Chapter 188: A 200 Percent Game
“Yeah, we should get off work too.”
Ras looked at the design document he had made for a moment, then nodded. It felt somewhat interrupted, but finishing it in one day was impossible anyway.
Moreover, because he had been overflowing with motivation and created a pile of unfamiliar systems, he needed to clean up the design properly. Of course, no matter what he did, overworking the Development Team was already guaranteed, but if he simply threw them a vague concept like this and told them to make it on their own, they might only suffer without producing results.
Before rising from his seat, Ras moved the design document on his computer to Spirit Space. This was still a world without anything like web hard drives, but since he was the owner of Spirit Space, he could use it in this way.
But it was not exactly private misuse. After all, this plan was also part of company work, and the design document itself qualified as a confidential document permitted for server storage under the company rules.
“What should we do for dinner? Should we eat out?”
After gathering part of the design document he had written on paper and standing up, hunger belatedly swept over him. Ras turned to Ella and asked.
“Not today. We still have a lot of ingredients we bought.”
Ras nodded at Ella’s firm answer. In truth, he remembered the ingredients in the refrigerator too, which was why he had asked.
Ella, who had gone through a hard past, and Ras, despite now having a lot of money, still felt resistance toward carelessly throwing away food. And now Ella’s cooking skills had improved considerably, so eating at home was fully satisfying too.
They now lived in a mansion, and since they had hired many caretakers anyway, Ras had initially considered hiring someone to cook separately. But his hobby was looking for good restaurants, and he was also busy, so he thought they would eat out often and gave up on it.
Besides, Ella liked cooking for Ras, so it was not as if the mansion’s kitchen was being completely neglected.
“You must be really busy today?”
After returning home, Ras washed up and immediately sat back down in front of the computer. After some time passed, Ella’s voice reached him. When he turned around, steaming dishes had been placed on the table beside him.
“Ah. Sorry. I’m planning a new game.”
Ras scratched the back of his head with an apologetic expression, then stood up. It smelled good. There was a meat dish topped with cheese, plain white bread usually eaten with sauce or soup, and a salad with a simple dressing.
The two of them were still young, almost too young, so they were meat-eaters, but they were worried about health and gaining weight, so they tried to eat at least a minimum amount of vegetables.
The two naturally sat at the table in the room and began eating.
When Ras had lived alone, his eating habits had consisted of sitting on the sofa while eating, or eating whatever while coding at the computer. Ella, who had spent a long time living on the streets, also had little experience using something like a dining table. Because of that, even though the two lived in a proper-looking mansion, they were far removed from dining etiquette and common sense.
At first after moving in, they had enjoyed the mood of eating at the long, splendid dining table the contractor had prepared, but going to the dining room every time was troublesome, and they wanted to watch TV while eating, so it was now mostly neglected.
“So what kind of game is it? The one you’re making this time.”
“Ahh. That?”
After eating enough to fill her stomach to some extent, Ella asked what she had been curious about. By now, she could be called something of a gamer girl herself. And as far as she knew, Ras was the world’s greatest game developer, yet he had been so absorbed in planning that he forgot the passage of time. There was no way she would not be curious.
Ras was also pleased that she, his girlfriend and the person closest to him in this world, showed interest in his work. His expression immediately brightened, and he began telling her about this plan.
“Wow...”
At first, she found it extremely interesting. It was a virtual world, but unlike previous games, it was not fixed in form. Instead, the player could become an individual capable of doing anything in a world that changed with the passage of time. Anyone who liked role-playing games could not help being tempted by that.
But as Ras’s explanation continued, she began tilting her head slightly, and her expression turned complicated. Then she seemed to hesitate for a moment before finally raising one hand slightly and speaking.
“But isn’t that too complicated?”
Ella had not joined Ras and become his secretary because she had deliberately aimed for it or wanted it. But she was not lazy, and perhaps because she was still young, she had a great deal of curiosity and motivation, so she tried many different things.
Among them were things related to game development. Since Ras was a game developer and she had somehow become a gamer girl herself, this might have been a natural flow.
So she had tried drawing and learned coding as well. Ella found them somewhat interesting. But she had not developed enough resolve to make them her profession, so now she had half-given up. Even so, she had at least learned that game development was not easy.
She knew that implementing even something that looked very simple required a workload that could be described as blood and sweat.
“Huh? Well. It is a little like that.”
Ras was slightly flustered by her reaction, which was a little different from what he expected. But soon, he straightened his expression and began saying something that sounded almost like an excuse. No, it was not exactly only an excuse.
“But systems like marriage and bloodline sound grand when explained, but they aren’t that hard to implement. It’s not like they need any amazing graphics.”
To put it extremely, it was only adding a few status values. The bloodline was the same. Once a spouse tag was attached, a character with a child tag would be generated according to given conditions. Then, as time passed in the game and they reached marriageable age, a spouse of the same or a similar race would be randomly generated and attached to them, and the process of generating children would repeat, with that information simply stored as data.
And that data would be loaded when the character died to generate a new character, so even if made as code, it would probably not take more than a few pages. Moreover, very little of it would be expressed through graphics, so it would not take much capacity either.
At most, they would be placed as characters in the city or village where the protagonist’s family existed. Since they would only be placed there and would not have much interaction anyway, it was effectively just attaching names.
“The system for turning enemies into companions isn’t particularly difficult or time-consuming to make either. No, if we reuse Spirit Stone’s code, we don’t even have to make it from scratch.”
“Ah...”
Spirit Stone also required the target to be near death before capture was possible, and it was a probability-based system. Instead of throwing a Poké Ball, they could make the player capture the target, or use another action or item.
Ah! Come to think of it, adding capture items or capture magic would be good too.
A new idea came to Ras again, so he asked Ella for a moment, went to the computer, entered it into the design document, then returned.
If powerful monsters or special characters could only be captured through items like that, this would be another form of fun. Or perhaps an item that ignored probability and always captured the target.
Diablo’s Soulstone or Superman’s Kryptonite would be fun too.
If he inserted settings from Earth that only Ras knew, people here would likely feel they were quite fresh.
“Really? Then that’s a relief.”
Ella nodded after listening to Ras. Even if she knew a little, in the end, her knowledge was shallow and only touched the surface, while Ras was an expert and the best person in this field. She thought he was probably right.
But there was no way such words would work on the experts who actually had to make this game.
After refining the design document for several days, Ras called Casual Team 1 and introduced it to them.
Casual Team 1 had already finished their vacation and returned long ago, but since there had been no talk of a new project, they had merely been on standby. So when they heard about a new work, they felt regretful, but at the same time, relieved and glad.
However, as Ras continued speaking, the atmosphere darkened.
No, some people did not immediately notice the production difficulty of this game and were simply overwhelmed and impressed by the grand plan. Even among developers, there were people who were only well-versed in their own specialty and practically ignorant of other fields.
In the case of the Scenario Team, some even thought there would not be much for them to do because it was a game without a story.
“I don’t know about the others, but this World Event System seems like it’s on the level of making an entire strategy game by itself...”
However, Dure, the team leader, raised his hand with a stunned expression and carefully pointed this out.
“Well... that’s true.”
Ras wondered whether he should make an excuse, but since they were both experts and he realized it would not work anyway, he simply admitted it cleanly.
This system, which Ras had named World Event, did not simply make characters appear. Since it formed forces and made the forces in the world interact with one another, the work was expected to rival Civilization and War, which they had made before.
Of course, since they were not making a full strategy game, most of it would not involve tactical battles where units moved and fought like the battles the actual player experienced. Instead, they would quantify each force’s overall strength, put it into a simplified formula, and apply the resulting outcome.
But even then, that was not much of an excuse, because other strategy games were the same. In strategy games, when AI forces fought each other in parts not expressed through graphics, simple logs such as which general or character used what skill only gave room to imagine that an actual battle took place. In the end, they only showed the result that one force won and took that land.
No, in Civilization and War, which Ras himself had made, even the player did not get a tactical screen, and the process was omitted, so there was even less to say.
Only then did the rest of the team grasp the situation, and the atmosphere darkened rapidly.
If one system alone takes as much work as making a strategy game, then including the basic role-playing part, the workload is at least enough to make two games, isn’t it?
Ras and Dure did not say this directly, but most of them immediately reached this calculation. It was a horrifying thought. Of course, Meta Soft’s development environment was better than that of other developers, but if the workload doubled, that meant nothing.
Several of them were already remembering acquaintances who had gotten jobs at other software companies and complained about feeling like they were dying, and their faces turned pale. Just imagining having to pound on keyboards for days without sleep like them was terrifying.
Ras read the atmosphere and immediately began handling it.
“Ah. You don’t have to worry too much. I’m not planning to make this with the same manpower and time as before. I know the workload is heavy too.”
After refining the plan and designing the logic, he had gotten a rough estimate. Even if it would not really take as much as making two full games, it seemed the workload would approach around 80 percent of that. This was based on the role-playing games and strategy games Ras had developed before.
Ras thought about how to solve this problem. First, as he had said, he was not going to simply dump everything on them.
It was not exactly because he wanted to be a good boss to his employees, but because that would be stupid. If simply pushing forward made everything possible, the word impossible would not exist. Even if they accomplished it by grinding down the employees, that itself would be a problem.
Human resources were ultimately resources that could be consumed too. If people were ground down like that, their health, motivation, mentality, and everything else would inevitably decline.
Half-clever idiots might say they could simply kick out the people who were worn down and hire new ones, but if they drove out people who had accumulated experience and knowledge and brought in new hires, the team’s own capabilities would plummet.
Footnotes
Translator’s Notes
Poké Ball — Capture device from Pokémon, the Japanese media franchise created by Satoshi Tajiri and first released by Nintendo/Game Freak in 1996; used to catch and store Pokémon.
Diablo — Action role-playing game series by Blizzard Entertainment, first released in 1997; its lore includes Soulstones used to contain powerful demonic beings.
Soulstone — Fictional magical artifact from Diablo used to bind or imprison demons and their souls.
Superman — DC Comics superhero created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, first appearing in 1938.
Kryptonite — Fictional mineral from Superman stories, introduced in 1943 radio episodes and later comics, best known as Superman’s major weakness.