Chapter 146

Chapter 146: Independent Game Planning

Recently, everyone’s final decisions for the club had been settled.

Wan Chaoxiong naturally signed up for the Animation Club, which was exactly what he had always dreamed of;

Xiang Bingbing signed up for the Basketball Club and became one of the new female players in the school team.

In addition, Xiang Bingbing also expressed that she was actually very interested in photography, so she signed up for the Photography Club;

Liu Xiaoyu initially had no intention of joining any club, but Xia Yuan dragged her to participate in the selection activities for the Etiquette Department.

The Etiquette Department was a student organization that selected emcees for events, award ceremonies, and welcoming guests. There were many beautiful clothes to wear.

Both Liu Xiaoyu and Xia Yuan had very distinctive personalities, and they both successfully made it into the Etiquette Department.

Of course, Liu Xiaoyu also had a job composing music, which Xia Yuan was helping her get familiar with using the Fruit Music software.

Since it was work she was interested in, and it could well subsidize her living expenses, she studied very diligently, making rapid progress.

Apart from the Etiquette Department selection, neither Xia Yuan nor Lin You Xi spent much time on other clubs. They both spent this period preparing the materials for founding a club with Mei Fang.

With the experience of two games already listed on the APP Store, “Life Reopened Simulator” and “Monarchy,” their application for establishing a club was quickly approved. The three of them also found an office space in the club building.

The signature of Ximilu Studio was officially registered under Jiangcheng Normal University No. 1 Affiliated School. Currently, the only officially registered members of the club included Meiyuan, the three little ones, and Liu Xiaoyu, who assisted in composing music.

The most valuable assets of the entire club were the three ten-thousand-yuan laptops purchased by Mei Fang, as well as the top-tier single-lens reflex camera Olympus E-P3 bought earlier for filming Yuan Yuan’s performance.

After “Life Reopened Simulator” and “Monarchy” went online, they received strong market responses quickly, with sales breaking a thousand in the first week on the App Store in China.

Although their combined income was just around a thousand yuan, it was a very good start. More and more domestic users began to recognize the name of Ximilu Studio, leaving messages and participating in discussions in the comment section.

Aside from observing the market response of their self-developed products, Mei Fang spent most of his time browsing foreign forums during this period.

Thanks to the special identity of the C Station manager [Lin You Xi], he easily made friends with many independent game developers looking for like-minded individuals on foreign forums.

The first developer was Gao Gan, a college student from Jiamada. At the time, he was using the traditional RPG Maker software to create a narrative game.

Although Gao Gan didn’t know much about programming languages, his debut work, from composing music to writing scripts to designing the flow, was all created by himself. It was said that he started designing it in his sophomore year.

The background of this work was set in a scientifically advanced future where humans could use machines to change and write human memories. This technology was used to help people fulfill their dreams and wishes on their deathbeds, allowing them to leave without regrets.

In the story, we needed to play as two professionals from the company, helping the protagonist achieve an unreachable childhood dream through memory rewriting.

During the process of achieving the dream, players would gradually understand a deeply touching story of companionship and waiting through the perspective of the professionals.

When this work was first released on foreign forums at the beginning of the year, it did not cause much impact abroad. However, after Mei Fang discovered the work, he proactively offered to provide Chinese localization for its release, as there were many high-quality translation teams on C Station.

At the time, Gao Gan, still a young man, felt immense gratitude towards [Lin You Xi] and even asked him some questions about programming and technology.

In addition, with Xia Yuan’s assistance, Mei Fang also helped optimize some of the melodies and rhythms of the music and performed a memorable theme song “For River” with just two notes.

As a return for Mei Fang’s generous contributions, the young Gao Gan and Mei Fang reached a simple contract agreement, giving C Station full authority over the domestic region’s game distribution rights.

The C Station manager [Lin You Xi] personally provided a famous review after uploading the game to the game section of C Station:

“This is undoubtedly a trash game because you can’t see the screen through tears.”

This was the process of the most famous RPG Maker narrative independent game, “To the Moon,” being uploaded to C Station in the previous life.

The second young person Mei Fang met was a well-known big shot, Liang Qiwei, a master’s graduate from Yale University in the Beacon Country. He had just released his long-awaited wuxia-style game, “Rain Blood: Dead Town.”

Although the art style and gameplay design of this game were very cool, Mei Fang thought that the code was quite terrible, with many bugs appearing every few steps.

Thus, Mei Fang sent a private message offering to help Liang Qiwei rewrite the code. The next day, he received an email reply containing the source code for “Rain Blood: Dead Town.”

Mei Fang and Lin You Xi only spent a weekend reconstructing the code of this game, and when they returned it, Liang Qiwei was very satisfied with their results. He even intended to pay $3,000 as a reward, which Mei Fang politely declined. He wanted the domestic distribution rights for C Station instead.

People often place great importance on their first game. Liang Qiwei was hesitant to make a decision, so Mei Fang waited for a month before finally receiving his consent.

By then, the game section of C Station had just been completed, and Mei Fang gave it a naming that was not yet popular at the time—

Independent Games.

The concept of independent games would only become more widely known around 2013-2014 due to a documentary film about game developers titled “Indie Game: The Movie.”

Currently, the game section of C Station only involved independent games, including the two self-developed games from Ximilu Studio, plus “To the Moon” and “Rain Blood: Dead Town.” Among them, the most expensive, “To the Moon,” was priced at just 8 yuan.

There was basically no hope of making money…

Because C Station itself had a relatively high membership threshold, the players who left reviews were relatively high-level gamers. Under this section, Mei Fang and others received many positive reviews, with a harmonious comment section.

Mei Fang knew that once his independent game section gained more recognition, many more classic independent games would join the C Station section.

Compared to the once-popular smart mobile games of the past, such as Temple Run, Angry Birds, Candy Crush, and Fruit Ninja, these independent games could almost be considered to earn negligible amounts of money.

Of course, Mei Fang wasn’t against those games; he would still go after the money they could earn.

He just thought that now that C Station had gradually established itself as a portal website, perhaps it could bring some fresh air to the domestic game industry?

For domestic games, especially domestic single-player games, even if there was only 1% market development potential, they might produce unexpected qualitative changes, showcasing unprecedented possibilities.

And after Mei Fang took this step, the name of the C Station manager [Lin You Xi] began to spread rapidly among game professionals, especially independent game developers, both domestically and internationally…