Chapter 139 - Wuxia Game Design Document

Chen Mo wrote down the title of his new design document.

Wulin Legend design concept document.

There were many classic Wuxia games in Chen Mo’s previous life. Although Wulin Legend wasn’t the best, it was the most creative, starkly different from the Wuxia games that were based on Western RPG games.

Although Wulin Legend wasn’t extremely popular, its predecessor Heroes of Jin Yong was.

In Heroes of Jin Yong, the main character was transmigrated into a world formed from fourteen of Jin Yong’s novels. The main character was constantly interacting with the characters from Jin Yong’s novels, collecting items, learning Wugong, and recruiting swordsmen before completing the fourteen main quests lines, gathering fourteen holy books and returning to his world.

This game was shocking at the time of release, as players could train Wugong from Jin Yong’s novels, recruit warrios such as Duan Yu and Yang Guo to fight alongside them, and even complete quests that were relevant to the original novel.

Moreover, Heroes of Jin Yong had a good/evil system, which would increase or decrease depending on the choices of the player.

When the player finally was about to leave the world after gathering all fourteen holy books, if they were nice, the ten evil masters would attack the player, if they were evil, the ten good masters would attack the player.

The player would need to beat the ten masters before beating the game, giving the player an immense amount of satisfaction.

Jin Yong’s novels weren’t in this world, and Heroes of Jin Yong wasn’t as rich in content as Wu Lin Legend. The art wasn’t good enough to satisfy the needs of players nowadays either.

After considerations, Wulin Legend would better fit what Chen Mo was looking for.

There wasn’t much content from Jin Yong’s novels in Wulin Legend. Although it descended from Heroes of Jin Yong, the different factions, characters, and styles of Wugong were basically all made from scratch, making it easy for the people of this world to understand.

In terms of artwork, although Wulin Legend was an old game, it was remade in 2015 (as Tale of Wuxia). The artwork, character models were all remastered. Moreover, as Chen Mo’s art skills were relatively high, it should satisfy the demands of the players.

Chen Mo felt that Wulin Legend would match the content in this game better as opposed to Tale of Wuxia.

Of course the most important part was that the playstyle and the story fit Chen Mo’s needs very well. The innovative playstyle of the game was unique among Wuxia games.

There was also a story regarding the remake of the game.

Wulin Legend was released in 2001, although it was well received, it didn’t become a classic like ‘Chinese Paladin’ or ‘Xuan-Yuan Sword’.

Other than the fact that it had a small audience, its difficulty, unbalanced combat system, and incomplete story contributed to its downfall.

Of course, these were due to limits in funding.

In the end, in an environment plagued with piracy, Heluo Studio disbanded. The new studio Oriental Calculations weren’t able to make anything noteworthy either, disappearing like fireworks in the night sky.

In 2006, someone posted a question on the Wulin Legend forums :”Is Oriental Calculations still a thing?”

The players replied, “Haven’t seen them in a long time. It’ll be too bad if they disbanded.”

In 2009, the post was received with a reply by Heluo Studio’s founder and Wulin Legend’s producer Xu Changlong.

“Oriental Calculations ceased all operations three years ago, but everyone on that team is still in the videogame industry. All the key players are also in a certain videogame company. As long as we are still here, there is a chance of us making better products.”

Xu Changlong was shocked.

As time went by, he along with many others in the videogame industry gave up on making standalone games, turning into online games instead, doing things they didn’t want to do and questioning their future.

Until discovering that post on the Wulin Legend forums, seeing there were so many people discussing the game.

He didn’t know there were so many people in 2009 talking and reminiscing about a game from 2001.

And it was because of this reason, with support of the fans, Xu Changlong wanted to remake Wulin Legend, releasing Tale of Wuxia in 2015, and selling a respectable four hundred thousand copies in January 2016.

—

Just like when he made Warcraft, Chen Mo did a concept draft, giving an overview of the game, before distributing the workload among Su Jinyu and the others.

Chen Mo didn’t need to raise his skills this time as the game was pretty simple. After making a game like Warcraft, a game like Wulin Legend was a piece of cake.

He only needed to figure out some of the complicated settings and the stories, then recreating the content as close to the original as possible.

It didn’t take long for the concept draft to be complete.

This game can be split into two categories, exploration and training.

And the character arc could be split into three sections, entering the world (exploration), learning from the masters(training), and entering the field to save the martial arts world (exploration).

The reason Wulin Legend got good reviews was because of how it melded both.

Of course, Chen Mo needed the help of Memory Playback Potions to recreate all the details. It was still largely the same as before, Chen Mo would write down some of the more important features of the foundations. The story, numbers, and artwork would be done by his three assistants.

After the draft was done, Chen Mo held a meeting with Su Jinyu, Zheng Hongxi and Qian Kun.

“I planned for morerest, but there are changes made to the plan. This is the concept document for the next game, take a look,” said Chen Mo as he handed out the document to the three of them,

Qian Kun was disappointed, “Not a scummy game…”

Zheng Hongxi was quite interested in it, “Hmm? From the looks of it the story is quite rich. And this a Wuxia theme too, Chinese style.”

Su Jinyu was confused, “Manager, I thought you said Wuxia themes were difficult? There are so many innovations in this game, isn’t that a bit risky?”

“Don’t worry about that, familiarise yourselves with the content of the game. I’ll provide concept art for the characters and the locations. Goldfish, you’ll be taking on all the artwork this time.

“Hongxi, you’re mainly working on the story which is Wuxia themed. There is a lot of cultural knowledge in this, including artworks, books, chess, and music. You’ll need to do some research on that. Of course, make it suitable, don’t go too easy or too deep on it.

“Qian Kun, you’ll be working on the combat system and balancing as per before. Balancing this time isn’t as important as Warcraft. There’s a few abilities that need to be especially strong and difficult to achieve, I’ll tell you more about it later.

“Alright, that’s about it. Take a good look at the document and have an idea of what the game will look like at the end. Make suitable preparations.”

After receiving their work, the three of them started working.

As for Chen Mo, he started recalling some key scenes and settings from the game using Memory Playback Potions.