Chapter 154 - Emperor Dynasty Entertainment’s Internal Experience Exchange

Chen Mo started distributing the work to the three of them after going through the design concept.

Everyone was more or less familiar with their jobs after working on Warcraft and Wulin Legend without needing Chen Mo to say much.

Chen Mo re emphasised the importance of the story for Onmyoji.

Onmyoji did have an IP, it was a novel by Baku Yumemakura under the same name. However, the novel wasn’t super influential in China either, and the biggest contribution of the novel to the success of the game was the story.

Of course there would be a lot of work involved remaking the novel, and Chen Mo didn’t need to do that as Zheng Hongxi could fill out the rest after receiving the main gist of the story.

Moreover, most of the monsters and characters in Onmyoji were based on folklore from the Heian period taking inspiration from Konjaku Monogatarishūt, so it wasn’t hard for Su Jinyu and the others to grasp the concept.

The three of them started working after receiving their jobs. Zheng Hongxi in particular had a lot to do as he needed to do research because it was his first time writing Japanese style stories.

Chen Mo’s job was the same as usual, quality control.

Back at his office, Chen Mo used a Memory Playback Potion and started working on the sketches for the different Onmyojis and Shikigamis from the game.

Abe no Seimei, Kagura, Hiromasa, Yao Bikuni.

Ootengu, Shuten, Gyourou Arakawa no Aruji, Ibaraki Douji…

Through Onmyojis continual updates, more and more Shikigamis were added to the game. In the end there were nearly one hundred Shikigamis, which was more or less the so-called Demon Parade.

There wasn’t a need to have that many Shikigamis in the first version, seventy of them was more than enough to support the content of the game.

Chen Mo decided to go by his Memory and provide sketches, positions, and abilities for all the Shikigamis.

The rich combat system was the core of the game. The settings of each Onmyoji and their abilities matched perfectly, and was a Chinese mobile card game that did this aspect particularly well.

For example, Yuki Onna’s Blizzard, Sanbi no Kitsune’s Woman Scorned or Shouzu’s Water Circuit. The Shikigamis and their abilities fit well with the stories. And when a Shikigami consumes another one of the same type, they can even level up their abilities. And with the inclusion of different souls having different effects, its combat was much more complex and rich than the other games.

This was Onmyojis biggest advantage, it was a game that felt fresh and complete.

Strictly speaking, the core of Onmyoji wasn’t a new concept as it was still a type of card game that was very similar in playstyle to Summoners War.

Summoners War wasn’t a huge mobile game either, but the game felt really complete.

Onmyoji didn’t make many changes with the balancing (other than making it more time consuming), but it was successful because it implemented a lot more content surrounding the theme of Onmyoji.

In terms of art, artwork, UI, and models were the best of the best and didn’t feel out of place, making the game feel more immersive.

In terms of music, the background music and dubs were incredibly good, making it easier for the players to be immersed into the story.

In terms of story, using the novel’s story as the foundations, each character/monster had their own background story. The animated scenes and texts had tens of thousands of words combined, with plans to keep expanding on it.

Therefore, Onmyoji’s real reason for success was its story and content. When other card games were still borrowing IPs, buying IPs, or forcing IPs, Onmyoji already reached a stage where it had a highly integrated theme and content, a state where the game was the IP. This was the reason it became such a huge phenomena.

If Chen Mo wanted to recreate Onmyoji in the parallel world, this was the point he had to focus on.

The game can be scummy, time consuming, or monotonous. These flaws can exist, but as long as the aforementioned point was done well, it can surpass all the other card games just by virtue of its content.

—

While Chen Mo was working hard on Onmyoji, the other videogame designers weren’t slacking off either.

In the headquarters of Emperor Dynasty Entertainment.

In the meeting room, a powerpoint about Experience with Demon Slayers was being projected onto a screen, honest my Qiu Bin.

The meeting room was filled with people, mainly B and C-grade videogame designers within Emperor Dynasty Entertainment. They were giving it all their focus as they were afraid of missing out on something.

Qiu Bin seemed to be in good spirits as he spoke.

He led the development of Demon Slayers and managed to reach over forty-five million RMB in monthly revenue. He was now really well known in the mobile game industry as the sat safety at the top of the best selling leaderboards and was gaining ground within Emperor Dynasty Entertainment.

He almost quit after losing his bet with Chen Mo but luckily Lin Chaoxu was confident in him and allowed him to develop a game like I Am MT, resulting in the hugely successful Demon Slayers.

Qiu Bin was quite smart, what he lacked in creativity he had in being calm and collected. After losing to I Am MT, he dedicated everything to learn the reason I Am MT was so successful.

Qiu Bin’s understanding of I Am MT continued to grow during the development and operation of Demon Slayers. Qiu Bin was confident enough to say that he was probably the videogame designer to best understand this genre of game.

Of course, other than Chen Mo.

Emperor Dynasty Entertainment decided to host this talk hoping that Qiu Bin could pass on the experience he gathered from developing Demon Slayers to other videogame designers, solidifying Emperor Dynasty Entertainment’s ground in the mobile gaming industry.

Qiu Bin was presenting non-stop with the help of the powerpoint.

“I’ve done extensive analysis on the entertainment value of card games. It has to do with the recognition the players have for the value of the cards. Of course, these were all points that designers are able to reach after basic research. Well, how can you make your card game different from the rest?

“For the success of Demon Slayers and other card games of similar success, I reduced it down to three things, fragmentise, low cost, big IP.

“By fragmentise I mean plan and reduce the time a player could spend in the game. Reduce the daily playtime and split big chunks of playtime into smaller chunks and allow players to fully utilize the smaller chunks of time.”