Chapter 84 Game Pricing
Brother Ba’s decision to raise Xiao Lu’s salary was unanimously supported by everyone in the studio.
After all, this Bug is too critical.
After receiving praise and the promise of a pay raise, Xiao Lu immediately demonstrated to everyone the process of how the bug occurred, as well as the logical principles behind the bug.
To put it simply.
In the game "Shennonglu", the unique favorability mechanism is the key for players to recruit NPC partners.
Different NPCs have different initial favorability towards players.
The monsters in the game were not originally designed in this way, and they would not generate favorable feelings. As long as the player encountered a monster, a battle would be triggered...
But after the battle is triggered, you can choose to "escape"! Because most NPCs are unique, the escape mechanism is to protect the player. When the team is about to be wiped out, choose to escape to save the living force, and then come back.
The escape mechanism is fine.
The problem is that when the player chooses to escape and leave the battle, the monster will remain in the "disengaged from hatred" state for about 10 seconds.
To put it another way: when a brave hero leads a group of teammates to fight a monster and finds that they cannot defeat the monster, and chooses to escape to save their lives, the monster will not immediately pull the brave hero into the battle.
This also gives players time to react. Otherwise, they might just escape and end the battle, but when they come out, the monster’s hatred has not yet been broken away and it enters the battle again. How can they escape then?
"The problem lies in this 10-second hatred escape time!"
Xiao Lu explained: "During these 10 seconds, the monster that was separated from the hatred used the NPC's neutral favorability template at the underlying logic."
To summarize in two sentences: Under normal circumstances, monsters do not apply NPC templates, they have a separate set of behavioral logic.
But when the hero escapes and the battle ends, for 10 seconds, when the monster's hatred is gone, the underlying NPC neutral template is applied for convenience.
During these 10 seconds, the monster is no different from a normal "neutral NPC".
So during this time, the hero can use gifts on monsters to increase their favorability. Ten seconds is not enough? Then keep fighting, keep running away, and keep repeating this process...
When the favorability reaches the "Follow" level and you run away again, the monster will appear in the "Recruitable" list queue and will no longer trigger a battle.
This sounds like a complicated bug, but under normal circumstances, no player will trigger it.
But Chen Ba did not dare to underestimate the horror of the fourth disaster. As long as this bug existed, players would definitely be able to trigger it and use it to attack the demon king.
No matter how small the probability is, he dare not gamble.
Therefore, this bug must be fixed to prevent everyone from being distracted from their work after the game is released and forgetting their identity as heroes as they rush to conquer the demon king.
“Fixing this bug requires replacing the underlying logic code. Simply put, after the monster loses its aggro, it can no longer use the NPC neutral template.”
Xiao Lu smiled bitterly and said, "This is very time-consuming, and it is not worth writing a separate code for it, so the solution I thought of is to add a few lines of code to lock the upper limit of the monster's favorability."
This is also to save trouble.
Rewriting the underlying system is troublesome and unnecessary, as there are many solutions to this problem.
The simplest solution is to lock the upper limit of the favorability of monster characters.
In this way, during the period of hatred separation, even if the monster uses the NPC template, it is not a normal NPC and the favorability cannot be increased.
“No, no, no, it must be rewritten!”
Chen Ba shook his head, saying that Xiao Lu’s solution was unreliable and that he would have to rewrite the underlying code to be reassuring.
Always be prepared for the worst!
After much difficulty discovering the hidden evil in the new game, he chose to muddle through instead of eradicating it all at once, as he was worried that new bugs would appear.
Just rewrite it!
Although it will waste some time and is not very meaningful, it at least eliminates the possibility of the bug variant being resurrected.
"Okay then, I'll listen to you!"
Brother Ba said to rewrite the code, so Xiao Lu naturally had no objection. After all, Brother Ba was the one who paid him, so he had to do whatever he said!
So under Chen Ba's instructions, Xiao Lu and Zhong Shengwei began to fix the Bug.
As for other bugs...
Chen Ba also took a look and found that just as Xiao Lu described, they were indeed not serious. They were basically common minor problems and could be fixed with a little modification.
“Our new game is awesome!”
"It's more perfect than any previous game. I guarantee that the new game will definitely bring surprises to everyone after it is released..."
Before the early access version was released, the game had already solved a deeply hidden vicious bug, which made Chen Ba very proud.
In the Tianba game community, when answering questions from a group of players about the new game, he even used the word "perfect" to describe the new game.
This surprised everyone. How much did Brother Ba drink to dare to say such nonsense?
There is no mistake in the poem, post, content, and read the book on 6, 9, and bar!
Did he forget so quickly how the nicknames such as Cowherding Simulator, House Flipping Simulator and Graphics Card King came about? "Before each new game is released, Brother Ba will speak rather arrogantly. Please understand..."
"Big words during the development phase, silence during the early access, and nonsense during the official release. Brother Ba is indeed like this."
"Brother Ba, what new bug have you brought to us?"
"A bunch of little scoundrels, what did my Pigeon do to you? It's just that there are a few bugs in the game, if you have the guts, don't play it..."
You don't believe me, right? Seeing the mocking comments in the player community, Chen Ba was so angry that his face turned black.
He admitted that the previous games produced by Tianba Studio did have problems of one kind or another, which led to the games ultimately deviating from their original design intentions.
But that was just carelessness on his part!
If we hadn’t been too careless and hadn’t detected any problems during the testing phase, the previous games wouldn’t have turned out like this.
If you don’t want to believe it, then don’t believe it!
By the time "Divine Grace Continent" is officially released, players' stereotypes about him and Tianba Studio should be able to change a lot.
"That's right, Brother Ba!"
Seeing Chen Ba chatting happily with others in the player community, Zhong Shengwei couldn't help but ask: "Everyone is very concerned about the pricing of our new game. What do you think?"
"As for the game pricing..."
Chen Ba frowned and fell into deep thought.
He really hadn't really thought about this question. After all, there were too many factors to weigh when pricing a game, and you couldn't just set the price as you wanted.
The official versions of the studio’s previous games were priced at 18, 25, and 50 yuan respectively! Given the size of the new game, the price will definitely not be too low, but after all, it is not a large-scale game and does not meet the three-digit requirement.
Eighty or ninety yuan is too expensive! If the price is set so high, fewer people will buy it. After all, many players have a scale in their hearts and will not buy it if they think it is not cost-effective.
Forty or fifty yuan cheaper again!
After all, "Divine Grace Continent" is really well made, and Chen Ba also admitted that he invested more energy in this game than "Star Emperor".
"68 yuan!"
Chen Ba thought about it for a while, combined with the pricing of other similar games, and finally made a decision: "The early access version is 57 yuan, the official version is 68 yuan, and the deluxe version with DLC will be discussed later."
If nothing unexpected happens, it will be on the shelves next week (end of this chapter)