Originally, 2048 was supposed to follow Piano Tiles as the next big hit, but its downloads had just passed 80 million and were growing slowly, almost reaching their limit.
Classical Poetry Crossword had been pulled from its spot as an extracurricular learning app for elementary students for various reasons. Its download growth had slowed too, but even so, it was still creeping close to 300 million.
Turns out, even without official support, parents would rather let their kids read poetry on their phones than watch random videos.
Unfortunately, after hitting the fifth milestone, there were no more milestone rewards left. Since downloads alone didn't bring in more money, William was thinking of moving all the current games onto WeChat mini programs, hoping to earn some more reputation points through active user milestones.
As for Jump Jump, since it was one of the very first WeChat games, it couldn't be released in any other app stores. In one word—it was exclusive.
So, the answer was clear.
[Life Restart Simulator has passed 100 million downloads! Milestone unlocked!]
[Milestone Reward: The Sims Developer's Handbook (Full Version)]
The full handbook included everything from The Sims 1 to 4, including mods—basically, you could recreate the entire game and its engine just by copy-pasting.
Sure, the first game's engine and graphics were outdated, but the fourth game was still very solid. Even so, Earth Games didn't have the tech yet to fully recreate something like Sims 4. And William wasn't planning to go overboard all at once either.
"One hundred million!!!"
Cynthia was thrilled. This was William's win, but also a big success for the whole team. It proved again that she'd made the right choice joining them.
Others would hear the news a little later—but not by much. Something this big was bound to get picked up by the media and hit the trending charts.
Life Restart Simulator suddenly became a hit during the Chinese New Year holidays. There were many reasons, but the biggest one had to do with a skit from the Spring Festival Gala.
The sketch told the story of a young man from a small city who went to a big city to chase his dream. Of course, in the end, things didn't work out. Dreams aren't that easy. But when he returned home, he found a new goal in life and treated his past struggles as valuable life experience—and ended up living happily.
People started talking about whether giving up on a dream was ever the right thing to do. Many believed that if it's truly your dream, then it's worth chasing—even if it takes your whole life.
Naturally, that led people to share their own dreams and regrets. The topic quickly shifted to the idea of "starting over if you could."
If you could go back to the beginning, would you do things better?
Life doesn't have a restart button, but games do.
That's why Life Restart Simulator saw a huge wave of players. Not only did it cross 100 million downloads that day, but its total number of active users also passed 2 billion, and online active users went over 1 billion. That unlocked a new growth milestone and earned 30 reputation points.
With two days left before the holiday break ended, William planned to finish Happy Match Mania during that time.
The game was pretty much done—only the last two big level sets still needed designing.
Originally, he planned to use an AI algorithm to generate levels. But after trying it out, he realized learning AI would take him more time than just designing the levels himself. So in the end, he used AI to make minor changes for regular levels, while personally creating the big boss stages.
Because of that, he cut the original 1,000-level plan down to 100 levels. He'd design 10 levels himself, then let the AI handle the rest with difficulty adjustments between stages.
But what really drained William's brain cells was the character designs for Honor of Kings. He had to stay true to historical figures while also making them fun and interesting. That meant reading a ton of books to find a good balance.
It wasn't so much difficult as it was exhausting. Since they planned to reveal 20 characters early on, William focused on the most famous people—ones even kids would know just by asking.
Ying Zheng, Jing Ke, Li Bai, Zhang Fei… they were all on his list.
There were lots of famous generals in history, but scholars were the real core. And it's not easy to make scholarly characters both smart and good in battle. Turning calligraphy and painting into combat skills took a lot of creativity—and care not to distort their image.
More importantly, he couldn't just copy the Earth version of Honor of Kings. Changing a character's backstory also affected their visual design and fighting style.
This whole process was so painful it made William almost regret choosing to make the game.
Three more days passed in a blur. Today, everyone was coming back to work.
Because so much time had gone into Honor of Kings, Happy Match Mania was only officially finished that very morning.
That's right—William hadn't slept well for days. He just wanted to make sure the team wouldn't show up with nothing to do.
"You look totally wiped out."
Cynthia sipped her milk. She'd flown back last night and clearly had a great break. She looked full of energy—complete opposite of William.
"Pulled a few all-nighters," William yawned. Even with his personal workspace, both his mind and body were completely exhausted.
"You're such a workaholic." Cynthia pulled her shoulders in like she was spooked.
She didn't really think much of it though. After spending the past few days around William, she had a good idea of what kind of person he was.
"Making games is a fun job in itself."
That was true. Most game developers worked crazy long hours—often more than ten hours a day—with no weekends off. Their schedule usually followed the game's progress. The only real break they got was after finishing a game. Then once the next project started, it was back to the grind.
If they only cared about salary, developers would have more options. But it's because they love what they do that they're willing to stick with it and give it their all.
That's also why, when William hires people, the first thing he looks at is their attitude toward games.
If you don't like games and just want a paycheck, then this job's not for you.
When he arrived at the studio, Marcus was—as always—the first one there. Clearly, he had a great Chinese New Year. He looked refreshed and full of energy.
Not long after, Leon, Claire, and Tina showed up one after another. Chris had already said he'd come later in the afternoon due to personal stuff. Even so, it didn't stop everyone from getting to know each other, and they officially created their team chat group.
William scheduled the first team meeting for the end of the workday. For now, he just assigned them tasks based on their roles.
Leon's job was to create the concept art for the characters in Honor of Kings, based on the backstories he'd written over the past few days. Tina would then take that concept art and turn it into 3D models.
Since drawing concept art takes time—at least three days per character—William also gave Tina another project that had been sitting on the shelf: Happy Mahjong.
Tina would model all the mahjong tiles. It wasn't really her specialty, but it wasn't hard either—just a good way for her to get more practice.
Claire's tasks were way easier in comparison—she just needed to learn. William assigned her to continuously study and understand what each role in the team does. She also had to learn how to use Unity. After all, a good producer needs to understand how games are made. They don't have to be top-level developers, but they do need to know how to use the tools.
Unity is pretty easy to pick up. With three to five days of after-work study, anyone can learn how to use it. The studio had teaching materials straight from the system that covered all the key points.
As for Chris's task, William gave him the full source code and engine of The Sims 1, along with all the related resources. His job was to rebuild the engine and learn every feature of it inside and out.
After assigning everyone their tasks, William finally had time to focus on developing Journey of the Wind. Meanwhile, Cynthia was working on recruiting a new team member—an animator. Once they had one, development speed would pick up a lot.
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