This is a dilapidated Underground City. The earthen walls are about 500 meters long and wide, with only a crude Lord's Mansion and a simple hall.
"My territory is finally opening for business!"
Quinn stood in the hall and sighed with emotion.
He was originally a fresh graduate and a corporate slave, who inexplicably transmigrated into the game world of Dungeon Lord. After struggling for many years, he finally became a Lord and obtained his own Underground City.
This world is very special.
There are two professions: "Adventurer" and "Lord".
Adventurers are a group of 'undead' living on the surface. They are always hungry, constantly searching for various Underground Cities, forever curious, seeking excitement, and fond of courting death. They challenge the Secret Realms of the Underground Cities in pursuit of treasure, prestige, and even simple pleasure!
Lords are the creators of the Underground Cities. They can use their spiritual power to create various Secret Realms to attract Adventurers. When the latter die in the Secret Realm, they produce soul crystals, which are the core resources for building the Underground City.
The relationship between the two is close and full of gamesmanship.
The main game-play of Dungeon Lord is playing as a Lord and pitting one's wits against Adventurers, with elements of strategy, management, sandbox, and roguelike, which is very addictive.
Quinn had long since accepted the reality of his transmigration.
He was even more determined to become the greatest Dungeon Lord!
He dared to make such a grand vow, not only because he had sufficient understanding of this world, but also because he discovered that his awakened Sea of Inspiration had actually fused with various popular games, anime, and movies from his previous life.
From it, he could draw unique and rich materials.
This was undoubtedly the strongest Lord talent!
Adventurers are very similar to the player groups of his previous life. While challenging Secret Realms might have utilitarian factors, they are also attracted by interesting Secret Realms. Even without sufficient material rewards, as long as it is fun, they will rush forward one after another, never tiring of it!
If creating a Secret Realm is compared to creating a game.
The level of this world is undoubtedly rotten to the extreme!
99% of Secret Realm are essentially mazes, with nothing more than differences in theme, elements, and structure.
Why is this?
Creating a Secret Realm is not easy!
First, one must awaken the Sea of Inspiration to condense an Inspiration Crystal.
And the "Inspiration Crystal" is the material pack for creating Secret Realms, which contains monsters, scenes, props, and so on.
The number of materials a Lord can obtain is generally scarce and monotonous. Only a very few talented Lords have the ability to awaken unique special materials, but even they are limited by quantity and find it difficult to create rich game content.
Quinn is different.
His Sea of Inspiration is unique.
His materials are ten thousand times richer than an ordinary Lord's!
He can not only completely replicate and manifest the most classic and fun games from his previous life, but also fuse and innovate elements from different games to create more creative, crazier, and more localized content!
He has the confidence to bring the most interesting and fun Secret Realms to this world!
For Adventurers and other Lords, this will be a dimensional reduction strike!
Quinn activated the Underground City core, and a control panel appeared before his eyes, with two options: [Information Management] and [Territory Management]. He checked his personal information first.
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[Name]: Quinn
[Rank]: First Rank
[Spiritual Power]: 5 / 1000
[Soul Crystal]: 0
[Inspiration Crystal]: Left 4 Dead
[Current Secret Realm]: None
[Territory Capacity]: 0 / 100
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Quinn spent nearly twenty years of accumulated spiritual power to awaken the first Inspiration Crystal from the Sea of Inspiration.
It was Left 4 Dead, the doomsday zombie-themed game that was once popular across the country in his previous life!
Back then, it was the favorite of countless college students in dorms and internet cafes!
When the crystal was activated, the materials appeared.
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[Monster Materials]: Common Zombie, Boomer, Hunter, Charger, Tank Zombie, Witch Zombie...
[Venue Materials]: Urban Block Material Pack, Forest Valley Material Pack, Park, Station, Subway, Airport, Port...
[Prop Materials]: Cold Weapon Material Pack, Hot Weapon Material Pack...
[Character Materials]: ...
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This Inspiration Crystal encompassed all the content of the first and second generations of the Left 4 Dead series.
He could replicate the entire game 1:1 without any changes.
The zombie-themed shooting game, which was ubiquitous in his previous life, had a unique worldview and monster elements that were unprecedented here, and would definitely generate huge attraction for Adventurers and stimulate their desire to explore!
Every Adventurer who experienced it would definitely think it was a genius inspiration and production!
However, Quinn would not 100% replicate the original work.
When a Dungeon Lord creates a Secret Realm, whether it is deploying monster materials, setting up scene venues, or manufacturing special props, it consumes spiritual power.
Current monster material consumption is:
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[Common Zombie]: 0
[Hunter]: 3
[Boomer]: 3
[Charger]: 5
[Tank]: 20
[Witch]: 20
[...]
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Secret Realm materials can only be used to create Secret Realms.
Quinn only had a mere 5 points of spiritual power left, so he could not create too many special zombies for the time being. However, it was not a big problem; after all, Secret Realms can be continuously improved, adjusted, and added to.
First, create a basic framework.
The scene for this Secret Realm will use "Urban Block", with a total area of about 100 square kilometers, equivalent to a small to medium-sized city, which just happens to consume 5 points of spiritual power.
Deployment of common zombies have no spiritual power required, no quantity limit.
He threw in hundreds of thousands to directly fill the scene and every nook and cranny.
Some of the zombies roam in fixed areas, while others refresh randomly based on time.
Quinn added infection threats on top of the settings. Even if just bitten by a zombie or scratched a little, it would cause continuous damage, to increase the difficulty and realism of the game.
To save resources, he adopted a single-player survival mode in the early stages.
Anyone who has played this game knows, this game often requires teammates to save each other, and the single-player difficulty is very high, especially in realism mode.
Adventurers entering the game only have the physique of ordinary people, so the difficulty of survival is conceivable. He didn't have to worry about not being able to harvest leeks!
In addition, as a designer, one must have one's own creativity. The material library provided by Left 4 Dead has huge development potential. In the future, he can build plot modes, team modes, battle modes, etc., around shooting and biochemical game-play.
Why would a Dungeon Lord painstakingly create Secret Realms for Adventurers to play?
Is it because he loves Adventurers?
Of course not!
The only purpose for any Dungeon Lord to create a Secret Realm is to harvest players, and how to sustainably fish in a drained pond is a major subject.
The game cannot be too simple!
These old foxes of Adventurers will stop coming once they get bored!
Unless tempting clearance rewards are set, but the generation of rewards will consume the Lord's resources, and many Underground Cities have gone bankrupt because of this.
The game cannot be too difficult or too boring!
Adventurers are not fools. A Secret Realm game that is maliciously difficult with no hope of clearing, clearly designed just for harvesting, will at most fool a wave of Adventurers, and then it will ruin the reputation of the Underground City, which is not worth the loss.
This Secret Realm design is very hellish and extremely difficult.
But with a unique worldview, unique monsters, and fresh game-play, why worry about not being able to attract Adventurers to become batches of leeks, rushing forward one after another, willing to come over to be harvested?
After being busy for three days, he finally finished!
Although the Secret Realm is based on Left 4 Dead it can already be considered a remade original game.
Considering that new game-play like team, plot, CS, survival, etc., will be developed in the future, it is naturally not suitable to use the original name, so he named this Secret Realm Doomsday Frenzy!
The first Secret Realm game was successfully created!
"Hehehe, everything is ready!"
Quinn rubbed his hands, full of anticipation. "Let me first bring a little shock of the zombie frenzy to the innocent Adventurers!"
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I've had this story as en epub on my pc for a while and have been meaning to fix it up. I don't remember the raw name so don't ask, you can probably google the story info and find it.
The OG translation doesn't have any nationalism to edit out, however this is a 'game' novel. Meaning there are lots of technical words that get mistranslated all. the. time. It was annoying to read through when I did over a year or so ago. Words like goblin, dwarf, and gnome being constantly swapped around.
Also lots of erroneous capitalization errors. Like it always capitalized Zombie. Did my best to catch them all when fixing it up though I left ones that made sense like special zombies from L4D like the Tank and Witch.
I'm rereading it while fixing it up so I shouldn't miss much. Leave a comment if you see something and I may get to it.