Chapter 45: The Name is Dawn (Seeking Recommendation Tickets!!)

  Jester was still unaware that his Japanese branch had not yet been formally established, and the person in charge of the Japanese branch, Tamaki Yoshikazu, had already brought in one of the most important figures in Sega's future rise, Nakayama Yuji, with just a bowl of cheap street ramen.

  If he knew what his company had done while Zhongshan Youxiong was in the US, he would probably laugh himself to death.

  Although Atsushi Yuki in this timeline may no longer have any intersection with Sega.

  Currently, the entire Mars Entertainment has more than 40 designers who are not unrelated to game development. In the past month, they have continuously recruited a dozen new employees.

  Apart from the R&D team led by Mark Cerny, which they themselves voted to be named 'the-king', who were secretly tackling the difficulties of 'Avengers', more than 30 people were summoned by Jester for a project discussion on this aerial combat game.

  First of all is the discussion about the name.

  Of course, Jester took into account the American sense of humor and with a cold smile warned these designers who always like to indulge in fantasies and are full of energy that some pranks were too much.

  The characteristics of the game's name were simply summarized by Jest as three points: first, it must be easy to understand; second, due to the game's background, the name must give people a sense of upward momentum, brightness and hope; lastly, the style must be high.

  It gives people a sense of grandeur as soon as they hear it.

  After much discussion, a proposal by a young artist who had just joined the company was approved by an overwhelming majority.

  "Dawn"

  Although Jester thought the name was a bit cliché, he couldn't think of anything better, and since most people consistently praised the name, it was officially established that the game would be called "Dawn".

  The team that the four main characters in the game's story belong to is also called Dawn, which was set up in the setting collection of Just Cause.

  The proposal of the name "Dawn" was made by a young painter recommended by Jester's grandfather, Cao Kairui, who had just graduated from university two years ago and had been doing some odd jobs in a comic book company.

  He is also an overseas Chinese, his father came to the United States after the founding of the country, and before the founding of the country, he opened a printing factory in the south, many big newspapers were printed by their family's printing factory, at that time, the head of their household was friends with Mr. Wu Liande, and even had a share of "Liangyou", but later in the tide of nationalization of private assets, the family business was taken over, his family moved to Hong Kong and came to the United States, continuing to work in the printing industry, that is to say, they are all from the so-called "black five categories" in domestic slang.

  If it weren't for running fast back then, I'm afraid there wouldn't be a good ending in the decade of calamity.

  Cao Kairui graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which is one of the top three art schools in the United States, along with the New York Academy of Art and the Alfred Art College. The school has consistently ranked among the top three art colleges in the US News university rankings. Cao's family background also played a significant role in his artistic upbringing. His grandfather was a master of Chinese painting, who studied under the Jinling Eight Masters, and his father followed in his grandfather's footsteps. As a result, Cao was exposed to the arts from a young age.

  Jester has seen some of his works, which indeed have a strong personal style, and are almost flawless in terms of momentum, composition, and color matching. Most importantly, they embody the characteristics of both Chinese and Western painting styles, which is what Jester values most.

  Even Jester had a plan, after letting Cao Kairui participate in the production of several games, he formally established Mars Entertainment's own exclusive art design team, Mars Son, imitating Blizzard's "Storm Son" from later generations.

  What's more, Jester was also surprised to find that in an era where hand-painting is still the mainstay, Cao Kelei likes to use computer drawing software to create some creative paintings. However, he often complains about the inadequacy of the computer's built-in drawing software and has recently been discussing with some like-minded people in the company whether they should develop their own specialized drawing software to produce more complex and delicate pictures.

  This reminded Jester of a later famous image processing software that would almost become the ruler of computer graphics.

  So, Jester also didn't stop upon hearing this news.

  He deeply knew that in future game creation, this software called Photoshop would occupy a large position.

  However, in his impression, the prototype of Photoshop in history was in 1987 when Thomas Knoll was completing his Ph.D. thesis on an Apple II and found that this computer could not display grayscale black-and-white images, so he wrote a program called dispy to achieve this effect, unexpectedly The effect is very good.

  If it weren't for his younger brother, the ultimate fate of this program designed for convenience might be to be forgotten on a computer's hard drive until even its designer forgets that he ever made such an ingenious little thing.

  Thomas Knoll's brother is John Knoll, and you may have heard of him because he was the visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, who later won an Oscar. After discovering his brother's program, John immediately became interested in this little program while working at ILM.

  The two brothers then began to continually improve the program called dispy, gradually turning it into a powerful image editing program. Eventually, at an exhibition, they accepted a user's suggestion to rename dispy to photoshop. At this point, PS already had functions such as level, color balance, and saturation.

  As for whether the software being developed by his company's employees can reach the status of later PS, he doesn't know, but a specialized computer image processing tool is indeed what he needs.

  The subsequent discussion was also very heated, with everyone agreeing that the sense of substitution in Jester's settings was a big plus, unanimously believing that choosing a character as the player's experience object felt much stronger than choosing an airplane, although essentially there was no difference between the two, and when playing games, players still had to control a cold plane.

  But this transformation is psychological, and players can feel it.

  However, Sean Darby, the person in charge of "Origin", has a different opinion. In his view, the same bloody scene can't show differences on different characters.

  Then Jester suddenly realized that in order to reflect the DIY personality, he set up a self-selected weapon system, so originally each character could have had a completely different weapon system to best reflect their differences, but now they couldn't be designed anymore.

  These four characters have nothing in common apart from their appearance.

  "This is a problem, let's note it down for now and not discuss it. We mainly need to discuss the shortcomings of this game I initially set up and how to modify them, we'll settle that next time." Jest said simply.

  Then, the discussion about the DIY system for weapons was a surprisingly enthusiastic and unanimous welcome that Jester had not expected at all. Even Darvish, who previously said that characters were no different except in appearance, said that even if it couldn't solve the difference between characters, this weapon's DIY must be kept.

  This extremely innovative design is absolutely indispensable.

  Great creativity.

  Even many designers use such high words to evaluate - this also makes Jester a bit embarrassed, although he also agrees with this view, not that he is great, but that he deeply knows that the personalization of later generations will be the mainstream of game development.

  Because players always want to develop a character that is different from others when playing games, I want to be different from others, this is personalization.

  This is extremely obvious for enhancing the playability of the game.

  Next, regarding the discussion of levels and some effects, Jester is not the main force at all. Each profession has its own expertise, and naturally, there are technical experts who have been sharpening their knives to criticize Jester's ideas.

  "Strikers 1945" is still ahead of its time, the board that carries this game is a 16-bit board, it is much stronger than now in terms of memory, video memory and CPU computing speed, some effects that can be easily achieved inside are very difficult to achieve on an 8-bit board, although not impossible.

  But it's a great hassle, in these tech guys' mouths, it's just not worth it, a stupid idea.

  So basically what's left is a discussion where tech enthusiasts go all out in ridiculing Jester's ideas.

  Jester, who was splashed with dog blood on his head, could only hide in one corner and listen quietly, occasionally taking notes on some technical terms that the tech dogs mentioned, which can be achieved under the current hardware without affecting the smooth experience.

  Jester wasn't annoyed about this, as it was the original purpose of holding this brainstorming meeting. He could make good settings based on excellent games in later generations, design great levels and other fun gameplay mechanics, but he couldn't guarantee whether these things could be completed now.

  For example, when Yuji Naka was designing Sonic before, the idea was a rabbit that could pick up things with its ears to attack enemies. This idea seems very simple in retrospect, but at the time it was difficult to achieve, which is why there was the classic image of Sonic afterwards.

  Of course, he must have known that it is absolutely impossible to complete the sandbox game now, but he has no way to distinguish the 16-bit motherboard from the 8-bit motherboard except for the popularization of computing power, color, and on-screen display.

  After all, he came from 2014. The development of hardware has changed dramatically in just ten years, let alone thirty years.

  What he doesn't understand, he leaves to those who do. This has always been Jester's creed, and in his view, the best investment target after rebirth is actually people. Under the butterfly effect, many histories may change, but a person's ability will not change.

  A person who can achieve success in a previous world will also be able to make a name for himself and achieve great things in this world.

  If every discussion is just Jest boasting about how great his game settings are, and how awesome it would be to play like this, and you guys just need to go program my ideas without considering whether the hardware conditions can actually achieve the desired settings, and his programmers only know how to flatter and praise, saying "Long live the boss, the boss is mighty", and cannot negate some effects that are obviously beyond the allowed range of the hardware or personal abilities.

  That's the same old story, if this company makes real-time strategy games, it's definitely not SC, but must be Blood Lion. If they make adventure games, it's definitely not Shen Hai, but must be ET. If they make FPS games, it's definitely not Call of Duty, but must be Extreme Paintbrawl. If they make fighting games, it's definitely not Street Fighter, but must be Shaq Fu. If they make stealth games, it's definitely not Splinter Cell, but is...

  The above-mentioned are all super masterpieces and super stinkers in history, such as the 1998 game "Extreme Pinball" which was given a score of 6 out of 100 by PC World magazine, which is also the second-lowest rated game in PC World's history.

  The company that makes this kind of game will definitely be despised by players.

  But it's also possible that some games can deceive brainless fans with seemingly high-end and atmospheric game settings, just like the game "Daikatana" made by John Romero after he left id Software.

  That setting is even more magnificent than what many authors with open minds can think of, and many things in it would make Jest look tongue-tied even if he saw them in 2014, and he would exclaim that Romero's brain-hitting ability is simply unmatched.

  But brain-flashing ideas are just that, and despite Romero's genius as a programmer, it couldn't stop the impracticality of the idea from ultimately dooming the game to failure, and Romero to infamy.

  So, Jester knew from these experiences that making a game must be based on reality.

  With mature technology, parallel thinking is possible. This sentence, which summarizes Yokoi Gunpei's lifelong experience in hardware development, also applies to software development.

  Because software is based on hardware.

  But in the end, games are no different from other programs, just a slightly better-looking piece of software.

  In short, Jester looked at the tech dogs who were getting more and more excited about their own setting sets, but on the contrary, a satisfied expression appeared on his face, because he knew that this was a group of real game-loving designers.

  They love this industry.

  If you don't speak out, you won't make progress.

  Daken, I've given you the role you wanted.