This game that was questioned for plagiarism was once the banner of Tencent’s self-research.

Tiger Sniff Note: QQ Flying Hand Tour, which was launched at the end of last year, found its own living space in the crack of the "Eat Chicken" war. The original end tour, also driven by hand tour, is recalled by more and more people. We all know that "QQ Flying Car" was very popular. The story behind this game, which is called "Tencent’s self-developed benchmark", deserves to be heard by more people.

this textTransferred from WeChat official account’s "Game Grape (ID:youxiputao)", author: Thomas’s Cranium, the original title "The exclusive story of QQ flying car research and development: the first free list and the second best seller list" How was QQ flying car hand tour born? 》。

"QQ Flying Hand Tour" may be the biggest explosion in the field of mobile games recently. One week after its launch, its DAU reached 20 million, and it also occupied the first place in the free list and the best-selling list of the App Store.

Many players cheered, saying that the speeding hand tour made them find the feeling of the year. However, some practitioners have not experienced that era. I don’t know why this "old game" that seems to have been in operation for a long time can explode so much energy after adapting the mobile game.

Next, let’s start with that history and talk about the stories you don’t know about QQ Speeding.

It takes only one year from project establishment to research and development, and the launch is an explosion.

Zheng Lei left QQ Pets at the end of 2007 and joined the QQ Flying Team. A few days after arriving at the new project team, Zheng Lei felt that the working atmosphere here was different. "The project team is very young from planning, development to art, and everyone is full of love for the game. At that time, working during the day and meeting at night, basically staying up late every day, but everyone is still full of passion. "

At that time, there were less than 10 people involved in the operation and planning of QQ Speeder.Some people, like Zheng Lei, come from other project teams of the company and have one or two years of work experience. Most of them have just graduated. This group of young people’s work area is not big, they often discuss game design together, and sometimes they have a fight, but the whole team atmosphere is still harmonious.

According to Zheng Lei’s memory, only one colleague of the whole planning team had his own car at that time. In order to better perceive the feeling of driving, everyone rubs his car around whenever they have time. There are many CDs in his car, and everyone listens to his music every time he goes for a ride.

When we discussed the design, we thought it was quite good to match some music suitable for driving in the racing game. At that time, Zhang Hanjin, the head of the operation of QQ Speeding, immediately asked the planner with a car to choose a song. So he chose a dozen pieces of music that he often listened to while driving, including his favorite "Linkin Park", and let the team buy their copyrights.

This seemingly random move has actually made one of the most famous designs of QQ Speeder. At present, there are many song lists of "QQ Speeding" music on major music platforms. "Many players hear the music of" Linkin Park ",and the first reaction is, isn’t this the music of QQ flying car?"

However, what impressed and admired Zheng Lei most was a project leader who kept a low profile, often wore a simple T-shirt or shirt, was gentle and clean, and had a lot of ideas. His name is Yao Xiaoguang, and his English name is Colin. He is the first producer of QQ Speeding.

He will personally determine the head-to-body ratio of the characters with five heads, and also ask the characters to be separated from the car to show their clothes; He will ask about the pricing derivation process of each car, analyze whether their shape and feel match, and compare them with similar products on the market, and carefully distinguish the differences between each grade of each car; He will pay attention to whether each picture is appropriate and whether there is a typo in each sentence; He also chats directly with a large number of players, and even sends screenshots suggested by players to the project team from time to time.

Of course, let Yao Xiaoguang study the most carefully, or the polishing of the core feel. Shan Hui was the main strategy of "QQ Flying Car" at that time. According to his memory, they would carefully quantify, disassemble and measure the subjective experience of driving the car in the game, such as speed, leap and drift, and standardize the process of testing and tuning.

To this end, Shan Hui led the team to intercept thousands of pictures, record hundreds of videos, deduce and fit the motion curve of each track and each car, including the on-the-spot changes of the camera with different operations, and then adjust the animation frame by frame. Finally, a unique feel different from the realistic racing game is realized-the drift inertia is not high, the front of the car can be pulled back quickly, and the feeling of landing is more flexible.

Ji Haodan, a 37-year-old player, was a user in the internal test of "QQ Speed" in 2007. He first learned about this game from the QQ pop-up. "Tencent’s advertising has always been very strong, overwhelming, as soon as the screen is opened." In order to light up the QQ icon, he downloaded QQ Flying Car, and then found that it was "quite special", which was different from some PS2 games and other end games. He added:

At that time, other games were not close to China’s national conditions. "Need for Speed" is very realistic, but drift and nitrogen are not used, but it is not fun enough; And "Go Karting" is too cartoon, with a big head, and people in their twenties are too naive to play.

The characters in "QQ Flying Car" have small heads, 3D pictures, and a little aesthetic style. The whole physical engine is well done, and the taxiing distance of heavy cars will be longer, while cars with big tires will be more stable when driving, like Renault, which is very stable and has a strong sense of collision.

Like Ji Haodan, many players entered QQ Speeding because of Tencent’s powerful online platform promotion, recognized its artistic style and feel, and then stayed.

After 14 months of research and development, "QQ Flying Car" was officially released for public beta on January 23, 2008. At that time, the team was wondering how much PCU (maximum simultaneous online number) could reach. Some people said 80,000, while others said 120,000.But in the end, the PCU reached 159,000 on the first day of the launch of QQ Speeder, and exceeded 300,000 in less than 10 days.In April of that year, DAU (the number of active users per day) quickly exceeded 4 million, and reached 5 million in half a year, which was the most popular end tour at that time.

In this process, "QQ Flying Car" has gradually formed an iterative idea of alternating small and medium-sized versions and large versions. The team will start developing the big version 2-3 versions in advance, then pull a branch, and at the same time develop the next small and medium-sized version that will be launched soon, and then pull the branch back to the trunk until the next version.

However, this joy only lasted for about a year-with the launch of QQ Hyun Dance, Dungeon and Warrior and Crossing the Fire Line, Tencent’s platform promotion resources will inevitably be diluted; At the same time, due to the internal adjustment of the team, there have been some changes in R&D personnel. At the most difficult time, there is only one system planner left in the whole project.

In various cases, many hidden dangers accumulated before the project began to attack.From April to May, 2009, the DAU of "QQ Speed" began to drop sharply, from more than 5 million to more than 3 million.

At the critical moment, Ji Zefeng, who took over the operation of QQ Speed, stood up.

Rebound and become Tencent’s first PCU 100 million self-developed game.

Ji Zefeng continued Yao Xiaoguang’s research and development method of communicating with users. He thinks that the traditional way of collecting feedback and solving problems through customer service is too inefficient, and they need to keep zero-distance communication with users.

Ji Zefeng asked all planners and operators to set up a separate group called "Speed Players" on QQ, and add users at all levels to ensure that they have at least one hour to communicate with them every day. The official forum of "QQ Speeder" has also established a "planning problem exchange area", where two planners are on duty every week to collect and reply to players’ questions.

In addition, Ji Zefeng personally led a team to a number of cities to hold offline forums for players, and conducted in-depth interviews and interactions with active users, new users, lost users and potential target users. These methods were retained and continued by the team. Up to now, every year, all the planning of "QQ Flying Car" will still go to several cities to visit and communicate with different players in batches. In the tenth anniversary year, the project team also went to ten cities to communicate and interact with players face to face.

Through these surveys, the team found that the basic experience of the game had problems at first, such as slow loading, frame dropping in a single game, broken line and crash, etc. At that time, QQ Flying Car was always introducing new content, and the iteration speed was very fast, and a version would be updated every 40 days. Because the overall developers of the development team are young and inexperienced, they have no time to optimize the system.

So Ji Zefeng thought of various ways, and invited some expert teams to jointly tackle the problem, constantly refining the problem, comparing it with benchmark products, and constantly optimizing it from the technical level. It is necessary to meet the experience standards of benchmark products, and finally solved the current basic experience problems with 2 or 3 versions.

Secondly, Ji Zefeng began to reflect on the positioning of QQ Flying Car.Being both Tencent’s "Four Great Classical Novels", its competitiveness is not as good as that of Crossing the Fire Line and its leisure is not as good as that of QQ Hyun Dance, so it is difficult to find a breakthrough opportunity from these two angles alone.After several discussions, he put forward the concept of "pan-racing eco-circle", hoping to make "QQ Speeding" a game platform integrating competitive, leisure and social play.

QQ Speeder began to add more diversified content, trying to meet the needs of different users.It added a leisure area, so that leisure players can chat and listen to music, fish and break eggs to relax, and after a few years, it gradually joined the city-state system and new gameplay; Social systems such as mentoring, motorcade and marriage are added to promote the precipitation of the relationship chain in the game; The opening dance and dance mode were added to attract female users and meet their demands of showing off; It also adds racing numerical value, shape modification system and task system, which more systematically combs the player’s goal pursuit in the game.

In terms of competition, QQ Speeder began to launch online events that can cover users of different levels, including SSC Super League, Lucky Grand Prix, qualifying, team championship and so on. In terms of offline events, in addition to the WCG competition which was well-known in the early days, they also added SSC, who is the king of cars, the national championship and other competitions.

Under the influence of a number of events, "QQ Speed" has gradually become a legendary player of its own. Ji Haodan is still obsessed with Gu Zhengwen, the car king who once set a record of 16: 0 in the offline competition from 2008 to 2012, and always ranks him first in his own mind. He feels that it is a great pity that he retired later. At that time, as soon as he appeared, you could only take the second place at most. " These legends have become the biggest talk of players in the community, and they have also become the motivation and reference objects for their map running.

Of course, in the process of optimizing the experience, adding content to the game and expanding the competition system, the team has also made great efforts for this game. "QQ Speeding" was the only project among all the game teams at that time that never delay, so overtime was naturally the norm. Planning often discusses the planning case in the company until after 12 o’clock in the evening. If it is too late, take a shower in the company and fight again. According to Zheng Lei’s words, "everyone came over and spelled it out."

In the summer vacation of 2009, QQ Flying Car did a wave of "centralized marketing", and for the first time integrated packaging marketing was carried out during holidays, and a series of activities with particularly strong feedback were launched, which brought back many lost users and made them feel the basic experience and new content after optimization, and also promoted a large number of new users through word-of-mouth communication of players. The school season after the summer vacation should have been a low point of data, but the DAU of QQ Speeding has returned to more than 5 million, and has since entered a snowballing trend.

On August 14th, 2010, at 2pm, when the players were most active, the whole QQ Flying Team was staring at the PCU data in the background. According to the memory of Luo Tao, the main program of the server"When it gradually exceeded 1 million, everyone suddenly cheered." Since then, "QQ Flying Car" has become the first product developed by Tencent with a PCU of more than 1 million.At a time when many people thought Tencent was a company that "didn’t know how to play games", the significance of this achievement was self-evident.

Liu Chi Ping, the current president of Tencent Group, and Ren Yuxin, the chief operating officer, both attended the 1 million PCU celebration banquet of QQ Speeding. That night, more than 100 people drank all the sake in the self-service Japanese food store, and many core members, including Yao Xiaoguang and Ji Zefeng, shed tears of excitement and felt deeply for the hard-won achievements.After that, QQ Speeder won Tencent’s major business breakthrough award for four consecutive years, which Ren Yuxin called "a banner of Tencent’s self-developed game".

After the PCU reached 1 million, the data of QQ Speeding has surpassed all domestic racing end-games and entered a stable development stage. Under the operating ideas of "pan-racing ecosystem" and "zero-distance communication with users", it has achieved long-term operation for 10 years.Today, its registered users have reached 470 million, PCU has exceeded 3 million and MAU has exceeded 40 million.

Research and development of mobile games: a new milestone of 20 million DAU a week

In 2014, the mobile game caught fire, and the QQ Speeder team also transferred some members to quickly develop an evasive racer tour Everyday Speeder.

Although "Everyday Ride" achieved rapid success, it was not an original racing mobile game due to the network conditions and hardware equipment at that time, which also became the team’s regret. In 2015, some mobile games featuring strong competition and real-time PvP became popular, and the flying team finally saw the opportunity. So they formed a team of four people and began to prepare for the pre-research of the flying hand tour.

You may remember Zheng Lei at the beginning of the article-now she has become the producer of "QQ Speeding" and one of the oldest employees in the team. Zheng Lei believes that the core feel is always the core competitiveness of racing games, which should be enough for users to "practice, improve and play again and again". QQ Speeder has done this, but the engine used in QQ Speeder Mobile Games is different from that used in end games, so it can’t be transplanted directly. So they used the old and effective method 10 years ago again: disassembling the drift route of the end tour frame by frame, and restoring the various operation skills of the end tour little by little. To this end, the team also found the core players of the end-game tour as feel planners to polish the special experience.

In addition, the operation mode is also the difficulty of "QQ Flying Hand Tour". More than ten kinds of operation skills of the end-of-car tour need to be completed with six fingers, and the mobile game finally overcomes this problem through the operation combination of the left and right fingers, and provides players with three mode choices at one time to meet the needs of different players.

Zheng Lei said that "QQ Speeding Mobile Games" can restore 95% of the high-level skills of end-games, but it will also do some special simplification suitable for mobile phone platforms. In the end tour, the player needs to press "Forward ↑" twice in a row to carry out "double spray", and only the master can grasp the timing of this operation. However, in mobile games, the small spray key will light up when the player can trigger it, prompting the player to go to the point and separate the big spray from the small spray.

In order to polish the core feel of mobile games, Zheng Lei first led this four-person team to develop for 2 years, during which he also did some tests in the drifting version of Everyday Flying. At the end of 2016, after ensuring the core feel experience, they selected more than 20 people from the QQ Speeding Tour Team and the Tianmei Team in Chengdu, and formally established the QQ Speeding Tour, and began to enrich other systems of the game while continuing to polish the feel.

The end tour of "QQ Flying Car" focuses on the single-player experience, and many players pay more attention to repeatedly honing their skills; In the era of mobile games, interaction and socialization are important factors that drive many people to try games. To this end, the team of the flying hand tour has made a lot of thinking and changes, such as adding the method of transmitting props in the team prop competition of the hand tour and encouraging teammates to help each other. The player in front can give the accelerator card to the backward teammate and let him catch up; The player behind can throw the angel to the player in front to keep him safe under the attack of other players.

QQ Speeding Tour has also made many changes in some peripheral systems. In the era of end-tour, the R&D team will limit the success rate of car modification, while the success rate of modification in mobile games is basically 100%. The game also encourages players to get more modified accessories through being active, so that many people can get their own modified vehicles. Zheng Lei said that this is to give players a more definite goal and reduce the potential negative reputation of the game.

In the process of research and development, QQ Speeding Tour will do a big iteration every six weeks-four weeks for research and development, two weeks for testing, and a large system may have to pull a branch separately for 6~7 weeks.But even so, "QQ Flying Tour" has experienced several postponements.

The game was originally scheduled to go online in the summer of 2017, but after a small-scale player test, the team thought that the basic experience of the game could be better, so the online time was postponed. In the test in November, some players thought that the game was too tired and easy to get bored, and there was more room for improvement in the long-term game. So Zheng Lei led the team to deepen the casual social play repeatedly and added a leisure area: players can participate in answering games, listen to live radio broadcasts and interact in the leisure area.

In the process of constantly polishing research and development, the booking volume of "QQ Speeding Mobile Games" has gone up and then up. After online booking in June, its booking volume quickly exceeded 10 million.Near the launch, the number of reservations for this game even exceeded 45 million, setting a reservation record for Tencent mobile games at that time.

Since November, the team has never taken a weekend off. One week before the game went online, Zheng Lei was "very uneasy and couldn’t sleep" every day, and other team members were also nervous and uneasy. Fortunately, in the end, the results of "QQ Flying Tour" did not live up to their expectations-DAU is more than 10 million in 24 hours, and it is more than 20 million in a week.In the crack of the "eat chicken war", this achievement is really brilliant enough.

What’s more, the launch of "QQ Speeding Tour" not only did not affect the data of end-tours, but also brought back many users who had been lost for a long time. "At the 10th anniversary ceremony of QQ Speeding, Zheng Lei said that the launch of mobile games made QQ Speeding IP rejuvenate. "We have seen this user’s strong support for this IP, and we are more confident to continue to operate this IP into the next decade."

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Now you must have understood what "QQ Speed" means to Tencent.

It has created a set of R&D methods for entering new categories, explored a set of methodology for iteration of fixed-cycle versions, tried the integration of light and heavy design ideas, introduced the operation idea of "centralized marketing" as a holiday theme, and continued to implement the thinking mode of "zero communication with users" … This is also the reason why we review the R&D process of this product on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of QQ Flying Car-from this Huangpu Military Academy, which is known as Tencent’s self-developed game.

Ten years later, Yao Xiaoguang, the first producer of "QQ Flying Car", is now the vice president of Tencent Group and the president of Tianmei Studio Group; The second producer Ji Zefeng is now the vice president of Tianmei Studio Group; Zhang Hanjin, the former operation manager, is now the president of Rubik’s Cube Studio Group; Shan Hui, the former chief planner, is now the director of Tianmei T1 Product Center (later made star products such as "Cool Run Every Day" and "King of Gone with the Times"); Qin Yalin, the former client engineer, is now the general manager of Tianmei J1 Studio (the team once developed Contra: Return) … These elites who came out of QQ Speedway are now the backbone of Tencent’s self-research.

I don’t know if they will think of the drunken and crying moment at the celebration dinner of 1 million PCU when "QQ Speeding Mobile Games" broke the industry record one after another recently.