game trailblazer

Chapter 54 Fu Zan's ambition
Fu Zan once again stepped into the small building at No. 16 Meiwu Road, a place he is very familiar with. Over the past ten months, every table, every counter, and every machine here have been He personally arranged the layout, all of which were soaked in his painstaking efforts, and even every developer here was recruited by Fu Zan himself.In fact, even today, Fu Zan sometimes feels like he is in a dream. A year ago, he was just the head of the school-run software service department, but he did not expect to become the head of a foreign company in the blink of an eye.

Since the establishment of Tianzhiyuan, Fu Zan has had a hard time, because he has been reluctant to let go of Yanshan Software. After all, it once carried a part of his dream, so he often needs to run at both ends.Fortunately, his boss trusted him very much and did not interfere with this matter. Fu Zan himself was very careful, and usually only went to Yanshan Software when he was resting.Fu Zan admired his boss very much, and relying on the previous trick, Yanshan Software has been completely different this year.This year "Yanshan Software Technical Service Center" has been renamed "Yanshan Software Technical Service Department". Of course, this is not because Fu Zan and his old guys have any special preference for names, but because of national policies. However, since After Yanshan Software changed its business from enterprise software development and computer hardware sales to mainly selling modified Atari cassettes, its sales performance soared rapidly, from 9 yuan in the previous year to 110 million , This made Fu Zan very relieved, and it also made him feel more responsible.

……

At the beginning of April 87, when Tianzhiyuan had just been established, Fu Zan recruited seven or eight technicians who were familiar with computer programming, intending to serve as his main development team.At this stage, domestic game development is not even considered the enlightenment stage. When it comes to game development, programmers immediately come to mind. As for the art and music parts of the game, no one has thought about it. By the way, Mr. Fu, who is still a layman, is no exception. It can be said that all of his development team are engaged in programming.But this can't be completely blamed on him. At this time, better art and music talents generally regard the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Music as their first choice, and it is impossible and unknown to participate in game development.In order to make a change, Zhang Lexing managed to trick four or five art and music students through Fu Zan. After signing the "deed of sale", he immediately sent them out for special training. He hoped that after one or two years, Have the ability to come back and enhance the professional strength here.

Fu Zan’s main team can be said to be ignorant of FC game development. In order to let them get started quickly, Zhang Lexing provided a lot of FC development materials. The fly in the ointment is that most of them are in English. Panda is an American company), fortunately, there is also the help of translation.Fu Zan led the development members to read books hard, delved into FC development technology, and then practiced with FC development tools. After more than 3 months of serious study, they finally mastered the basic technology of FC game development and knew how to use FC. Game console-specific programming language to realize your own ideas.Naturally, practice is indispensable after graduation. Fu Zan’s first target was "Battle City". He had already taken a fancy to this game when Zhang Lexing presented it for a demonstration. The second is because it is easier to modify.Of course, it was premeditated for Zhang Lexing to demonstrate this game at that time.

To modify a game, the conventional method is to first dump the contents of the cassette through the development tool, and then analyze the code and data through the development tool. This is a very time-consuming and labor-intensive process.But this "Tank War" doesn't need to be so troublesome. One is because the game itself is relatively simple, and it also comes with a map editor. The other is that Zhang Lexing has already replaced the source code of the game, so naturally there is no need to analyze it so hard. .

The original version of "Tank War" has a total of 35 levels, and the levels after the 36th level are just repeated from the first level. The task of the player in the game is to keep his own headquarters and destroy 20 enemy tanks.As a beginner in game design, Fu Zan knew that it would be a bit more difficult to start directly from the source code of the game relying on the current technical strength, so at the beginning, Fu Zan chose to make some modifications to the original map and parameters.This job is relatively simple, and the main time is spent on the map editor. People often spend several hours pondering whether the design of a map is reasonable, and how much influence the adjusted parameters have.After several weeks of hard work, hundreds of new levels of varying difficulty were designed.

At this time, someone needs to repeatedly test these new levels to check whether there are still poor designs.If you rely on Fu Zan and these developers alone, one is to play repeatedly every day, which is too tiring and easy to get bored, and more importantly, they don't have time.For this reason, Fu Zan thought of a tricky way, put a TV and a game console in the store on the first floor, and invited some players who lived nearby to try it out.At this time, Atari 2600 compatible machines were mainly popular in China, and FC game consoles rarely appeared. Once such a rare host was put on display, and it was free to play, it quickly attracted many players to stop by. here.Although only two people can enjoy the game directly at a time, many people are satisfied just looking at the game screen that is much more beautiful than Atari, not to mention the exciting two-person collaboration and various tricks All kinds of levels, and soon the players were fascinated by the modified version of "Tank War", and the passionate music of "Tank War" began to float in the store from morning till night.

The players' love for the game gave everyone in Tianzhiyuan a sense of satisfaction, but as they got a deeper understanding of FC game design, Fu Zan and the developers were no longer satisfied with playing around with the map editor, and started Think about how you can add something truly new to Tank Wars.A developer named Lin Xinyuan found out by accident while watching the players play the game that in doubles, if one tank was reimbursed in advance, they could only wait helplessly by the side, even if the remaining one was in a hurry, there was no way to help.He couldn't help but had an idea, and came up with the idea of ​​"after one side's tanks are used up, we can borrow extra tanks from the other side, so that we can avoid being in a hurry when there is only one person left."Naturally, a good idea cannot be enjoyed by one person alone. Lin Xinyuan quickly expressed this idea at the weekly development meeting. Everyone felt that this idea was very innovative and worth a try.To add this function, it is natural to modify the program code, but for the development team that already has the source code, this is no longer an obstacle. The key is to come up with a more reasonable implementation method.After careful research, Fu Zan finally chose the interrupt call method to realize this function. First, he wrote a code to process the number of lives of 1P and 2P tanks according to the conditions, and then added the code to call this function code in the handle input processing module. "A+B" key, after final debugging, the completed program was burned into a cassette, and Fu Zan named this version "Tank War 28".

Soon the game console cassettes on the store were replaced by the freshly released "Tank Wars 28". Of course, the players didn't realize the mystery of this at first, until a certain player (2P) started to dry up as usual after all the tanks were wiped out. while sitting.The player didn't know whether it was intentional or unintentional. While sitting on the chair waiting, he pressed the A and B buttons on the handle at the same time.Suddenly, something happened that surprised everyone and made the development team secretly laugh. The 2P player who had lost all his tanks had another tank to control. The enemy, and the 1P player who had been concentrating on it was surprised to find that his tank was missing one, "Boss, someone moved my tank!", there was a whistling voice in the store.Since then, the fighting style of the players has changed, and the cautiousness in the past has become a fight to be the first. "Death is death, don't borrow my life!" roared, although this is very different from the original idea of ​​the development team, but the players have experienced another fresh feeling of two-person cooperation from it.

The encouraged development team made persistent efforts, and this time the black hand reached out to the players' special items-treasures.After code and parameter adjustments, "Tank Battle" once again has a new element - enemy tanks can also eat treasures. Those who used to be the best protection umbrellas for players are now about to become players' soul stimulants.After burning the cassette, the poor players once again became the test subjects.

On this day, Ye Tianwei and Chen Xiaohao came to the store at No. 16 Meiwu Road early, just in time to catch up with the owner of the store who was turning on the TV and game consoles, Ye Tianwei and Chen Xiaohao took a handle in tacit understanding, waiting for the game screen to appear , everything was the same as usual, but Ye Tianwei noticed that the store owner's smile was a little weird.When the game screen first appeared on the TV, several regular players arrived, but Ye Tianwei and Chen Xiaohao still had a strong status in the industry as the pair with the strongest fighting power and the most number of clearances. Sit down honestly, ready to watch the performance of the two of them today.Ye Tianwei and Chen Xiaohao are old friends who have played since they were young. Unlike ordinary players, they are very good at cooperating with each other when playing "Tank Battle", so they can often achieve very good results.Holding the handle, Ye Tianwei felt that he was in a good state today, and seeing Chen Xiaohao's expression beside him seemed to be in good shape, he secretly calculated in his heart, and felt that he should be able to persist a few more times than the previous two days.Select, confirm, select again, and confirm again, the game starts from the third level of N difficulty No.20.

As usual, Ye Tianwei and Chen Xiaohao quickly took control of the situation, destroying enemy tanks while eating treasures to thrive.A red tank sneakily appeared beside the two of them under the cover of the grass. Before the players watching the battle could exclaim, Ye Tianwei, who had been prepared for a long time, turned around and shot, and it was done.Accompanied by the sound of the reward, a pocket watch flashed on the top of the screen. Ye Tianwei weighed it. The distance was too far, and the risk of rushing up directly was not worth it. The two exchanged glances and decided to continue defending below.

"Look, the tank is stealing treasure!" A player exclaimed.

Ye Tianwei smiled contemptuously, and muttered in his heart: "I'm really not good at it, I just yelled when I didn't understand anything, it's just that the treasure disappeared by itself, so there's no need to make a fuss about it."

But Ye Tianwei soon realized that something was wrong. The tank that was once extremely flexible in his hands seemed to be stained with glue. No matter how he pressed the direction keys, he couldn't move it. With a confident expression, drips of sweat began to ooze from his forehead, and an ominous thought came to his mind, "Could it be that the handle is broken? The boss won't ask us to lose money."

(End of this chapter)