Interview with Zhang Xinlei, community manager of Surround the Nervous Cat: The secret to the success of HTML5 games

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On July 22, 2014, a game called Surround the Nervous Cat became popular in WeChat Moments, and HTML5 games entered people's vision again. The development time of Surround the Nervous Cat was one day and a half, with one artist and one programmer. Since its launch 48 hours ago, the PV of Surround the Nervous Cat has reached 10.26 million and the IP has reached 2.41 million. With the continuous upgrading of mobile phone configuration, more and more heavy RPG games have become the darlings of various game companies. But what is the secret of the success of Surround the Nervous Cat? 51CTO exclusively interviewed Zhang Xinlei, the community manager of Beijing Egret Times Information Technology Co., Ltd., where Surround the Nervous Cat is located, to share everything about Nervous Cat.

5 1CTO: First, let me introduce the development engine of "Surround the Nervous Cat", Egret Runtime.

Zhang Xinlei: Egret Runtime is an accelerator component released by Egret that is dedicated to improving the speed and stability of HTML5 games, which can greatly enhance the HTML5 game experience. However, we are not only providing engine products now. We provide a lot of related support in the development workflow, such as visualization tools and some programming plug-ins.

51CTO: It took only two people one and a half days to make "Surround the Nervous Cat", but it was a huge success. What's the reason?

Zhang Xinlei: To be honest, the popularity of Surround the Nervous Cat was beyond our expectations. But later our team also analyzed it. I think there are two reasons.

***Steve Jobs promoted HTML5 technology when iPhone was first released, but FaceTime later expressed disappointment with it. It can be said that HTML5 technology has always been overrated. It was not until 2011 that many smartphones were equipped with built-in GPU acceleration that HTML5 technology began to develop. Currently, iOS 8 and Android 4.4 have fully supported HTML5, which is why the game Surround the Nervous Cat was born.

Secondly, the game mode and graphics style of Surround the Nervous Cat are in line with the gaming habits of the post-90s generation, and each sentence will not exceed 1 minute. This is also one of the reasons for the success of Surround the Nervous Cat.

In fact, Surround the Nervous Cat is just a project we are testing. I believe that two years from now, HTML5 mode games will not only be light games like Surround the Nervous Cat, but also medium-level card games and heavy-duty RPG games.

51CTO: You mentioned that the model of HTML5 games will be like medium-to-medium development in two years. So what are the requirements for mobile phones?

Zhang Xinlei: RPG games are indeed heavy games on mobile phones, including their path-finding algorithms and graphics rendering. To solve this problem, we developed a product called Egret run time, which is an acceleration plug-in for heavy games. We also cooperated with Tencent's X5 browsing service and implanted the Egret run time product in their kernel. Use the browser with the Egret run time plug-in X5 kernel to play web games made with HTML5. Then all games will be executed by native performance, accelerating HTML5 games. In the screen, our graphics and images are rendered using the underlying Native. In terms of network connection, we also connect to the system-level network interface.

51CTO: So in terms of traffic, do users need to worry about too much traffic?

Zhang Xinlei: In terms of traffic, first of all, 3G and 4G are rapidly becoming popular, which is good news. However, the usage of 3G and 4G is relatively complicated. We have optimized the technology to address this situation. We compress the size of a game to 200K after packaging, so that users will use less traffic when using it, and the loading speed will be very fast. Then we add a method of loading at any time in the game, so that players feel that the game is very smooth. At the same time, using Egret run time will cache game resources locally, so that there will be no problem of secondary loading when opening it again. These two aspects are issues that developers and users are concerned about, and they are also issues that our team is concerned about.

51CTO: What will the market landscape be like for HTML5 games and heavy mobile games like Native in the future?

Zhang Xinlei: I think there will be two extreme situations in the future. First, HTML5 tends to be more fragmented. For example, each game of Nervous Cat or Step on White Blocks will not exceed one minute. You can play it on the way home from get off work. This is the characteristic of HTML5. In addition, there are reports abroad that HTML5 games will occupy 40% of the mobile game market and will reach a profit of 60 billion US dollars in the future. For heavy games such as mobile native, the online time can often reach 3 to 4 hours or even longer every day. So the player users will be further differentiated.

It is worth looking forward to whether HTML5 games will occupy the 60 billion market share as claimed. However, with the update of hardware and the maturity of technology, I believe that more and more "neural cats" will appear.