Chapter 7 - Almighty Video Game Designer

Translated by Coldtaco

 Edited by Aelryinth

 His first attempt resulted in a score of 0. This was the first time Qiu Hengyang had encountered a situation like this.

 After the bird died, a Game Over overlay appeared, along with Qiu Hengyang’s current and best scores… both of which were zero. Underneath that was the leaderboard, displaying — where his current rank was supposed to be. It was likely that his score was too low to be entered into the leaderboards.

 Other than that, Qiu Hengyang had noticed the upper fourth of the screen was blank, and had the words Ad Space written on it.

 Qiu Hengyang nodded: these words had changed his opinion of designer number Seven.

 Qiu Hengyang was the founder of hengyou.com, and had been actively researching video games. Therefore, he valued the commercial model and value of games.

 Many entry-level video game designers who have not been in the industry have the quirk of not considering the commercial model of their game during design.

 In reality, a designer should think of the best commercial model for their game from the beginning.

 As for casual games like this, they could consider between making it a paid app or serving advertisements. Different ways of profit could greatly affect the performance of their game on the market.

 This designer had left a space for ads, showing that they knew the importance of commercial value, much better than designers who spend their time on insignificant problems…

 Tapping the screen again restarted the game.

 This time Qiu Hengyang prepared himself, tapping on the screen non-stop. However, the flight path of the stupid bird was too hard to control. Qiu Hengyang managed to clear two pipes before crashing head first into the third one.

 “Freaking damn it!” Qiu Hengyang was not willing to give up, so he went for another attempt.

 After five minutes, Qiu Hengyang had already restarted dozens of times.

 As expected, it was easy to die in this game. Even if they put all their concentration in the game, it was possible for them to die within a few seconds.

 Furthermore, after dying, another tap would restart the game. There wasn’t any need to consider if they wanted to, before they knew it they had played many rounds.

 Qiu Hengyang’s best score was 12, a score that he had achieved by giving his all.

 After trying a dozen more times, he finally managed to push the score up to 14, feeling like he was unable to think straight.

 Qiu Hengyang noticed that after that attempt his ranking on the leaderboards had moved up to sixth at the end screen.

 He tapped on the ranking and out came a leaderboard, sorted by highest to lowest score.

 Of course, the names on the leaderboard were all in the format of ‘GuestXXXXX’. Chen Mo couldn’t have everyone create an account, as it would adversely affect the gaming experience.

 However, the players were allowed to change their names freely on the leaderboard.

 Qiu Hengyang scrolled down and was shocked to find out the leaderboard had five hundred and forty-three people on it!

 -Five hundred players out of seven hundred in the audience? No way! How is that possible?-

 Qiu Hengyang thought that the majority wouldn’t find a game like this interesting. The number of people interested in a simple tapping game like this had exceeded his expectations.

 Qiu Hengyang couldn’t help feeling satisfied, ranking sixth out of five hundred or so people. This was a result to be proud of!

 Qiu Hengyang tapped on his account name and changed it to his real name.

 But before that, he scrolled down the leaderboards again, noticing that it was constantly shuffling. It looked like it was updated quite frequently, possibly every five to ten seconds.

 After seeing the shuffling of the leaderboard, Qiu Hengyang couldn’t help but feel that the game was quite lively.

 Scrolling upwards shocked him, it revealed the first place player with a score of forty-seven!

 -Holy shit!-

 Qiu Hengyang felt like dying. How did they do that? What kind of psychopath got a score of forty-seven? Did they cheat?

 The top players hadn’t changed their names, likely because they hadn’t discovered the feature.

 Qiu Hengyang wasn’t happy with his measly fourteen. He was in sixth place for now, but he could be knocked down at any time.

 “I’ll play for another five minutes. Then I’ll try the other games.”

 After closing the leaderboard, Qiu Hengyang was ready to play hard.

 ——

 Ten minutes passed quickly and the effects of the Super Focuser ended.

 “What an unexpected game… How did I spend so much time on that? Damn it.”

 A middle-aged man with glasses closed FlappyBird. A popup had appeared: Would you recommend this game to others?

 The man hesitated for a bit and pressed Recommend.

 It was hard to explain objectively but it was probably an ‘I can’t be the only one going through this torture” mentality.

 Up till now, FlappyBird had five hundred and eighty-nine people on its leaderboard and had no signs of slowing down.

 This was because of the inherent crowd mentality of humans. Some of them saw their friends or family playing it, competing to get a high score. Furthermore, upon seeing that many others in the audience were playing the game, others felt compelled to try the game out, even without the effects of the Super Focuser acting on them.

 After the effects of the Super Focuser expired, the majority of players quit the game. However, a small portion of those chose to not recommend the game;The remaining others recommended it.

 As for the players still playing, they were still trying to grind out their high score.

 Lin Hai noticed the Shi Huazhe didn’t look too well, asking out of concern, “What’s wrong, feeling unwell?”

 “Oh, it’s nothing,” he replied, shaking his head.

 Lin Hai noticed that Shi Huazhe’s eyes were glistening, and he was trying to hide it. Lin Hai couldn’t help but be curious.

 In the end, he glanced at Shi Huazhe’s screen. On it was the results screen of FlappyBird: Score: 4, High Score: 4.

 Lin Hai quickly looked away, barely holding in his laughter. It seemed that Shi Huazhe was angry because of that. Fair enough, he had been playing for ten minutes to achieve a high score of 4. That score wasn’t even in the top two hundred, anyone would be mad!

 Sensibly, Lin Hai chose to not pry into it…

 ——

 The game experience round continued. The whole round was an hour long, and only ten minutes or so had passed.

 Of the seven hundred people in the audience, almost six hundred of them had played FlappyBird. However, only a small portion of those were still pushing on; others chose to play other games.

 Chen Mo wasn’t worried. When the emcee was introducing the other games, he learned the abilities of his competitors, and most of them were barely competitive.

 Other than a handful of works that were passable, the others weren’t even comparable to his FlappyBird.

 Put it this way: the games had better graphics, resources, and content compared to FlappyBird. But in terms of gameplay and speed of spreading?

 -I’m not targeting anyone specifically, but what I’m saying is that everyone here is garbage!-

 Indeed, when trying other games, most of the audience quickly closed them, and reopened FlappyBird.

 Not saying that the game was fun, the most important part was grinding the high score!

 Why not say that the game was infectious. It did get stale after playing for a while. It was also quite boring, and most importantly, torturous! But after just closing it for five minutes, the desire to reopen the game came back.

 Chen Mo knew this from the reactions of the audience. Now, he only worried about the judges.

 If the judges all rejected the game and disqualified him, it would still be over!

 However, as long as one of the judges acknowledged his game, first place would definitely be his!