Longan Tree——My Idea, My Dream [Game Detailed Explanation]
Sep 24 2012
This game was developed five months ago. It was violently developed for a month or two, and the remaining months were spent slowly fixing Tintin bugs, etc. I don’t know what to say.
Most of the ideas for the game come from my dreams and my real-life experiences.
Once upon a time, I always had this type of dream: being hunted. In the dream, I was being hunted in various places, and various people came to hunt me. I will run wildly in the alleys, I will leap from the rooftops. However, no one could catch up with me. Occasionally there would be a fight, but I would always kill the person who was chasing me. Generally speaking, if you watch the hero in a martial arts movie, it's as fun as mowing grass. That's a long way to go, but most of them were still being chased. I kept running and running, but no one caught up with me. But, never been hunted in the woods.
Furthermore, in the past year, I often wandered around the nearby longan (longan) forest. Playing the violin or flute there in the morning is a very interesting experience. And there is often no one else there, only birds and insects, enjoying themselves. Moreover, they played my songs while they sang theirs, without any intention of disturbing each other. It's been a long time since I came here to see the longan tree, and naturally I have some feeling and affection for the longan tree.
Naturally, there are a lot of deep grass around the longan tree, and it is full of all kinds of strange animals. This is my favorite. In my spare time, I would take secret photos. They wouldn’t sue me if they were photographed anyway.
So, in April 2012, I started creating the game Longan Tree.
It started out as a model, planning to build a super-realistic longan tree model. But I gave up in the end, because I had dozens of faces on one leaf, and millions of faces on an unfinished tree. In the end, I used Unity3D's built-in tree building component. It actually didn't look very similar when built. However, I had prepared textures for leaves and trunks before, so it was probably enough to have a similar meaning. (Many game processes are recorded in the Longan Tree section, so I won’t explain them in detail.) Then came the grass, and then the entire scene was built.
What the game wants is that feeling, the feeling late at night. Dim the lights, get a rough idea of the environment, and add some fog. The most important thing is the sound. I recorded birdsong late at night and went to the woods to collect various sound samples. I did this many times and the effect was pretty good. As for the character's movement, I used the one that came with it at first, but it was not easy to use, so I started writing it myself. Although it was my first time to use Unity3D to make something, with Brother Long’s guidance, everything came easily. Slowly it became more and more formed.
Regarding the initial environmental test of the game, I really don’t want everyone to be able to start the game directly. First, I think impetuous people don’t understand anything at all, so they should just stop playing my games. After all, if you just click on the keyboard without reading any words or prompts, you will naturally not be able to enter the game. And even if you enter accidentally, it is your luck and you will gain nothing. As for the light and sound environment that cannot meet the conditions, I think it is difficult to obtain the best experience to a large extent, so I will not play. In addition, the game has very high hardware requirements. It is purely a matter of personal optimization ability. There is nothing that can be done for the time being, that's all. In the future, when I have the ability, it will be good for future games to be better optimized.
The gameplay of the game is naturally roughly the same as what was originally designed. Run in the forest, then get shot to death, then run again, then get shot to death again, then run faster, then not get shot to death. But the game actually has no goals. What I hope to express through this game is the relationship between man, himself and nature. From the perspective of playing games, games can have no goals, and players can discover things on their own, including goals and gameplay. In terms of guidance, naturally, the main direction is to guide players to avoid being shot to death. If you think so, you can run or hide. In fact, the design in the established game is that running wildly in one direction, or moving at the lowest speed, or not moving, can eventually eliminate the danger from nature. Here is man and nature.
When people enter the natural body, they don’t know what this piece of nature is, and their instinct is to obliterate it. And she is not trying to kill you in vain, she will observe you to see if you are harmful. If you're quiet and don't bother her, that's fine. If you walk around randomly, trample on flowers and plants, and make all kinds of noises, that is really abominable and should be buried. But what if the obliterators it sends cannot catch up with you? Then you are above it, and she can't do anything to you, so she lets it go.
What about people and nature in real life? As people became more developed, they wiped out all the jackals, tigers and leopards, so they cut down the forests indiscriminately. Even if it groans, there is nothing that can be done. Reality is realistic, while games are ideal. There is no need to explain this meaning too much: the pure will become clear from itself, and the turbid will become turbid from itself. Only by turning turbidity into clarity can we become clear.
At four o'clock in the morning, when you accidentally come to the Longan Forest, where you go is all up to you. Player behavior is crucial to the game.
In fact, whether it is the game goal or the game result, the choice lies with the player himself. This is not an entertaining game, there are no clear goals for you to achieve. When you are beaten to death many times, you give yourself a goal. That is the desire to survive, that is the instinct of life. As for running wildly and whizzing by, not being able to hear the sounds around you clearly, but deeply feeling your own rapid breathing, it was a relaxed state. This is also a direction of the game that moved me deeply.
And the game also expresses something, which is life. To sum up the previous paragraph, too many people nowadays walk for the purpose of reaching their destination and the purpose of running is for exercise. Few people can walk while appreciating the surrounding scenery and run at the same time to reach their destination quickly. If life has too much purpose, it will lose a lot. I can't say specifically what I lost, but when I felt this, I discovered that the most precious and beautiful things are right beside me.
What I need is to understand and feel, rather than to ignore or ignore them.
I once stepped on freeze-dried leaves under the setting sun, making a squeaking and cracking sound. Now when I recall it, it is still warm and beautiful. And how many people can have such memories? I don't know. I once rushed through the day and really wasted my life for the whole day without gaining anything. In life, what matters is the present moment, not the future. So I can still not feel irritated when the train is delayed for several hours, so I can not feel bored when there is a power outage, so I can go to the lake and play the pipa for several hours before going to bed late, so I can look up at the stars for a long time even if I Can't recognize any constellations.
Since then, how many people can quietly listen to the birdsong in the woods? Listening for footsteps? Listen to breathing? Feel the air around you and the faint light?
Ah, it seems I have said too much. In short, as the first game I started, although it has many shortcomings and imperfections, it finally expressed many things I wanted to express. And some things about myself are really integrated into it. I don't have to care too much about the players' opinions. Players have their own thoughts, and what they get or what they get is entirely up to them. I don't have to ask everyone to understand what I express as much as possible. Because what I express is not what I want to express; and what I want to express is not what I express.
Where to go, everything depends on you. As for the game Longan Tree, there is probably a lot more that can be said, but let’s stop here. The words are endless, and my thoughts are endless, but enough is enough.
