I Just Want Players to Save Money, They Insist on Giving Me!
Chapter 549 - 177: Three Textbook-Level Works!_4

Chapter 549: Chapter 177: Three Textbook-Level Works!_4

The true charm of meat pigeon games lies in enabling players to make brilliant moves through various combinations and strategies, even in unpredictable situations, thereby achieving victory.

The core appeal is strategy, not luck.

But what’s with the entries I received?

Setting aside graphics for a moment, Ke Jin didn’t expect these hastily made games to be god-tier in every aspect.

If they could highlight the gameplay, other aspects like the art style, voice acting, and rendering could be optimized slowly over time.

But they didn’t even grasp the core gameplay of meat pigeon games.

They focused the entire gameplay on randomness.

If you get lucky with a powerful item, you can go on a killing spree and breeze through the game. Sounds exhilarating, right?

But if you end up with trash loot, you’re pretty much left with no choice but to restart.

It’s like hitting the jackpot on a lottery.

So, after a few tries, players naturally pursue only one outcome—if they don’t get a god-tier item, they just restart.

That effectively solidifies the approach to clearing the game.

Players are confined to a single path in a game that’s supposed to be about randomness.

Honestly, don’t even call it a meat pigeon game.

You’re literally playing sidescrolling levels!

Damn, with a textbook example of a game like Slaughter Spire right here, you’ve managed to miss the essence entirely.

All you saw was the randomness, huh!

Ke Jin felt that even the super popular pay-to-win meat pigeon games from Blue Star these past few years did it better.

At least with the pay-to-win element, the developers know to reserve good items for the paying players, balancing the trash items to some extent to appease the cyber vagabonds.

So you don’t know how to make games without the pay-to-win element?

What, does making a traditional single-player game make you uncomfortable?

Of course, not all entries are fixed-price games.

There are a few that still incorporate pay-to-win elements.

But Ke Jin was baffled as soon as he opened one of the game archives.

A designer had even sent a promotional poster they created, hoping the top player could help advertise it.

Bro, let’s not even talk about the fairness to other designers if the top player were to promote it for free.

Even if we promote it, what’s the deal with this poster?

Opening the poster reveals a very eye-catching headline: "100 draws free when you join Slaughter Sea!"

Alright, the headline is fine.

But what the hell does pairing it with an image of a white man holding a whip imply?

Looking at it is enough to raise Ke Jin’s blood pressure.

If the meat pigeon theme was just a case of the designers misunderstanding the core concept,

Mistaking the strategy hidden within for randomness,

And consequently causing a significant drop in gameplay quality,

Then for themes like sidescrolling levels and platform jumping, things really went haywire.

As the saying goes, every generation produces its own talents, and there are still masters out there.

Some designers took the theme of sidescrolling levels literally, creating a game that required players to literally view the screen sideways to progress.

Others interpreted platform jumping as merely jumping off platforms, resulting in the design of a bungee jumping game.

And the art style of that bungee jumping had the aesthetic of ’three years of animation study to produce Titanic’.

The kicker is that Ke Jin couldn’t even object.

Go ahead, say there wasn’t a platform.

Or that there wasn’t a jump.

It’s just shy of serving you a platter of Ai-chan pou yu-jang pou.

Some went even further, slapping their foreheads and thinking.

Since other designers have played out all the tricks, if I want to impress Designer Ke, I must create something spectacular!

And so they designed a ’Escape from JZ Camp’ mini-game.

The platforms were stacks of pixelated corpses, and jumping involved hurdling over varying corpse obstacles like a track athlete.

Background, illustrations, and world view were all indescribably bizarre.

Looking at the submission IP:

Oh, Germany.

Well, that explains it—it’s a traditional art form.

After all, Xir is forever protecting us all.

If Ke Jin had to comment,

This game is the kind that even Lord Yan would have to dedicate three days of chanting to accrue some merit.

For a game like this, the top player wouldn’t even consider passing it through the preliminaries.

Let alone posting it on the official website, it could cause serious trouble.

But apart from these more abstract games, were there any that were seriously made?

There were.

But after trying them out, Ke Jin felt something lacking.

How should I put this?

They weren’t fun.

Too by-the-book and lacking in highlights, these games ended up being less engaging than the abstract ones with their wild ideas and fun.

This open-to-all game design competition can only be described as total chaos, almost the complete opposite of what Ke Jin had envisioned.

"It feels like their creativity has been somehow restricted."

"Why is that?"

"We already have the path paved by games like Slaughter Spire, Odyssey, and Star Kirby. Slaughter Spire brilliantly captures the essence of a meat pigeon game, Odyssey takes platform jumping to the extreme, and Star Kirby is the textbook on sidescrolling scroll games."

"Can’t they even copy properly?"

"How are we supposed to award the prize money at this rate?"

Seeing the boss in a fit of frustration in his office, Gou Chehua didn’t have many good solutions either. He could only scratch his head and then tried to reassure him.

"Mr. Ke, there’s no need to worry."

"For one thing, only a week has passed, and good games might need time to mature."

"Another thing is, many top designers from big companies like Tengjing Netcom and other second-tier firms haven’t joined the competition."