The Red Dragon Lord is OP, but Insists on a Pop Culture Invasion!

How to act—whether to become someone who holds onto their principles in a warzone or to become a Night Living Yama—was entirely up to the player to decide.

Of course, they also had to bear the consequences themselves.

This was the brilliance of the game’s expression. It didn’t just shove its ideas in the player’s face; it used interaction.

The player’s actions led to different outcomes, allowing the immersed player to think for themselves without being lectured.

The greatest thing about interaction is how it creates a sense of identification.

Because players are controlling their own characters, they naturally feel a greater sense of immersion than they would from just text or images, and they more easily think from the character’s perspective.

After much thought, Zog ultimately chose *This War of Mine*.

A siege war was a better fit for the current situation of the Augustine City State.

And compared to *Braveheart: World War*, this game had more replayability.

For novices just starting out, the pressure to survive was immense. Team wipes at the drop of a hat were a common occurrence.

Different character combinations and different timing choices also offered the fun of repeated playthroughs.

It would also be easier to release follow-up content. They could add a story mode directly onto the original gameplay framework, letting players experience a scripted survival story.

Zog was very skilled at writing design documents, finishing the entire proposal in just a few hours.

Copying homework is much faster than doing it from scratch.

However, Zog still added a few of his own ideas.

For example, more numerous and more unpredictable random events.

The events in the original game all had set trigger conditions and outcomes. After encountering them a few times, players could learn the patterns, turning them into a fixed way to farm resources. It lacked the sense of uncertainty found in war, where you truly don’t know what tomorrow will bring.

All Zog could do was add more randomness and less fixed conditions. This could extend the feeling of novelty for players, though they could still grasp the general patterns after playing for a while.

It couldn’t be helped. Before the birth of true AI, it was impossible to keep the experience feeling completely fresh for players forever.

Additionally, Zog specifically added a custom character creation feature. It would allow players to design their own unique character, including various stats, special traits, background, and even upload their own photo to use as an avatar.

Very "Creative Workshop."

This project wouldn’t need too many people. Zog pulled together a few Mages and artists, plus an executive planner responsible for helping implement the design document, forming a team of a dozen or so people—enough to make the game.

Especially with the help of the mature engine they had now.

Those senior Illusionists had thrown themselves completely into the engine’s R&D, iterating through several generations over a few years.

They were all old-timers, but they were grinding so hard that even Zog worried about their health.

For this group of Illusionists, their profession and hobby had merged. They had researched and developed many features on their own, and the level of convenience in some aspects even exceeded Zog’s expectations.

Making a game now could truly be done in a "fool-proof" way; you didn’t even need to know any Magic.

It’s just that if you wanted to perfectly achieve your desired effects, you still had to study the basic principles.

With the help of the "fool-proof" game engine—which was public and free for everyone, with royalties only taken after a game was finished and put on sale—making games had become a somewhat common affair.

How should I put it? It was the trendy thing for young people to do.

Any student team that hadn’t tried making their own game would be too embarrassed to say they were from a proper academy.

It’s just that, looking at the finished products, the vast majority were trash.

Thanks to this extremely low barrier to entry, the "I can do it too" attitude was effectively reduced.

Anyone could give it a try. You could make a game after watching a couple of online courses, and after you finished, you’d realize you really weren’t cut out for it.

With the proposal sorted, Zog still needed to sort out the music.

The music for this game wasn’t prominent, but it was very distinctive and crucial for setting the atmosphere.

It perfectly expressed the helplessness of the pitiful common folk in war.

Oppressive, cold, and desperate—these were the main characteristics of the game’s soundtrack. Listening to it for too long was distressing.

And it wasn’t the kind of creepy music you’d find in a horror movie.

It was something like post-rock.

It’s a type of instrumental rock. In this genre, vocals aren’t that important; often, there are no vocals at all.

The "post" actually refers to subverting the structure of traditional rock music, but that concept is a bit too broad.

Later, this genre of music came to mostly refer to styles that lacked a central melody, used a great deal of emotionally charged instrumentation, and incorporated elements of electronic music into traditional rock arrangements.

It’s still very broad, but at least you can identify the general genre.

It was supposed to be a very niche style.

Until it became the soundtrack for "emo"...

On the internet, it’s usually accompanied by all sorts of strange text—the kind that’s primarily sad, seems profound but says nothing of substance, and would make the original writer cringe with unbearable embarrassment if they looked back on it a few years later.

The application of this musical style in *This War of Mine* was also very unconventional.

Most post-rock, after a long, oppressive build-up, will have a cathartic explosion.

The game didn’t have that.

There was only the sound of a guitar with a slight electronic tinge, looping coldly and desolately.

Only oppression, no catharsis.

Just like civilians in a war, there is only tragedy, no victory.

After deciding on the main themes for several maps, he handed them over to the music department to complete.

After grabbing some suitable sound effects from the sound library, Zog’s work was basically finished. All that was left was implementation.

Then, Zog would only need to playtest it and provide feedback for revisions.

...

"Uffie, how are the revisions on your project coming along?"

In the game department’s breakroom, or as it was also called, the unlimited drinks and snacks room.

The producer of another small team was holding a coffee. He was relying on this stuff to keep him going, drinking only concentrated shots with no sugar. He didn’t care if it tasted good; the worse it tasted, the more it woke him up.

"Not great."

Uffie answered listlessly.

There were many teams participating in the game festival, but they were all working on their projects in their spare time.

Sleeping only four or five hours a day was the norm.

If their own projects were going well, it could be considered a painful but joyful experience.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.

Her own project was a struggle.

It was just painful and agonizing.

Uffie had taken Zog’s feedback to heart; her demo was too difficult.

Previously, she had referenced many real-life war accounts, basing it entirely on realistic situations.

The player’s character could be zapped to death by an Element ray from an unknown source, randomly step on a trap and get blown up, or be killed by the aftershocks from a battle between high-level Professionals...

It highlighted one thing: you were born arbitrarily and died randomly.

Very realistic to war, but not fun as a game.

The experience was nothing but frustrating.

Uffie made some simple changes. Now, although the difficulty was still high, at least you wouldn’t be killed by a random attack from nowhere. The enemies that could kill the player were all visible.

But after making the changes, she discovered a new problem.

After playing for a little while, you’d get used to the fact that your current character would die and be replaced by a new one.

It wasn’t much different from a traditional game where you control the same character the whole time.

This went against her original intention of expressing the cruelty of war.

’So frustrating.’

Now Uffie was starting to wonder if she was really only suited for the technical side of things.

But at the very least, she had to finish the task at hand. The promotions for the anti-war game festival had already gone out.

And wherever the anti-war art festival’s promotions went, the game festival’s promotions followed.

Everyone could tell that the two organizers didn’t get along.

If the game side laid a huge egg then...

It would be even more humiliating.

’Can games only be pure entertainment?’

"Hey, by the way, have you seen Mr. Zhuoge’s design document?"

Although Zog had assigned the game to a team, the design document was public to the entire department. After all, it was meant to be an example, so anyone who wanted to learn or study it could take a look.

"Of course I’ve seen it. *This War of Mine*, right?"

"Yeah. What do you think of that proposal?"

"It’s alright, I guess."

Uffie didn’t actually like it much, but she suspected it was because she didn’t fully understand it.

Because she felt that proposal was just as difficult. The characters had so many stats to manage, resources were hard to get, combat was discouraged, and the player’s character could die at any moment.

It seemed pretty similar to her original design.

And just from reading the document, she couldn’t see how it was supposed to make players think more deeply.

The expressive power of text was a bit lacking.

Just then, a shout came from the office, "The first internal playtest for *This War of Mine* is out!"