Building a Gaming Empire From Scratch

Chapter 696: Chapter 661: “Chang’an” and “Pokémon”

The success of the [Rehabilitation Plan] was entirely expected for Kyle.

The date was even barely off from his prediction, only ahead by less than a week.

But for Lincoln, it was somewhat unexpected.

The reason was simple: he hadn’t looked at the daily reports of the Journey Prosthetic Company for a long time.

These were now Mavis’s work, after all, with more and more Cloud Dream servers, Mavis’s computing power was becoming more and more abundant.

What does that mean?

It means that the work is not saturated!

Lincoln kept buying luxury villas (referring to server centers) for Mavis, so Mavis should help manage the house and do housework, right?

As a result, he wouldn’t pay attention to this company unless there was a special situation.

The employees of the Prosthetic Journey Company privately complained: “Cloud Dream is the boss’s own son, and we are just picked up from the street.”

Not only did they complain, but even netizens often did the same.

When Lincoln received a call from Kyle and learned about the success of the [Rehabilitation Plan], it took him a few seconds to react.

His momentary stunned reaction didn’t matter, but it caused chaos among the employees who were trying to squeeze into the Chang’an project team.

The office was quickly filling up with four consecutive batches of employees who came to him for “decisions”.

The situation in Chang’an was unique. When Lincoln first organized people to travel to Chang’an, he didn’t explicitly say, “These are all the members of the Chang’an development team.”

It was all the employees’ guess and judgment.

Moreover, Cloud Dream had multiple games operating normally, and some positions and tasks had to be filled, so many people wanted to go but couldn’t.

They could accept the need to continue working and not being able to travel.

But they couldn’t accept not being able to join the Chang’an project team because of it!

At today’s morning meeting, Lincoln announced the [Virtual Chang’an] project to everyone, officially naming it “Chang’an”, confirming the team, docking with the [Virtual Chang’an] city construction team and [Cold Weapon Combat Technology R&D Group], and officially launching the development process!

——In fact, Lincoln had thought of many names in between.

Stuff like “Assassin’s Creed: Chang’an,” “Chaos in Chang’an,” “Wind Rising From Chang’an,” “Cyber Chang’an 0754,” “Tianbao-Withdraw from the Sky,” “Legend of the Twin Dragons of the Tang Dynasty”…

Various names, either serious or playing around, were not just one or two.

But in the end, thinking about how much content he planned to stuff into the game and the twists and turns of the gameplay and theme behind it, he felt that no matter what the name, it wouldn’t be quite right.

Finally, he decided to simplify the name and use the simplest two words for the game’s title—

“Chang’an”!

This is the advantage of being a pioneer, you can use the shortest possible name as a headline without worrying about attracting players.

Later developers won’t have this advantage.

After another ten years, if the genre is overdone, then short game names may not attract casual players anymore.

By then, if someone wants to make a game with this theme, they might have to name it “Rebirth Chang’an, I Can Practice Point Cultivation,” “Can’t Be a Prince Consort, I Have to Cultivate Dao Instead,” “My Mother-in-Law is Wu Zhao” …

That would be quite amusing.

But that doesn’t matter to him either.

As for the team’s work, it will inevitably advance very quickly in the early stages.

After all, there is an existing Chang’an City as a basis, and as long as modifications are made based on the story and gameplay needs, adding functions and details, this is much easier than starting development from scratch.

And since the content of the first chapter is not complicated, it’s just about letting the players come to Chang’an and have a good time “traveling.”

Everyone can make up any bustling scenes they’ve seen during their travels to modern-day Chang’an, their imaginations of ancient Chang’an’s heyday, or things that might not actually exist but sound amazing, and stuff them all into the game.

Lincoln has already explicitly stated: no need for absolute historical accuracy or for all content to find historical basis, as long as your content can fit into the city of Chang’an and not be stylistically jarring, it’s fine, and you can go ahead and do it.

After all, what he wants to do will be even more outrageous than what the employees can imagine.

For example, the game’s story, on one hand, he gave it to the employees to work on, on the other hand, he also planned to create a super long quest line that would never happen in history—

[Princess Holiday]

Yes, the Tang Dynasty princess skips home and travels all over Chang’an with the player.

Lincoln thought it sounded very fun.

This idea only came to him after he and Princess Camille Victoria had been wandering around Chang’an for a week.

When the employees have almost completed various lively scenes, the little princess will work with him to create this quest line.

What Lincoln didn’t expect was that as soon as he announced the formation of the “Chang’an” development team, there were employees raising their arms, hoping to join the “Chang’an” project team.

Lincoln’s response was, “Each team’s situation is different, and the specific allocation of personnel depends on the current work situation. So, if you want to join the ‘Chang’an’ project team, apply to your supervisor.”

After that, Lincoln continued to talk about the MR game (mixed reality game) development project with a pet battle theme – “Pokémon”.

The reason for choosing this name is that when designing pets, a large number of fierce beasts from the “Classics of Mountains and Seas” and monsters from Huaxia ancient legends will be made cute and incorporated into the game.

The name “Pokémon” is really apt.

As for the Pokémon Lincoln remembered, Izumo’s classic monsters, etc., they would all be made into expansion packs in the future.

This project is not starting from scratch, either.

Last week, when they were having a blast in Chang’an, this project had already begun its preliminary preparations.

After “My World” was completed, a small number of employees from this large team began to take vacations. After the mod production of “Terraria” and “Witch” was completed, their work basically came to an end. Except for a few employees maintaining the mod platform, the rest were all idle.

Only a small portion of them went to Chang’an.

Most of the remaining ones, except for those who took vacations, were all preparing for the game.

Lincoln also brought over a small technical group from [Eight Sides] Audio-Visual Assistance Equipment, which he “picked up on the street,” to provide them with technical support.

However, the technical difficulties for this game are not significant – they might have been in the past, as it used to be not easy to make the content of the virtual world interact with the real world in terms of visuals and blend both parties appropriately without any inconsistencies.

Lincoln got used to it because Mavis was so powerful and had amazing computing power support, constantly calculating in real-time to achieve this.

This cannot be taken as a normal technical means.

But with the massive use of the [Eight Sides] headband, the technical team of Prosthetic Journey has continuously improved the software functions and developed various auxiliary plug-ins. The technical difficulties in this area have already been overcome.

Even now, many healthy users would purchase the [Eight Sides] headband for traveling, business trips, finding directions, recording, and other scenarios.

Especially the core function of finding directions, which has almost been played out now.

Penguin-guided routes, dinosaur-guided routes, virtual handsome men and beautiful women-guided routes… etc., are just basic functions.

Now they even plan to launch a year-long project to record the scenery of all four seasons with users. After the recording is completed, users can see the snowscape of winter in spring or listen to the sounds of cicadas in summer during autumn.

Even within a short 50-meter street, they can simultaneously see the different scenery of all four seasons.

In short: extremely ambitious.

When Kyle reported these R&D plans to Lincoln, his first reaction was that they had too much money to burn.

But Lincoln quickly changed his mind: it was nice that they had something to do, and they were doing serious R&D instead of using the money they earned to buy houses or throw into the stock market. So he directly nodded in agreement, “Very interesting, keep up the good work.”

By now, the technical accumulation of the Prosthetic Journey team in this area has coincidentally solved the most critical technical problems of mixed reality games.

It could be considered a fortunate accident.

Now, the remaining work for developing the game is just the game plot, pet design, and combat system.

For Cloud Dream’s developers, this is precisely their forte.

The meeting ended in such a relaxed atmosphere.

Then Lincoln started being repeatedly approached by employees who complained to him, “Boss, you have to stand up for us!”

When asked what happened, they said their supervisors refused to let them put down their current work and transfer to the “Chang’an” development team.

More and more people came forward with the same issue, several at a time.

Clearly, the supervisors’ refusals couldn’t completely deter them.

Seeing this scene, Lincoln became even more amazed at the attraction of the “Chang’an” project to employees.

Of course, Lincoln wouldn’t just run to Randall, Little Chun, Fred, Jiang Feng, and Clark… and make trouble for these people.

At first, he tried to comfort the employees.

But when the fourth group came to him, Lincoln immediately changed his mind and started looking for an excuse to slip away.

And Kyle provided just the right excuse.

After answering the phone, Lincoln stood there stunned for a few seconds, then suddenly got up with a worried expression on his face, holding his mobile phone, saying “Okay, okay, I’m coming!” while quickly walking towards the door.

Just before leaving, he turned back to the employees who were almost filling the office and said, “There’s an emergency at Prosthetic Journey, and I have to rush there. I understand everyone’s feelings, but other tasks also need to be taken care of, right?”

“I appreciate everyone’s hard work.”

After saying that, without waiting for the employees to react, Lincoln quickly left, even taking the door with him as he went.

Leaving behind a room full of employees looking at each other.