Many versatile sound effects, images, and special effects can be purchased on the game asset market, but their aesthetic appeal cannot be guaranteed.
To prevent the work from stalling if Varian didn't join, it was made clear that a batch of art assets had been purchased and placed in the asset library.
As for music, he is still actively contacting suitable outsourcing studios.
This project has already cost over 100,000 yuan, and it will definitely increase many times over when the game production officially begins.
In this way, the nearly two million yuan in funds that Mingyan had on his books became a large amount of fixed assets for Blue Star Studio.
For the next few days, Mingyan spent his time reading the instruction manual and learning how to use the new engine, "Star Moon".
My alma mater has quite strong R&D capabilities. This engine, which is still in BETA testing, has quite impressive performance and is more than enough for Mingyan.
He tried making a small game to familiarize himself with the engine.
This game is extremely small, only about 20GB, less than one-tenth the size of Minecraft, and basically smaller than 99% of current VR games.
The game mainly tells the story of a well-known dog, "Hachiko".
Hachiko is an Akita Inu that is a household name on Earth.
Players will take on the role of a newsstand owner, initially selling newspapers to Hachiko's owner every day and watching Hachiko take his owner to work.
Later, Hachiko's owner unfortunately passed away, leaving Hachiko alone to wait at the nearby train station every day. The protagonist would occasionally feed Hachiko.
The game's content spans 12 years, from the beginning to Hachiko's death.
Because the perspective is fixed and there's only one scene, the protagonist doesn't even have a model; he can only reach out to feed the dog, hand the dog owner a newspaper, or pat the dog's head—so it only needs 20GB to fit.
If each player goes all out to complete the game, it will only take about 40-50 minutes to finish.
This tiny game, Mingyan said, was completed very quickly, after only a few days of development.
He couldn't find an Akita dog model on Earth for the time being, so he used the interstellar breed "Beetle" which looked very similar as a substitute.
After completing the game, he made it clear that he had no intention of using this practice project to make a profit.
After thinking about it, he simply spent 100 yuan a month to open a cloud storage account, uploaded the game directly to it, and then posted the download link for free on his media account.
[A small project: I've made a new mini-game called "Hachiko's Story," which can be completed in an hour. The story is based on a true story, and I hope you enjoy it. :) (Download link attached)]
Because Minecraft is still trending and has been featured prominently on the charts, the IPP platform has given it a very good recommendation spot, resulting in a continuous influx of traffic.
As a result, Mingyan's account gained over eight million followers, making him a veritable local celebrity.
Within ten minutes of the message being sent, it had been read tens of thousands of times and received hundreds of comments.
Players are still making fun of Mingyan.
Has Minecraft updated yet?! When is the promised minimap coming out?! Why are you neglecting your duties?!
[Please nerf the mosaic monster; it truly lives up to its reputation as a newbie killer...]
Is this game, which is only 20GB, also pixelated/patchwork?
[Wow, this guy is amazing! I'm just here to see the legendary genius rookie architect.]
However, Mingyan took a look at the data on the cloud drive.
Nearly 20,000 people still clicked in and chose to download this mini-version of the game.