Worldview Reboot

Given Skyhill's small scale, it was not particularly expensive in the system store.

It only cost 40,000 Fear Points.

Having made up his mind, Meng Shu immediately bought it.

At once, accompanied by the clattering sound of coins, his Fear Points dropped to 5,158,000.

Next came the system's mechanical prompts.

You have obtained a step-by-step development tutorial for the survival adventure game "Skyhill."

You have obtained the concept design for the survival adventure game "Skyhill."

You have obtained the VR production method for the survival adventure game "Skyhill."

Meng Shu closed his eyes slightly, and two seconds later, he had fully absorbed the development tutorials the system had instilled in him.

A PowerPoint presentation also appeared on his computer desktop. It was Skyhill's concept design.

Since he was going to remake the game, the development tutorial was not particularly useful.

The document before him was what truly mattered.

Meng Shu moved the mouse, double-clicked the document, and began examining it closely.

Only then did he realize that many of its contents had never been implemented in the game.

For example, beyond the several monster types already in the game, there were additional ones such as Scissor Monsters, Wall-Crawling Monsters, Slime Monsters, and more.

Yet none of them had made it into the game, so it was likely a matter of funding.

Just like Alice: Madness Returns, which had cut many brilliantly conceived monsters and replaced them with the common pale-headed black sludge creatures.

Still, as a small-scale 2D game, Skyhill already had seven or eight monster types, which was enough. Since it was a survival game in the first place, it was understandable that the developers had downplayed combat and monsters.

Besides that, the PPT also contained concept art for the Apartment Building.

There were corridors, passageways, The Staircase, guest rooms, every possible angle, and even close-up details.

According to the original design drafts, each floor had four passageways and twenty rooms.

Every room contained various supplies to scavenge, rather than like now, where each floor had only two rooms and pitifully few resources.

It was clear that the developer might originally have intended to make a 3D game, but for various reasons, it had ended up as the 2D game it was now.

While that had saved costs, it had also abandoned many designs. It was truly a shame.

After quickly reviewing the PPT, Meng Shu began planning the next steps.

He created a new page at the end of the PPT and typed in the ideas he had already formed.

Since he was remaking it from 2D into 3D and adding VR support, major changes were unavoidable.

The first was the Apartment Building's scene design.

A concept design draft was still only a concept design draft and had little practical reference value.

It would be best to draw inspiration from reality.

After thinking it over, he decided to make a trip out, stay in several of Shencheng's most famous hotel buildings, and photograph their layouts and decor for Xia Nianzhen's reference.

He would have Xia Nianzhen explain that clearly at the meeting, then bring her along to stay at the hotels.

After all, she was the scene designer. It would be best for her to gather reference material on-site.

Then there was the worldview and backstory.

The original Skyhill had four endings, and every single one was surprising.

In the first ending, the protagonist fought desperately through countless hardships to reach the first floor. But when he opened the main door, he discovered that outside was the rooftop. Realizing he had spent so much time on useless effort, he suffered a mental breakdown and ultimately jumped to his death.

In the second ending, the protagonist reached the first floor and opened the main door, only to find that everything outside was normal and surrounded by crowds of police officers. The monsters he had hacked to death behind him had somehow become the Apartment Building's reception desk staff. Moreover, every monster he had killed had become a human corpse. In his mentally deranged state, the protagonist became a murderer and died under police gunfire.

The third ending had him solve the mysteries and discover himself lying on a hospital bed, with two researchers before him. Upon seeing that he had awakened, they said that data collection was complete and the test subject could be executed.

Thus, only the fourth ending was the true ending.

Specifically, the protagonist successfully reached the underground parking garage, killed the giant monster lurking there, and entered another Apartment Building.

There, as a consciousness entity, he discovered that he was actually an experimental subject lying on a bed for others to study?

Unable to believe it, he touched his real body and finally awakened, returning to reality. After overcoming one crisis after another, he escaped alive and ran toward the setting sun.

These four endings gave Meng Shu plenty of room for revisions.

To make it easier to incorporate elements of the Control Bureau, he designed a brand-new worldview while retaining Skyhill's original backstory.

First, the protagonist was a D-Class Personnel living within an FBC base.

As a humanoid disposable asset, he was selected one day by an FBC doctor for an experiment.

The purpose was to test the properties of the Z-FBC-0825 anomaly, the Illusion Helmet.

Thus, the protagonist was secretly drugged with sleeping pills and, while unconscious, bound to an operating table.

He was then fitted with the Z-FBC-0825 anomaly, and the experiment began.

What followed was the game's original backstory.

Under the hallucinatory influence of the Z-FBC-0825 anomaly, the unconscious protagonist arrived in Skyhill's Apartment Building within his consciousness and took up residence on the hundredth floor.

From there, he witnessed a biological weapon attack and the Apartment Building tenants' mutations.

Then came the gameplay itself, with players controlling the protagonist as he cautiously made his way through the Apartment Building toward the first floor.

However, Meng Shu made further changes here.

As long as the protagonist left through the first floor, one of the first two endings would be triggered: either the rooftop suicide ending or the police execution ending.

That meant the protagonist had ultimately lost to the Z-FBC-0825 anomaly, died in the consciousness world, and then became brain-dead in reality.

But if players solved the mysteries through documents collected throughout the Apartment Building, they could achieve a third ending and return to reality.

At that point, players would see a cutscene.

It would show the protagonist breaking free from the Z-FBC-0825 anomaly's control through sheer willpower and awakening, only to be executed on the spot by security personnel as he prepared to flee.

In all three endings, the protagonist died without ever understanding why.

Therefore, the fourth ending would have the player and the protagonist discover the truth together.

The player would need to kill the monster in the underground parking garage, then enter reality as a consciousness entity and discover that everything had merely been an experiment. His desperate struggle for survival had been nothing but an illusion, data collected by those white-coated researchers.

Thus, the player would need to control the protagonist to touch his real body and break free of the Z-FBC-0825 anomaly, awakening once more.

Then, Meng Shu would place another cutscene here.

The protagonist would remain calm and pretend to stay unconscious, then seize the chance to escape the laboratory.

While passing the W-FBC-0173 control room, he would be spotted by Control Bureau security and shot dead on the spot.

Then, the disturbance caused by the gunshots would draw the attention of the D-Class Personnel in the W-FBC-0173 control room, and then...

In short, Meng Shu's original intention was not to alter the game's own backstory. He only needed to add another layer of worldview onto its existing foundation.

It had to be said that the game's endings themselves gave him a great opportunity to add new settings.

Otherwise, he would have needed to rack his brains to unify the worldviews like he had with the previous three games.

Now that Skyhill's worldview and background setting were roughly complete, it was time to refine the game's content.

After all, no matter how well the game's backstory was told, it was still only a story.

The real core of the game lay in the player experience.

If he discarded the linear progression and turned Skyhill into a freely explorable open-world map, then main quests and side quests would be indispensable.

The main quest would remain unchanged and could directly use the original game's premise: descend the building and escape.

There were far more possibilities for side quests.

In a hundred-story Apartment Building, with no fewer than ten rooms on every floor, there would surely be plenty of unmutated survivors after the game was converted to 3D. That would make side quests much easier to design.

For that reason, Meng Shu decided to hire another quest designer to handle the development.

Finally, there was the monster design.

The original game's monster designs would remain unchanged.

On that basis, he would add some new monsters.

And Meng Shu already had ideas.

He guaranteed that players would experience thrills even more terrifying than Visage in this game.

This chapter had been written long ago, but I was not sure whether readers would like me adding an extra worldview to the original game, so I kept revising, polishing, and making it more coherent. That was why I could not publish it before midnight. In any case, I will write it out first and see how readers react.

P.S.: For certain reasons, this chapter's designation was changed to X-FBC-0XXX on August 7, 2022. If you see a designation in later chapters that does not follow this format, that means I missed one. Please leave a comment to remind me. Also, this is the third time the designations in this book have been changed. I do not know whether there will be a fourth or fifth time. In any case, we will see.