What is the experience of treating hobbies as work? "Actually, if you can treat your hobbies as work, I think it is a lucky thing. You can devote yourself to doing what you like when you work."
As the first prize winner of the final of the second HarmonyOS Developer Innovation Competition, Zhang Xuqian, he used HarmonyOS component cards to develop a visual novel creation tool with higher degrees of freedom - XstoryMaker. He said: "I usually like to play reasoning games. I want to design scripts by myself through an APP to make the characters feel more subtle. This is a cool thing!" At present, after XstoryMaker was launched on the Huawei application market, it has been widely praised by users, with a download volume of over 80,000 and a rating of up to 4.7 points.
(XstoryMaker founder Zhang Xuqian)
"Wild Programmer " evolution
Many people may be a little unfamiliar with the name Zhang Xuqian, but when it comes to his nickname "Jiu Gongzi", many netizens are more familiar with it. Zhang Xuqian usually likes to share some videos on B station to show netizens the process and experience of software development.
program development has always been rooted in his life. When he was in junior high school, he began to try to develop some web pages. Since then, he chose to become a free developer, freely learn development knowledge, and freely decide on the development direction. During this period, he accumulated rich experience in program development and, through self-study, he gradually "evolved" himself into a HarmonyOS application developer.
After participating in the competition, he became associated with HarmonyOS
In 2019, Zhang Xuqian, who has always had a keen insight into cutting-edge technologies, became very interested when he first came into contact with and learned about HarmonyOS. In 2000, he signed up for the Huawei Developer Public Beta and applied for the qualification of Huawei Developer after participating in the competition. At the end of last year, the lightweight video novel creation tool he designed - XstoryMaker - was launched. During the second HarmonyOS Developer Innovation Competition, he used HarmonyOS capabilities to add functions such as service cards, Xbone 2D skeleton animations to the application. Among them, Xbone 2D skeleton animation is mainly to solve the problem of character movement in 2D graphic game animation production, so that animated characters can freely deform and move.
(XstoryMaker application interface)
"In terms of technical support, Huawei experts gave me great help. For example, the XstoryMaker service card that was launched at the beginning was opaque, and many friends wanted a transparent style. In the developer exchange group, Huawei document maintenance experts not only helped provide relevant information, but also continued to inspire me technically." During this period, Huawei provided him with a very high-quality learning and communication platform, and the opportunity to collide and communicate with more technical experts; and on the HarmonyOS developer website, he had the opportunity to come into contact with some leading technologies to realize some optimization ideas in software development.
"During the development of XstoryMaker, through HarmonyOS distributed capabilities, multi-terminal interconnection can be achieved, and the development cycle can be saved at least one month, which has helped me a lot." Zhang Xuqian said that before HarmonyOS, JS could only develop web pages and simple applications. After HarmonyOS empowerment, developers can develop mobile applications through the same language and technical capabilities, and can also call the hardware-related capabilities of the mobile phone itself and data processing capabilities.
"small and beautiful" application, in the future,
The current XstoryMaker version allows users to complete simple scene animation script production on their mobile phones. Through the built-in 2D skeleton animation engine, they can quickly create game animations, and support exporting animations to JSON format, which is convenient for running and re-creation on more platforms.
"There is a lot of room for creation of games such as script killing and escape room in the future. But there is currently a lack of a fully functional creation tool, and through a fixed game program, the player's gaming experience can be greatly increased."
For the future development of this APP, Zhang Xuqian hopes to add more character dialogues in the next version of XstoryMaker, and the scene and plot setting functions to make creators easier to use and create satisfactory scripts.If possible, he will also use HarmonyOS capabilities to solve multiplayer online problems and apply them to games such as escape room, so as to set up more game scenes and plot events through the interconnection between Internet of Things devices and mobile phones.
"Games are the most extreme test of development." Zhang Xuqian hopes that with the rapid update of open source HarmonyOS, it will provide better technical support for developers, continue to their own "road of freedom", make such "small and beautiful" applications, use dreams as "codes" and create new social possibilities in their own way.
