Chapter 22: Art and Music

After setting up the adventure mode, Alex Parker continued to focus on the mini-games, puzzle mode, and survival mode.

With the experience from adventure mode, these other modes were relatively more manageable and more of a physical task. Alex didn't need to push himself as hard and could work while playing, completing the different modes in less than a week.

The Zen Garden, Almanac, achievements, and shop features were even more superficial, taking just three days to finish.

Finally, Alex spent another three days testing the game, playing through the entire adventure mode, checking the other modes for any unknown bugs, and fixing a few minor issues.

Thus, after over a month of almost non-stop work, Alex finally completed the central part of "Plants vs. Zombies."

In the previous world, "Plants vs. Zombies" was created over three years by a team consisting of a designer, an artist, a musician, and a programmer. Most of that time was spent constantly revising design plans, optimizing the user experience, and polishing the game into a masterpiece.

For Alex, he didn't need to write code, do extensive numerical adjustments, or find inspiration and revise designs. He merely copied the original, yet it still took him a month, illustrating that game development isn't as simple as many people think.

However, it was still not finished.

While the current game had complete gameplay, it used free placeholder art resources from the editor. The art style was severely inconsistent, with many models and original artworks mismatched in size, looking like a pile of junk—simply unbearable.

Moreover, the game lacked any music or sound effects, resulting in zero tension during gameplay and no impact during battles.

Alex's next task was to elevate the art and music quality to the original game's level.

Fortunately, Alex had already sketched the images of the plants and zombies and stored them on his computer. The next step was to complete them, which involved painstakingly hand-drawing and animating them himself.

With over forty types of plants and more than twenty types of zombies, each with its own animations, the workload was significant.

However, since the original artwork of these plants and zombies was relatively simple, with many zombies having reusable features, the task wasn't too overwhelming.

Alex's current level of art skill was not high, but the game's cartoonish style, with simple lines and colours, was manageable for him.

Of course, Alex could have hired someone to do the art, but explaining his needs in detail to other artists and potentially not being satisfied with the results made him decide to do it all himself.

On average, Alex could complete one plant and one zombie per day. Including interface elements, loading screens, and other resources, it took him nearly a month and a half to finish all the art assets.

Next came the music and sound effects.

After using the skill book, Alex's music and sound effects skills were now at level 10. While creating music from scratch was still impossible, recreating the classic BGM was feasible.

The BGM of "Plants vs. Zombies" was also a classic. Many melodies were still fresh in Alex's mind, and although he couldn't achieve a 100% faithful reproduction, he could get close enough.

However, Alex couldn't clearly recall the BGM for some less prominent features and modes.

For key BGMs like the tutorial, preparation screen, classic scenes, night scenes, boss battle scenes, and Zen Garden, Alex managed to recreate them based on the original melodies.

For less critical BGMs, Alex used free resources from the editor, finding ones with similar styles to avoid too much inconsistency.

For sound effects, Alex had to rely on the editor's library. Fortunately, the editor had a vast collection of sound effects, and with enough patience, he could find suitable ones.

The music and sound effects took another two weeks, and Alex was finally satisfied with the results.

Alex then spent over a week testing the game, playing through it repeatedly, and making minor tweaks to areas he found unsatisfactory. Finally, the game was officially completed after over three months of cumulative work.

Alex packaged the tested game, and the final installation size was 127MB, slightly larger than the original but still relatively small in this parallel world's gaming industry.

Alex prepared installation packages for both PC and mobile platforms, ensuring account data could be shared between platforms and including a simple ranking feature.

The final step was deciding how players would log into the game.

Without much deliberation, Alex chose to use his company's official account system, the "Thunder Game Pass."

Alex had other options. He could have linked social platform accounts or used accounts from the Empire Interactive Platform.

Empire Interactive was the largest channel and developer in the country, and most players had accounts on its platform.

Using their platform's accounts would be convenient for players, potentially increasing user numbers for Alex's game.

Many players were reluctant to register new accounts and verify their phones and IDs, and this step could even lead to player attrition.

However, Alex decided to use the "Thunder Game Pass," even if it meant sacrificing some user numbers.

The reason was simple: linking social platform accounts or using Empire Interactive Platform accounts meant Alex would depend on others, even if Empire Interactive made no money.

Player data was an invaluable asset, and Alex planned to develop many more games. Eventually, he would have to face these monopolistic channel operators. Rather than falling out halfway through, it was better not to get too involved from the start.

When the game was completed, Alex didn't immediately upload it to the app store.

He wanted to gauge players' reactions in this parallel world before finalizing the promotion strategy for the game.

Alex installed "Plants vs. Zombies" on the computers and phones in the experience store, ready to see how players would react before deciding on the game's subsequent promotion strategy.