Worldview Remake

Given Skyhill's small scale, the game wasn't priced too high in the system store.

It only cost 40,000 Fear Points.

So, having made up his mind, Meng Shu immediately purchased it.

Instantly, with the clatter of gold coins, his Fear Points became 5,158,000.

Then came the system's mechanical prompt.

[You have obtained the 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 briefly, and after two seconds, he fully absorbed the development tutorials the system had poured into him.

A PPT also appeared on his computer desktop—it was the concept design for Skyhill.

Since he was choosing to remake the game, the development tutorial wasn't very useful.

The document in front of him was the main thing.

Meng Shu moved the mouse, double-clicked to open the document, and browsed through it carefully.

Then he realized that a lot of things inside hadn't been implemented in the game.

For example, the types of monsters—besides the few already in the game, there were additional ones like the Scissor Monster, Wall-Crawling Monster, Slime Monster, and so on.

But none of these had been put into the game, so it was likely a funding issue.

Just like Alice: Madness Returns, which cut many creatively excellent monsters and replaced them with the common little white heads and black sludge.

Still, Skyhill, as a small-scale 2D game, already had seven or eight types of monsters, which was enough. Since it was a survival game, it was understandable that the development team downplayed combat and monsters.

Beyond that, the PPT also included concept design drawings of the apartment building.

Long corridors, hallways, the staircase, guest rooms—all from various angles, plus close-up details.

From the original design drafts, each floor had four hallways and was set up with twenty rooms.

Each room had various supplies to scavenge, unlike the current version where each floor only had two rooms with pitifully few resources.

It seemed the game developer might have intended to make a 3D game, but due to various reasons, it ended up as the 2D game it was now.

Although it saved costs, it also abandoned a lot of design—truly a shame.

After quickly browsing through the PPT, Meng Shu began planning his next steps.

He created a new page at the end of the PPT and typed in the ideas he'd already had in his mind.

Since he was going to remake a 2D game into 3D and VR-ize it, major changes were inevitable.

First was the scene design of the apartment building.

Concept design drafts were always just concept design drafts—they weren't usable as references.

The best approach for this issue was to draw from real-life material.

So, after thinking it over, he decided to go out, check into a few of Shencheng's most famous hotel buildings, and photograph their interior structures and decor to give Xia Nianzhen a reference.

For this, he'd have to explain it clearly to Xia Nianzhen at the meeting and then take her along to stay in the hotels.

After all, she was the scene designer, so it was best for her to gather material on-site.

Next was the world-building and backstory.

The original Skyhill game had four endings, each one surprising.

The first ending: the protagonist fought tooth and nail, enduring countless hardships to reach the first floor. When he opened the door, he found the rooftop outside. Realizing he'd wasted a huge amount of time on a futile effort, he had a mental breakdown and jumped to his death.

The second ending: the protagonist made it to the first floor, opened the door, and found everything normal outside, surrounded by a crowd of police. The monsters he'd killed behind him had somehow turned into the hotel front desk. Moreover, all the monsters he'd slain had become human corpses. In this state of mental confusion, the protagonist became a murderer and died under police gunfire.

The third ending: through solving puzzles, he discovered he was lying in a hospital bed, with two researchers in front of him. Upon seeing him wake up, they said, "Data collection complete. The test subject can be executed."

So in the game, only the fourth ending was the perfect one.

Specifically, the protagonist successfully reached the underground garage, killed the giant monster entrenched there, and arrived in another building.

Here, as a conscious entity, he found that he himself was a test subject lying on a bed for research?

In disbelief, he touched his real body, finally woke up, returned to reality, and after a series of crises, escaped to freedom, running toward the sunset.

These four endings gave Meng Shu a lot of room for modification.

To easily incorporate elements of the Control Bureau, he designed a brand-new world-building while preserving Skyhill's backstory.

First, the protagonist was a D-Class Personnel living in the FBC's base.

As a human consumable, one day he was used for an experiment by an FBC doctor.

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

So, the protagonist was secretly given sleeping pills, and while unconscious, he was strapped to an operating table.

Then the Z-FBC-0825 anomaly was placed on him, and the experiment began.

After that came the game's own backstory.

Under the hallucinogenic influence of the anomalous Z-FBC-0825, the unconscious protagonist found himself in the world of his mind, entering the Apartment Building at Skyhill and taking up residence on the 100th floor.

From there, he witnessed the bioweapon attack and the mutation of the building's tenants.

Then came the game's flow: the player controlled the protagonist as he made his way through the building, step by step in terror, until he reached the 1st floor.

But here, Meng Shu made another modification.

As long as the protagonist exited the 1st floor, either of the first two endings would trigger—the rooftop jump ending or the police execution ending.

This meant the protagonist ultimately succumbed to the anomalous Z-FBC-0825, dying in the world of his mind, and consequently suffering brain death in the real world.

However, when players deciphered the documents collected throughout the building, they could unlock a third ending: returning to reality.

At that point, players would see a cutscene.

It depicted the protagonist breaking free from the control of the anomalous Z-FBC-0825 through sheer willpower and waking up, only to be summarily executed by security personnel as he prepared to escape.

All three endings left the protagonist dead without a clear explanation.

Thus, the fourth ending was designed to let the player and the protagonist uncover the truth together.

Players needed to eliminate the monster in the underground garage, then, as a consciousness entity, arrive in reality to discover that everything was merely an experiment—his desperate struggle for survival nothing but an illusion, data collected by those white-robed researchers.

Therefore, players had to control the protagonist to touch his real-world body, breaking free from the anomalous Z-FBC-0825 and waking up.

Then, Meng Shu would arrange a cutscene here.

The protagonist remained motionless, pretending to still be unconscious, then seized the opportunity to escape the lab.

On his way past the W-FBC-0173 control room, he was discovered by Control Bureau security and executed on the spot.

Then, the commotion caused by the gunfire drew the attention of the D-Class Personnel in the W-FBC-0173 control room, leading to...

In short, Meng Shu's intention was to leave the game's original background story untouched, simply layering an additional worldview on top of it.

Admittedly, the game's original endings gave him ample opportunity to add new settings.

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

Now, with the worldview and background setting of "Skyhill" largely complete, the next step was to polish the game's content.

After all, no matter how well the background story was told, it was still just a story.

The real meat of the content lay in the gameplay experience.

Abandoning the linear progression and turning "Skyhill" into a free-roaming open-world format meant main quests and side quests were essential.

The main quest remained unchanged, directly adopting the original game's premise: simply escaping downstairs.

The side quests, however, offered plenty of variety.

With a 100-story building, each floor having at least ten rooms, once the game was rendered in 3D, there would certainly be plenty of unmutated survivors. So crafting side quests became much easier.

To that end, Meng Shu decided to hire another quest designer to complete the development.

Finally, there was the monster design.

The original game's monster designs were kept as they were.

On this foundation, new monsters would be added.

And Meng Shu already had ideas.

He guaranteed that in this game, players would experience thrills more terrifying than those in "Visage."

This chapter was written long ago, but I wasn't sure if readers would like adding an extra worldview to the original game, so I kept revising, polishing, and rationalizing it, which prevented me from publishing before 12 o'clock. Anyway, I'll write it first and see how it's received.

P.S.: Due to certain reasons, this chapter's designation has been changed to X-FBC-0XXX as of August 7, 2022. If you see designations in later chapters that don't match this format, it means they were overlooked, and I hope you can leave a comment to remind me. Also, this is the third time the designations have been changed in this book. I don't know if there will be a fourth or fifth time—anyway, we'll see.