73: Chapter 73 The Advance of Singularity Technology

The midsummer in Jiangcheng was always sweltering, but the office area of Singularity Technology was even more "boiling" than the outdoors.

After a month of working day and night, the beta version of "star path: reboot" finally entered the final sprint stage before launch.

Wang Chengsi stood in the testing area, clutching his laptop with a furrowed brow. In front of him sat two girls in plaid shirts, holding test reports filled with dense notes.

"Xiao Lin, are you sure this loading lag bug is caused by a memory leak?" Wang Chengsi pointed at the error log on the screen, his voice tinged with urgency.

These two girls were testers he had specially recruited, Xiao Lin and Xiao Su. They had been the core QA team for Blue Whale Games' "Cangqiong" before its launch, and their ability to find bugs was notoriously "tricky" in the industry.

"It definitely is." Xiao Lin pushed up her glasses and opened the background monitoring data. "Look here, when switching nebula scenes, the texture resources aren't released in time. It triggers a memory leak after three accumulations. Average players might think it's a network issue, but hardcore players will notice it as soon as they test it. If we don't fix it before launch, we'll definitely be called a 'half-baked product'."

Xiao Su added, "There's also a hidden issue—the dialogue logic for the NPC 'Starship Commander' has a flaw. After the player chooses 'Decline Mission', the subsequent side quest gets stuck. We tested it five times, and it happened every time. We need to have the programming team fix the branching logic."

Wang Chengsi immediately synced the issues with Zhang Fan and the development team.

Zhang Fan stared at the code, his fingertips tapping rapidly on the keyboard. Half an hour later, he finally pulled up the problematic module: "Found it! It seems an extra 'Mission Complete' condition was written into the side quest trigger. Deleting it now should solve it."

This testing battle lasted for three days, and the originally scheduled launch date was pushed back by five days, but no one had any complaints.

Xiao Lin and Xiao Su not only found the two fatal bugs of loading lag and dialogue freezing but also optimized over a dozen detailed issues, such as the sensitivity of spaceship controls and the response speed of AI NPCs, completely avoiding the embarrassment of "launching only to crash."

"Thanks to you two, otherwise this game would have been doomed." Zhang Fan specially ordered milk tea for the testing team. Looking at the fixed game screen, his eyes were full of relief. "Once it officially launches, I'll give you double the bonus!"

With the technical risks resolved, promotion matters were put on the agenda.

Zhang Fan sat at his desk, his finger scrolling through his contact list for a long time before finally stopping on the name "Brother Cannon"—this big shot who dominated the livestreaming world was a benefactor he met during his lowest point in life, and also the "Big Brother" he trusted most.

The story of how they met was quite a coincidence.

Back then, when Zhang Fan had just obtained the system, he encountered the multi-million follower influencer Brother Cannon livestreaming a challenge to see how much money he could win from 10,000 yuan worth of scratch-off lottery tickets. It just so happened that the winning ticket indicated by the system was among the tickets Brother Cannon had purchased. With Brother Cannon failing to scratch a winning ticket for a long time, Zhang Fan bought the other tickets and ended up winning 50,000 yuan.

The livestream chat exploded, with the screen flooded with "The Lucky One has arrived." Brother Cannon was both surprised and delighted, dragging him out for a meal. After a few rounds of drinks, Zhang Fan couldn't help but talk about his situation: his girlfriend betrayed him, his boss at Blue Whale stole his credit, and he lost his job.

During later drinking sessions, Zhang Fan mentioned his desire to set up a personal studio, and Brother Cannon immediately slapped the table: "If you want to make a game, do it! When the time comes, I'll help you promote it!"

Zhang Fan hadn't contacted Brother Cannon recently, but he remembered this favor.

Brother Cannon's words from back then still rang in his ears: "The reason I'm helping you isn't out of pity. It's to tell you, don't be a coward. Who hasn't fallen into a pit? Just get back up and keep working."

Now that "star path: reboot" was about to launch, the first person Zhang Fan thought of was this Big Brother.

He dialed Brother Cannon's number. As soon as he explained his purpose, a hearty laugh came from the other end: "Zhang Fan? You finally reached out to me! I must support the game you made! I'll handle contacting the streamers, don't worry about the costs, I guarantee you'll be satisfied!"

Less than half an hour after hanging up, Brother Cannon sent a WeChat message—a list containing 23 top-tier gaming streamers, covering multiple categories like sci-fi, single-player, and casual. These were all the ones Blue Whale wanted to hire but couldn't during their promotion of "Cangqiong".

What surprised Zhang Fan even more was the cost: a total of 500,000, averaging just over 20,000 per streamer.

You have to know, back when Blue Whale promoted "Cangqiong", hiring 20 top streamers cost 5 million. Although Allen and Wei Xiang might have pocketed some money when contacting these streamers, Brother Cannon's own commercial appearance fee was over a million, yet he gave Singularity such a huge discount.

With the promotional resources in place, the game's own hard strength was even more impressive.

The space exploration theme led by Liu Ruyan combined the original intent of "star path" with modern sci-fi aesthetics—players could pilot customized spaceships to travel through different galaxies, with each planet having unique terrain and atmosphere;

The AI technology provided by Liwen Group made NPCs no longer "repeaters"; they could adjust their tone of dialogue based on player choices and even remember player preferences.

On the day the beta version launched, 23 streamers started broadcasting simultaneously. The swirling nebulae and roaring spaceships on screen instantly captured the audience's attention.

"This starry sky is too realistic!"

"The NPC can even remember my preferences? It's much better than the AI from some big companies!"

The chat was full of praise, and many "Cangqiong" players were even more excited: "Finally waited for a proper interstellar war game! 'Cangqiong' flopped right from the start, this is what I wanted!"

In the first hour of launch, the test server was crowded with players, and the server had to be expanded at one point;

Three days later, the TapTap rating stabilized at 9.2, and it shot straight to second place on the TapTap hot list, second only to a national-level mobile game.

Zhou Yurou wasn't idle; leveraging the game's popularity, she intensively engaged with several investment institutions.

In the conference room, she opened the player data for "star path: reboot" and the demo video of the "YuFan AI" toolkit, speaking with confidence: "Currently, the beta version retention rate is 78%, and players have a strong willingness to pay. Our independently developed 'YuFan AI' can automatically generate videos from game scenes and assist players in interacting with NPCs. It can be applied to more game categories in the future; this is our core technical barrier."

The investors watched the smooth AI-generated videos on the screen—when a player talked to an NPC at the Mars base, the AI automatically captured key segments, added subtitles and background music, and allowed sharing to social platforms with one click. They nodded one after another: "This AI tool has great potential; it can not only increase player stickiness but also lower the threshold for UGC creation. The market space is huge."

A week later, the "YuFan AI" toolkit was officially launched. The "Yu" in the name was taken from Zhou Yurou, and "Fan" from Zhang Fan; it was the result of the two of them leading the team through countless sleepless nights.

After the toolkit was embedded into "star path: reboot", player-created game videos flooded Bilibili and TikTok. The topic #star path Reboot Space Diary# quickly hit the trending list, bringing another wave of new traffic to the game.