Building a Gaming Empire From Scratch

Chapter 223 - 223: 221: Stockpiling Guns

As for how the tea tasted, he really didn’t care much.

His usual drinks were fruit juice, milk tea, and cola which were not expensive but brought simple happiness.

He did drink tea, but he didn’t know much about it.

After finishing the tea, he didn’t care if the employees were busy developing games, and he leisurely played with the dog with Cheryl, watching her take photos to ease the mood after encountering an abnormal person.

Cheryl sat in a duck-like posture on the fluffy carpet, half-leaning over, holding the camera with its big lens directed at the little dog, and not stopping saying, “Little Milkshake, look here, look here! Yes, yes, come here!”

But Little Milkshake didn’t want to pay attention to her and bounced towards Lincoln, and started biting his trouser legs.

Lincoln wasn’t anxious and let it bite.

This little guy was too young. He still had milk teeth growing, and it would be another three months before he’d change teeth, so Lincoln figured he was just teething.

He took out his mobile phone and opened Cheryl’s video account “Cloud Dream Office Daily.”

According to Cheryl, this was to “ride on” Cloud Dream’s popularity. Audiences came with gossip and voyeuristic desires, and then only saw cats and dogs. “We get attention and traffic, and they get their souls healed. It’s a win-win!” What could Lincoln say? He could only give her a thumbs up: “Great!”

Opening the account page, he found that Cheryl’s enthusiasm and efficiency were very high. In just a week, she had posted more than forty videos.

The video with the most likes was not about cats and dogs but was actually related to the account name; it was an introduction video for the Cloud Dream Studio.

It had millions of likes.

Netizens were envious of the rest area environment and the fully stocked snack cabinet.

Next were the pet videos, which also had videos with hundreds of thousands of As he scrolled down, there were unusually many videos of Little Milkshake. After checking the comments, he found that netizens loved it very much, and many people even left messages wanting to feed Little Milkshake.

“Did people really mail dog food here?” Lincoln asked curiously.

“Yes,” Cheryl nodded, “We got both cat and dog food, but I didn’t feed them to the little ones.”

Lincoln nodded, everything was going as planned. He patted Little Milkshake on the head, then turned back to his office and logged into the virtual world.

During his relaxation, he had a new idea.

“Brother Qin, how is the self-defense ability of our NPCs in the metropolis

“Huh?” Randall was a bit confused, wasn’t that something they set up when they made the game?

He replied to Lincoln, somewhat baffled, “It’s still the same as before.”

“That’s not right! This is illogical!” Lincoln explained, “Think about it, if you were a metropolitan resident and heard that the police were going on strike, what would you do?”

“Uh… stock up on food and minimize going out?”

“Wrong! Big mistake!” Lincoln crossed his arms, very clearly asserting, “Only fools would stock up on food; smart people would stock up on guns!” “Stock up on… guns?” Randall was a bit dumbstruck.

“Without adequate self-defense capability, how can one survive in the metropolis?!”

“So what you mean is?”

“Strengthen the armament of metropolitan residents!” Lincoln showed his true intentions, “Relying only on points to restrict players is somewhat weak. Metropolitan residents need self-defense and resistance capabilities.”

“But wouldn’t that interfere with the players’ fair competition?” Randall hesitated.

“Isn’t that perfect? It can also provide a stronger show effect for the audience.”

Lincoln was getting more and more excited. ‘We need to design the NPC’s behavior logic carefully, plan their alert areas, when they’ll hide, when they’ll attack actively, and when they’ll fight back passively.”

“If the players don’t understand it, it’ll be an unexpected factor, enhancing the show effect. If they do understand it, they can use these mechanics to set traps and strategize, increasing their winning rate!”

Randall felt overwhelmed just thinking about it and even felt a little sorry for the players who were going to participate in the contest. This was getting too complicated !

Playing a game and still having to test the players’ real-time analysis and strategic decision-making ability?!

“This might be a huge project.” Randall warned Lincoln.

“It’s fine, I’ll join in, we’ll have enough time.” Lincoln said confidently.

Helplessly, when Lincoln thought of something interesting, he couldn’t help but want to realize it as soon as possible.

This was probably one of his character flaws, often acting on his thoughts impulsively.

But fortunately, he was lucky enough to have Mavis’s full support, along with money and manpower, allowing him to always turn his thoughts into reality and create tangible results.

It’s just that he couldn’t help digging holes for himself, making himself busier and busier.

“Let’s start working on it now.” Lincoln rubbed his hands together and directly joined the team, starting to design the new NPC behavior patterns.

“We’ll definitely give the players a surprise at that time!”

On the other hand, the media frenzy had also begun.

On Friday, “Light Encounter” had just been released, and everything was still uncertain.

Saturday and Sunday were rest days. Self-media didn’t care about that, and overworking their employees and themselves was a common practice, making it lively.

But some relatively authoritative and reliable big media still needed a break, so there were only brief reports.

Now that it was a proper workday, these media outlets started making efforts, and articles analyzing and evaluating “Light Encounter” , Cloud Dream’s new game, began gushing out in all directions.

At the same time, Super Tomato’s new video was also completed and successfully released, catching the wave of the craze.

For a moment, the popularity of “Light Encounter” was even higher than on the day it was released, and it climbed the trending topic list in one breath.

At a glance, all the media scores were consistently high, with lots of 9s, 9-5s appearing like a screen swipe, and even quite a few media outlets giving a full 10 points.

Even the most severe media during normal times gave scores above 8.5!

A media named “Digital Entertainment” published an article saying that “Light Encounter” was retracing the steps of “Traveler of the Wind” and was slowly ascending the altar of greatness. This was a completely different path from “Assassins’ Alliance”.

What the media meant was that although “Assassins’ Alliance” had good sales and high scores, the praise it received was more focused on its technical innovation and its astounding openness, realism, and freedom in gaming.

It was undoubtedly impressive, but it seemed too reliant on the epoch-making virtual reality technology, which often overshadowed the charm of the game itself.

It seemed that if this game were not released on the Mirage virtual reality platform, but on PC or VR, it might not have achieved such heights.

But “Traveler of the Wind” and “Light Encounter” were different. No one doubted that even if these two games were on different platforms, their inherent charm as games would not be overshadowed.

Of course, Lincoln didn’t care about such opinions. What a waste of breath!

“Assassins’ Alliance” was originally made to take full advantage of virtual reality technology, and now you’re talking about not releasing it on a virtual reality platform?

Ignoring facts and just insisting on your own opinions?

Lincoln was itching to blacklist this media.

But it seemed a bit too pushy and it would easily leave the impression that he was petty, intolerant of any questioning, especially when they were still praising his new game.

In the end, he decided to let it go.

“I’ll give you one more chance.”

Lincoln wrote down the name of this media in his notebook..