I’ve recently partnered with Gezi from Guangzhou to create Lingering Shadow. We’ve already released a demo for the game and plan to launch it on Steam. It’s a small puzzle-horror title with a distinctive art style, a compact gem that’s exquisitely crafted. I’m utterly drawn to its story—and as a father who dotes on his daughter, it only took one read to convince me to jump on board this collaboration.
Over the past few years, I’ve partnered with five different studios and collaborators in total: Adam from Australia, Jesse from Canada, Holdem from Latvia, Zhixuan from Beijing, and Mingzheng from Guangzhou. I love working with people from diverse cultures and backgrounds, and it’s also something I’m quite good at. In the process, I’ve taught myself the ins and outs of 2D/3D production, narrative design, dialogue writing, combat system creation, technical art, as well as voice acting and soundtrack composition. I’ve also learned the full production pipeline and underlying logic of the game industry from these different collaborators. For more than two decades, I’ve spent most of my time immersed in top-tier internet projects, growing accustomed to the mindset and iterative creative rhythm of the software and internet industries. But after working on so many game projects, I’ve come to realize that the production pipelines of the game and film industries have their own unique characteristics.
On one hand, both games and films are creativity-driven industries. Unlike the internet industry’s rapid, quick-win iteration and trial-and-error approach, they require an extremely exploratory creative process. On the other hand, much like the software industry, the more upfront investment is poured into the design phase of the production pipeline, the lower the time and monetary costs in the later stages—making cost control and profit maximization far easier to achieve. Waterfall-style development is highly unsuitable for game creation. Before any development resources are committed, we should flesh out the game’s core gameplay and framework in meticulous detail in drafts or on kanban boards as early and comprehensively as possible. At this stage, the actual art production should be delayed for as long as possible, with programming work scheduled in the middle phase. This approach is particularly logical for content and visual-focused games, and it aligns closely with the film industry: a screenplay can take years to polish, yet a great director will leave cinematography to the very end and complete it in the most efficient and streamlined way possible.
For this little game of ours, we’ve just released a closed beta version for a small group of fans to playtest. It’s received an average rating of over 8/10, with feedback noting a moderate difficulty level—and players have all expressed their love for the art style and characters. I consider this an excellent start. There were very few issues raised in the feedback, and we addressed and refined all of them within the same week.