Chapter 21: Art and Music

Translated by Coldtaco

Edited by Aelryinth

After finishing adventure mode, Chen Mo dedicated himself to minigames, puzzle mode, survival mode, and other modes.

Everything else was fairly simple with the experience of adventure mode under his belt. Chen Mo didn't try as hard as he did before, as it was just manual labor, playtesting as he went. Within a week's time, he finished the other modes.

The Zen Garden, almanac, achievements, and shop were even simpler to implement, finishing in three days.

Chen Mo spent another three days playtesting. He completed adventure mode once, checked if there were any bugs in the other modes, and polished up some of the finer details.

So far Chen Mo had been working on it day and night. After spending a month, the core Plants vs Zombies had been successfully recreated.

In his previous life, Plants vs Zombies was made in three years by a team of one designer, one artist, one musician, and one programmer. This majority of their time was likely spent on revising the design document and optimizing the user experience in order to produce a highly refined game like this.

Chen Mo didn't need to code, or make too many adjustments to the numbers. He didn't have to look for inspiration or change designs. All he did was remake the original piece and it still had taken him an entire month. This demonstrated that video game development wasn't as easy as the majority of people thought.

However, it wasn't done yet!

Although the game was basically complete, the placeholder art from the game engine was still being used. The styles of the artwork clashed, and many of them weren't the right size. It looked like garbage, calling it an eyesore would be an understatement.

Moreover, the game did not have any music or sound effects, completely removing the tension from the game. The combat wasn't satisfying, either.

Chen Mo spent his time on improving the art and music to the levels of the original in his previous life.

Luckily Chen Mo had sketched down the plants and zombies and it was all saved on his computer, all that was left was to complete it. However, this was a more painful process, as Chen Mo had to hand draw and animate all of it. 

About forty different types of plants and twenty different types of zombies, combined with the fact that every single one of them had their own subtle movements, added up to a substantial amount of work.

Luckily, the artwork of the plants and zombies were fairly simple, especially when many parts of the zombies could be reused, reducing the amount of work.

Although Chen Mo's art skills weren't high, he could manage. The art style was cartoonish, so the lines and colors of the characters were fairly simple.

Of course, Chen Mo could've hired someone, but then he'd be required to describe his specifications in detail. Moreover, the results might not be up to par with his expectations. After giving it some thought, Chen Mo decided to bite the bullet and take matters into his own hands.

On average Chen Mo completed one plant and one zombie per day. Combined with resources such as the interface and loading screen, finishing the artwork took almost a month and a half of Chen Mo's time.

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Next up was sound effects and music!

Chen Mo's Sound Effects Stat was now ten after consuming the skill book. It was impossible for him to make something from scratch, but recreating the original was still in the realm of possibility.

The background music of Plants vs Zombies could be considered one of the classic BGMs. Chen Mo could clearly remember many of the melodies. Although he couldn't replicate them a hundred percent, he got fairly close. However, he didn't quite remember the BGMs that weren't super popular.

The tutorial track, preparation screen, front lawn, night, boss theme, zen garden… these were a few of the classics that Chen Mo could remember. Based on their melodies from his previous life, Chen Mo composed a few simple yet similar sounding BGM tunes.

As for the other less important BGMs, all he could do was to find some free resources for casual games off the game engine to take their place. The ones Chen Mo found were quite thematically similar, so he hadn't made any significant changes.

As for sound effects, Chen Mo had to resort to the free resources of the game engine. As the sound effects library of the game engine was vast, Chen Mo managed to find similar sound effects, though he had to suppress his OCD for the slight differences…

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Music and sound effects took Chen Mo another two weeks time, and he was fairly happy with it.

After playtesting for a week and adjusting anything that didn't feel right to him, he felt that the game was finally out of its development stage, after taking three months altogether.

Chen Mo packaged his game into a 127 MB installer. Although it was slightly bigger than the original, Chen Mo didn't care, as this size was considered quite small in the parallel world.

Chen Mo had prepared two standalone installers for this game, one for PC and one for mobile. The accounts were also crossplatform, and it had a simple leaderboard.

The last problem was how the players were going to log in.

Chen Mo didn't give it much thought, and chose to use accounts at his own company, ie. a Thunderbolt Game Pass.

Chen Mo did have other choices. He could also make users login via social media, or use Emperor Dynasty Entertainment accounts.

Emperor Dynasty Entertainment was one of the biggest video game platforms and developers, so most players had a Emperor Dynasty Entertainment account. Moreover, Emperor Dynasty Entertainment allowed other games to use their platform for logins. Many game designers couldn't be bothered to design such a thing, and used their player management system.

This option would make it much simpler for the players, attracting more users to his game.

Many players didn't want to bother going through a new registration and all the verifications associated with it, therefore requiring players to register might lose a portion of the potential player base.

However, Chen Mo stuck with his decision of using his Thunderbolt Game Pass, not bothered by the potential loss.

The reason was simple: be it social media accounts or using Emperor Dynasty's user management system, Chen Mo would be under the control of someone else. It didn't matter that the Emperor Dynasty wasn't taking a single cent, in Chen Mo's view it was still his loss.

The data of the players was a valuable resource. As Chen Mo planned to make many other games, he had to take on companies like these eventually. It was better not to start with them now, than to have to sever ties down the road!

After the game was finished, Chen Mo decided to wait on pushing the game into the market.

Chen Mo wasn't sure if the tastes of gamers in this world were the same as his previous one. If there were any differences, he would have to make changes to the game. 

He first installed Plants vs Zombies onto the computers and tablets in his experience store to test the responses of the players, in order to decide on his promotional strategy.