Zhou Fangyuan sat in Mike's office for almost an hour, and drank two cups of coffee before Mike walked in in a hurry.

"Boss, are you here?"

"Hmm. ”

Zhou Fangyuan didn't get up, just nodded, watched Mike sit down behind the desk, and then asked, "Busy lately?"

"I'm busy. ”

Mike rubbed his eyebrows, a wry smile on his face.

"In order to cooperate with the film and television plan, almost all the games have to be updated, and a few people on the vulture's side ...... Fortunately, the boss reminded me in advance, otherwise it would have been difficult to recall them after they all left. Coupled with Hearthstone and the Titan Project, I'm not exaggerating, boss, I haven't been home for almost half a month. ”

Eating and living in the company every day, this is the status quo of the company's top management.

Everyone thinks that the boss is easy to be, in fact, unless he is like Zhou Fangyuan, who has the ability to be a prophet and has enough confidence to be the shopkeeper, the more ordinary people, the more they are in a high position, the more they often can't help themselves. Ordinary employees have a day off, but for the general manager or president of the company, they have no day off. In other words, they can either have a day off or a working day every day, mainly depending on the company's work arrangement. For example, Blizzard during this period of time, the workload is too large, and for ordinary employees, it may be enough to be responsible for their own share, and they don't need to think about anything else. But for Mike, he has to take care of almost every game. Whether it is an updated version, a new research and development, and more importantly, in film and television production, he cannot take it lightly.

As a result, it has become the way it is now, almost every day there is a busy job, the whole person has been in high-intensity work, and it is thanks to Mike's good physical foundation that he has not been exhausted, and he will try it with someone over fifty years old, I am afraid that it will not take a few days to break down directly.

"Although work is important, you should also pay attention to rest, Hearthstone and the situation of the Titans Project. Especially the Titan Project, didn't I tell you to stop? Why are you still going on?"

Zhou Fangyuan is not very satisfied with the "assault work", he prefers "methodical", Hearthstone is just that, the Titan plan, he explicitly forbade the other party to stop research and development, but it seems that Mike didn't take his reminder to heart at all.

Hearthstone and Project Titan are both games that Zhou Fangyuan has heard of or played directly.

The former, a classic CCG game, and the latter, an MMO masterpiece that was ultimately stillborn.

Let's talk about Hearthstone first, Hearthstone probably started to set up a project team in the original space-time 08. Its development team, called Ttam5, is a very small development team within Blizzard.

At the end of the closed beta, the team was only 15 people, which was Blizzard's smallest team, and of course, although the Sparrow was small, because of its small size, it also gave them quick reflexes and different ways to deal with it. It can be said that Team5 was established specifically for Hearthstone, unlike Blizzard's previous multi-year cycle of working with more than 50 people in teams, the team has become smaller but the level has not shrunk. In addition, the small team introduced a lively air that allowed them to break the shackles of Blizzard's traditions.

For a long time before the Hearthstone project was developed, Team5 was a small team of prototypes. For example, Hearthstone's design director Ben Brode, better known as BB, said that he joined the group in June 2008, and that "full development hadn't even begun" at that time. Substantial development of the entire project began in the spring of 2012. In March 2013, Blizzard first unveiled Hearthstone at the PAX East Game Show, and the open beta began in August, with the full release in March 2014, almost six years after development.

In fact, it is not difficult to see that Hearthstone is essentially a hasty project, maybe Blizzard has some ideas for developing Hearthstone internally, but it has been unhurried, and Blizzard itself is not in a hurry. But why did it suddenly accelerate development in 12 years? It's simple, because Blizzard had to save itself.

2012 is a very important point in time, at this point in time, Warcraft has begun to decline, and its market share continues to shrink. The previous games were either too old or not successful enough to continue Blizzard's long-standing dominance of the market. At this time, League of Legends was born and frantically seized the market with an indomitable posture. It must be admitted that in the face of LOL, the little brother, Blizzard was a little panicked. It just so happened that at that time, the development of the Titan was at an impasse, and the "great" Blizzard actually had no way to take LOL for a while, and had no choice but to speed up the development of Hearthstone.

I don't want to defeat my opponent, I just want to stabilize the situation.

And what many people don't know is that there are actually many fans of trading card games within Blizzard, such as Mike Mohan, one of the founders of Blizzard, who has more than 20 years of card game history. In the early stages of development, the team finalized the worldview structure with World of Warcraft as the basic one. Many members of the development team like BB, Lead Designer Eric Dodds, and UI Senior Designer Derek Sakamoto have previously worked on the Warcraft project and are fans of Warcraft. The development team wanted to add a strong Warcraft flavor to the game, while also creating a different Hearthstone style.

Lead designer Eric Dodds explained that the game has a Warcraft tone, 2 parts epic, and possibly a whimsical joy, a small amount of humor, and a little uninhibited. Hearthstone was originally called Warcraft, while an earlier development version was called Fire and Ice. At that time, only Stalkers and Mages could play, and Warriors were still in the works.

In the early stages of the game's development, before prototyping began, everyone on the development team, except Eric Dodds and BB, was loaned to support the development of Star 2 for almost a year. During this time, Eric Dodds and BB did a lot of prototyping and came up with a lot of ideas. For a while. They used only pen and paper to create prototypes, and shredded paper to make test cards. When the other members returned, they had already made a simple flash version. The work of other members in Star-Two has also had a big impact on Hearthstone's balance.

The developers tried a lot of different designs on the game's interface, and how Hearthstone is presented today was not clear at the time. One of the scraps is to allow players to travel through the world map of Azeroth and complete single-player missions to unlock new areas, similar to the later adventure modes. Other scrap cases include Hearthstone in the Forest, Adventure Book, 3D cards and even holographic cards. Of course, these designs were destroyed precisely because they were too difficult to implement, mainly because the time was too short to support such a huge project. When designing matchmaking, the team knew they didn't want to just make a timer and write "searching for opponents." One of the prototypes is the Arena of Cuba, where players appear on either side of the arena with their names on their heads.

Eventually, the designers met several times and came up with the idea of the box. The box allows the player to zoom in and out of the map to discover the battles taking place in Azeroth. Once a battle is spotted, the camera shifts to the battle panel. Of course, it took several revisions to become what we see today.

Hero units are also different from what they later see.

The game's starting hero was the Hunter, but eventually the Mage was replaced by the designers because the designers felt that the non-weapon class would make it easier for new players to pick up. At one time, there were two heroes per class, one each for the Alliance and the Horde. The Alliance Warlock was Wilfred Fitzban, who gave the King the inspiration for the creation of this retinue. Although optional heroes were later added, at launch, there was only one hero per class.

In most cases, each class's hero has several alternate characters before it is finalized, such as Tyrande the Priest, Kael'thas the Mage, and Paladin Fordin, the original Stalker Hero. It's always hard to find the perfect hero for every class.

Male faction, race, and gender are also many factors to consider when choosing a hero. The original setting was 7 males and 2 females, 3 Terrans, 2 half-orcs, 1 Night Elf and 1 Blood Elf, which was a balance of factors. Valeera's ability to become a Stalker hero also has an element of her being a female Night Elf. The board was made from 3D model materials, and team members Ben Thompson and Jomaro Kindred drew the images and gave them to John Zwicker, who then edited the model's textures in Maya.

In order to create a light and shadow effect and a specific viewing angle, the model had to be tilted and deformed, but the lower part was less deformed than the upper part.

In addition, the small traps triggered by board clicks were created by John Zwicker with the help of technical artists Kyle Harrison and Becca Abel.

Musically, from the very beginning, Hearthstone music was designed to allow Warcraft players to find a familiar feeling and have its own characteristics. One way to do this is to add a few classic Warcraft theme songs, like A Call to Arms, which can be faintly heard in the game's trailer. Another feature of Hearthstone music is that it is light-hearted and witty, but it also speeds up the tempo during battles. The music for the matchmaking search waiting screen comes from Warcraft II., and before that, this music was also used by Warcraft as the music for pet duels. The game's music was composed by Peter McConnell, who had written the music for Lucas's Star Wars game, and the style of the music was required to resemble a group of musicians playing in a tavern.

The game's first adventure mode brings a different spooky effect, with a few modifications to the original song.

In fact, it wasn't until the mechanical pack version that Hearthstone started making more of the original art. However, with the development of the new version, many of the original paintings have been reused, and in the case of the Old God version, almost 99% of the original paintings were made by modifying the original card art. Unlike other card games, Hearthstone's electronic form gives it the unique playability of gold cards. The process of making the gold cards is a two-step process, with special visual effects and original art being separated, and the effects are controlled by masks. Each gold card has four layers that allow artists to add four effects. This allows a golden card to have the same effect, like the eyes and mouth of a human harvester.

The creation of gold cards requires a certain amount of creativity, and sometimes a card is given a new lease of life. When the cards are static, the artist has to find a way to make them feel dynamic. Like the king of beasts, they added dancing manes and flying dust.

In short, the development of Hearthstone, although it was established a long time ago. But for a long time, everyone, including the members of the design team, has been moving forward at an unhurried pace, partly because Warcraft was strong enough at that time, and Blizzard itself was not in a hurry. On the other hand, it is also because the company's workload is not small, in addition to the follow-up development of existing games, the existence of the super project of Titan also distracts Blizzard too much. But what is the result? With the advent of LOL, Blizzard was caught off guard.

In terms of Titans, there has been no further development, and its difficulties are not in any aspect, but in all aspects, not to mention in a short period of time, even if everything goes well, it may not be able to see results in a few years, and this is still a good estimate. In fact, in the original plane, the Titan ultimately failed, and finally had to fill the gap with Overwatch, the relic, which shows how deadlocked Blizzard was before Hearthstone accelerated development.

It was almost in this situation that Blizzard had to speed up the development of Hearthstone, and almost overnight, the entire development team sped up.

So some people may ask, why not increase the number of people?

In fact, Blizzard expanded its development team once in '07 and hired a lot of people, but where did these people go? There is no doubt that all of these people joined the Titan Project.

Titan, once regarded by Blizzard as a cross-era MMO game, was even regarded by Blizzard as a killer feature that will continue to dominate the game market in the next era. Of course, in the end, the project was over, but in 12 years, Blizzard had not completely given up on Titan, and still hoped to fight for it in the end. Therefore, at that time, it was impossible for the Hearthstone team to get more support, and the expectations of Blizzard's top management for Hearthstone were far less than imagined.

However, what no one expected was that this small team of only fifteen people would take less than a year of development time - although a lot of preliminary work has been done, it is only a foreshadowing after all, and the whole development work took more than a year, but finally created a classic CCG game. When Hearthstone was at its hottest, even Big Brother Warcraft had to stand aside, and even how to say that before Zhou Fangyuan was reborn, Hearthstone's annual revenue once surpassed Warcraft and became Blizzard's most profitable game at that time. Suffice it to say that without Hearthstone, the situation Blizzard faces could be even more dangerous.

After all, in the game market at that time, not to mention the types of games that Blizzard had never been involved in, stand-alone games, are all old games, the latest hairstyle of Diablo 3, not successful, it can't be said to be a direct violent death, but after all, it failed to continue the glory of Diablo 2, LOL is crazy to grab the market, MMORPG games are in full decline, and Blizzard, which relies entirely on Warcraft to support the field, if you can't come up with a decent game in a short period of time, it is very likely to directly lose your most important battlefield, and the consequences are unimaginable.

Therefore, Hearthstone, the little brother, can be regarded as turning the tide in the stormy seas, barely stabilizing the Blizzard, a giant ship that has begun to leak at that time, in terms of the volume of Hearthstone itself, it is really not easy, from a certain point of view, it is not an exaggeration.