Interstellar Travel: Becoming a Dress-Up Game Designer

Chapter 202

The reason she chose the cultivation aspect as her daily dungeon instead of the mythology aspect is that the mythology part is difficult to change, and she wanted to tell the story of Chinese mythology authentically. She wanted to show the interstellar people that Chinese mythology is incredibly fascinating!

The mythology section will be presented in two parts: one part will be the original version, and the other part will allow players to alter the ending or create a storyline. Many of the mythological stories are unsatisfying, and Lin Shuying, as a child, fantasized about entering those stories and changing some of the events.

If we have the ability to do it today, why shouldn't we do it?

Mythology is not just mythology; it also includes supernatural tales, ghost stories, and so on, making its content extremely diverse.

Cultivation is a system of inheritance created by the indigenous Taoist school of China. After being processed by many authors, Taoist masters, and later generations, it has become a system of power evolution.

In Lin Shuying's understanding, this is something even more powerful than Western genetic evolution. Even at its peak, genetic evolution still results in humanity, not godhood. This is a unique aspect of Western mythology and culture—a perpetual submission to the strong, making it difficult to overthrow higher-level beings, such as God.

However, cultivation is different; the sole purpose of cultivation is to become a god.

This kind of thinking is terrifying, but it also represents the core spirit of the Chinese people: never giving up, never submitting, and resolutely fighting.

卷！

The path of cultivation not only involves power, but also lifespan, resources, experience, status, and so on. If poorly designed, the entire dungeon can trap players in a relentless cycle of resource gathering and leveling up, leading to exhaustion. This would likely tie most players to cultivation side quests, forcing them to abandon other gameplay elements like costume changes, homesteading, farming, and map exploration. For a game, such monotonous and fixed gameplay is detrimental, indicating a lack of balance in the game's content.

However, too much content also has a downside: the team and planners have too many things to consider, which can easily lead to problems.

When recruiting for the game design department, Lin Shuying was already planning to build a comprehensive team. Now there are 13 members, but she still feels that it's not enough.

Currently, we are divided into four groups, each responsible for monitoring different gameplay content and reporting feedback.

The first group is the costume design team. They are responsible for tracking how many clothes there are, how many clothes players have created, their favorite clothes, and the clothes players frequently wear in the game. They also oversee events related to clothing, its creation, components, and design styles. While they don't need to pay too much attention to player opinions, understanding them is helpful for improvement.

The second group is the Homestead Planning Team, which focuses on the gameplay and feedback of Homestead players.

The third group is the farming planning team, which includes gardening, gardens, and various farming activities. They need to monitor for bugs that appear in the process. They also need to record the varieties cultivated by the players themselves to prevent things like flowers blooming in the mud, which goes against the game's design.

The interstellar AI is incredibly intelligent, but even the most intelligent system is still composed of programs and electronic components; its calculations differ from those of real life. Lin Shuying experienced this most acutely in her past life. Back then, AI drawing was all the rage, with countless creations including four-fingered figures, three-eyed giants, cats with dog heads, and so on.

At its peak, a quick scroll through the app revealed a plethora of AI-generated images: flowers, landscapes, people, houses, clothing, jewelry—you name it. Many businesses used AI models to save on model fees; the images were so flattering they looked like paper cutouts, but when the clothes arrived, the bust or waist measurements were always wrong, or the clothes looked completely different from the pictures.

The bizarre things created by intelligent systems are not uncommon in interstellar games, especially in overly free game worlds like Qingfengyi. Holographic worlds at least have professional review teams, and non-compliant or unreasonable settings are monitored at multiple levels. In Qingfengyi, however, only the studio itself can handle it.

The planting team had previously detected an osmanthus tree that was also producing orchids. That player was quite eccentric; they actually thought of using orchid pollen to pollinate the osmanthus. The absurd thing was that the system successfully detected it, because the program determined that pollination would produce secondary behavior, so the player's actions were considered legitimate. This went on for five days before being detected. Fortunately, the matter wasn't publicized and they quietly resolved it. The price was giving the player a string of purple-flowered jade beads. When the player went out to show them off, other players discovered that discovering the exploit that created the Qingfengyi bug could earn a reward.

Lin Shuying had no choice but to form a monitoring team. They issued a formal announcement stating that if the vulnerability was detected by the authorities within a day, there would be no compensation for the vulnerability.

The fourth group is responsible for monitoring NPCs and other miscellaneous tasks; there are simply too few people to organize a fifth task.

The monitoring team was ready, and things were progressing rapidly in the game.

The announcement revealed that upon entering the instance, players would find themselves in a vast, seemingly endless grassland. Lin Shuying designed the area as a grassland to facilitate kite flying, and to realistically depict the boundless expanse of the grassland with no horizon, the game would continuously cycle through several areas, giving players a sense of endless vastness.

This is the latest technology from the gaming platform, inspired by Lin Shuying. She used to play dress-up games with a home system that included room-crossing mechanics. Players could see the scene and layout of another room from one room, but there was a certain buffer time between them. The StarCraft technology has virtually no buffer time, giving players a significantly larger map.

We used this technology briefly in the last event, Tea Road, and the results were quite good. The game platform has been further improved recently, making the map stitching even more seamless, so players no longer experience the lag or stuttering felt in the previous event.

Upon arriving on the vast grassland, the first thing that appears is a cutscene.

Players are really looking forward to Qingfengyi's cutscenes, which are very innovative.

Space combat games also have cutscenes, featuring grand-scale battles between humans and Zerg or spaceships firing cannons—truly magnificent. However, the scenes in Qingfengyi are gentler, even the grand scenes are filled with warmth and a sense of story.

The transition effects for this event are very straightforward:

In the main city, countless NPCs happily set off with their children. Wealthy families prepared carriages, and the whole family, along with their maids and servants, had prepared plenty of things, dressed beautifully, and were planning to do something important.

Those who weren't very wealthy would carry their own small baskets, leading their children and elderly relatives as they strolled slowly. The crowds gathered on the city streets, forming long streams. Children in carriages would offer their pastries to other children walking nearby; if the children outside didn't accept them, the adults outside would only allow them to take them after the lady inside spoke.

Lin Shuying thoughtfully added a note here: people in ancient times wouldn't have had such a scene. Lin Shuying made a slight change, hoping that gentleness could bless this beautiful world.

After leaving the city, they followed the official road past Shan'an and came upon a beautiful plain. The plain was dotted with small hills, ponds, pavilions, and streams. Near the mountain, there was a waterfall with many stone benches beside it. Water mist drifted down, and many children played in the shallow water. The shallow water was only twenty or thirty centimeters deep, paved with fish-scale-shaped stone slabs, and the rushing water was free of moss.

Beyond the waterfall area, the view shifts to other parts of the plains, with occasional wildflowers, grasses, and large peach trees in bloom. There are many kinds of trees: sycamore, tulip tree, paulownia, locust, osmanthus, cypress, bodhi, banyan, and so on, most of them very tall with dense foliage. Stone benches, wooden chairs, sofas, and tables are placed below, providing a place to rest after a long day.

Then the perspective quickly narrows to a child holding a swallow kite. The child is running around, giggling, and soon the kite takes flight. Looking up, the blue sky and white clouds are beautiful.

The couple followed behind the child, while the elderly sat under the tree. A large carpet was spread out under the tree, covered with fruits. Some children who didn't like kites or adults who didn't want to join in the fun sat there watching.

Of course, many adults also enjoy it, but their enjoyment is quite different from that of children. They pursue novelty in kites, high flight, and large size, aiming to become the best kite flyer, regardless of whether there are children or the elderly around them.

There really was an old man, incredibly strong, pulling a phoenix kite, the kite being about half the size of a small boat.

A number of onlookers asked him if he could put it away.

The old man said with great confidence, "I've had this skill for so many years, I'm sure I'll make it big!"

As it spoke, it trotted forward, raised its head, and slowly rose. A gentle breeze blew, and the phoenix took flight completely. When it wasn't very high, its tail couldn't lift, drooping to the ground, which didn't look very good.

But once it took off, the feeling was instantly different!

The onlookers got excited and were eager to try grabbing it themselves.

The old man's friend said, "Let me try it, let me try it."

The old man said, "You can't try it, you'll fall down. Wait until I fly up and give you a good time."

.......

After that scene, the sky was filled with kites. There were many styles of kites, but the most common were swallow kites, with large heads, blunt wings, and scissor-shaped tails. The colors were painted in a certain pattern, in various shades. There was a lotus flower on the head, some water droplets on the wings, and auspicious cloud patterns, very traditional designs. Lin Shuying was very familiar with this pattern; the first extremely beautiful drawing her art teacher taught her in fourth grade was a swallow kite.

Players were moved to tears by the gentle, lighthearted, and joyful scenes in the cutscenes. The interstellar people are generally quite emotional, and after reaching adulthood, they live separately from their parents. Even those who live together rarely see each other.

There's no time to eat together, no time to watch TV together, no need to spend time together in the living room. Even when we're in the living room, it's always inside a holographic capsule; the living room is filled with holographic capsules...

This joyful time we shared was during the last lantern and decoration event.

"Qingfengyi is really good at making my eyes red."

"Speaking of which, didn't the official announcement say that the Lantern Festival event would be returning? It's been a long time."

"Yeah, but this episode looks like it's going to be really good. What are they letting loose?"

"Science popularizer passing by: This is a kite. I saw it in a video in 'Enlightenment of Things,' but that kite was a long centipede, and many people were flying it together."

"Please explain in detail upstairs."

.......