Chapter 19

“Well... I only focused on drawing, so I’m not very knowledgeable about history...”

Pana awkwardly scratched her cheek while laughing nervously.

Despite her oversized glasses, it seemed she was not exactly a model student.

Reading history books was not particularly boring work.

Of course, they did not feel quite like novels.

Still, there were enough interesting stories that Ras could remain reasonably immersed.

Then, while sitting on the sofa flipping through pages, he managed to discover a fairly suitable setting within a single day.

According to the history books, it was a period near the Renaissance referred to as the False Peace.

Before this era, the various races had constantly fought and tangled against one another.

Then, due to multiple circumstances aligning, a temporary stalemate emerged.

However, the wars had not stopped because people genuinely desired peace.

They merely stopped fighting openly.

Behind the scenes, every nation still searched desperately for ways to damage one another.

One especially common tactic involved disguising perfectly legitimate navies as pirates or outright bribing pirate groups to raid enemy nations.

As a result, trade shrank dramatically, causing imported goods to skyrocket in price.

The profits became so enormous that many people jumped into trade hoping to strike it rich.

But conducting trade while fighting through pirates who were essentially regular military forces proved incredibly dangerous.

Naturally, vast numbers of people died.

Of course, the merchants did not simply accept it helplessly.

They strengthened their own military forces or hired other maritime powers as mercenaries.

It was an era where the seas themselves became battlefields.

During this chaotic period, there had apparently also been a man named Beolbeok who seized control of an archipelago in the southeastern Kozfont Sea and proclaimed himself the King of the Sea.

For nearly thirty years, he dominated the surrounding waters with influence almost equal to that of a true maritime monarch.

However, after his death, his successor failed to balance political interests as skillfully as Beolbeok himself had.

As a result, both the Dwarf nation of the Kingdom of Brandia and the Human nation of the Chin Empire turned against him.

Their allied fleet ultimately destroyed his naval forces, bringing his reign to ruin.

Ras thought that with some adaptation, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠this era could become an excellent game setting.

...Maybe I should build the systems first.

But once he tried rereading the history books properly to understand the period in detail, he quickly realized there was far too much information.

Countries, historical figures, place names...

The experience felt completely different from casually skimming through it.

So Ras gave up trying to memorize everything for now and instead decided he would simply reference the books later while working.

For the moment, he focused on designing the game systems first.

He decided to begin with the combat system.

Since the setting revolved around endless struggles at sea, he intended to place greater emphasis on combat than games like Uncharted Waters.

And honestly, combat was simply the part he wanted to work on first.

The coolest option would naturally have been real-time battles.

But with the coding methods Ras currently understood, making something like that function on existing systems was impossible.

Until some genius appeared and invented truly revolutionary code, RTS-style gameplay seemed unrealistic.

Still, using a combat style identical to Land of Adventure also felt inappropriate.

So instead, he chose an SRPG-style combat system.

He could not remember exactly how battles worked in Uncharted Waters or Pirates!, but Ras began thinking through the factors influencing naval warfare and implemented them one by one.

Basically, ships could fire cannons once enemies entered range, while moving close enough enabled close-quarters boarding combat.

Attack range was determined by several variables.

The performance of the mounted cannons, the Gunnery stat of the artillery officer, wind direction, and wind speed.

For additional detail, he also introduced turning and firing-angle systems.

Since ships could not easily change direction, turning required spending movement points through a dedicated maneuver command.

Turning costs varied according to a ship’s Turning Ability stat.

And Turning Ability itself depended on ship performance and the navigator’s Steering skill.

The plan was for the minimum turning angle of forty-five degrees to consume between one and three movement points.

Firing angle referred literally to the angle at which cannons could fire.

This depended on both ship performance and cannon type.

If the firing angle ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠exceeded ninety degrees, then instead of rotating the ship completely sideways through a ninety-degree turn, players could rotate only forty-five degrees and still fire.

He also implemented accuracy rates.

These too were determined by various factors.

Ras added a ship capture system as well.

This could be triggered either if the enemy surrendered or after winning a boarding battle.

To support this, he introduced a Morale system.

After all, it would be unrealistic for crews to continue fighting until every sailor died.

And even if the player seized the ship afterward, there would be no surviving crew left to operate it.

Morale would decrease whenever ships took cannon damage or when one side suffered disadvantages during boarding combat.

Implementing this combat system proved quite difficult.

The individual systems themselves were challenging enough, but the biggest problem was designing enemy behavior patterns.

True artificial intelligence was impossible, but enemies that behaved too stupidly would make combat boring.

Balancing difficulty became a constant headache.

Still, after somehow managing to make everything function and running tests, the results felt surprisingly convincing.

The graphics were still rough.

At this stage they were not even proper prototypes.

Most visuals consisted either of crude placeholder ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠drawings by Ras or several sailing ship images Pana painstakingly created after studying reference materials.

Still, because cannon fire effects and hit-or-miss impact effects had already been implemented, the feeling of naval warfare definitely came through.

But battles between evenly matched opponents are too easy.

When enemies were powerful, combat required genuine strategy and felt enjoyable.

But once combat strength became roughly equal, the difficulty dropped sharply.

He would need to think carefully about how to maintain tension in the late game.

In any case, with the combat system roughly complete, Ras moved on to creating the sailing system.

And for that, he first needed to build the world itself.

Wind direction and wind speed affected sailing velocity.

But simply randomizing them would feel unrealistic while also making the game excessively difficult.

So Ras decided to research actual seasonal winds and regional wind patterns before implementing them.

Which meant returning to data collection again.

Without internet access in this world, researching anything required digging through books manually, which was genuinely exhausting.

“Ms. Pana, I already told you what kind of game we’re making, right?”

“Yes.”

“I’m thinking of building the world now, so could you make terrain tiles? I want players to really feel like they’re drifting across endless oceans, so keep that in mind.”

Unlike before, Ras did not provide especially detailed instructions.

Pana waited briefly for clarification before realizing what he meant.

He wanted her to handle it herself.

The responsibility felt somewhat burdensome, but at the same time, it also motivated her because it felt like Ras trusted her artistic sense.

Some time later, she returned with ocean tiles and several kinds of land terrain tiles.

Even while assigning the task, Ras had worried slightly that she might produce artwork too high-quality for the system resources to handle.

Fortunately, whether from learning enough while developing Land of Adventure or secretly studying computers on her own, she created exactly the right balance.

The ocean tiles used blue backgrounds with carefully placed white lines, creating the impression of waves.

And when multiple tiles connected together, they produced the feeling of rolling ocean swells.

Yet the design still used only two colors, meaning it posed no problem resource-wise.

As for land tiles, they used green backgrounds with several simplified trees drawn almost like symbols, along with mysterious yellow patterns.

There was not just a single terrain tile either.

Pana created multiple variations depending on coastline shapes, each with slightly different tree placements and patterns.

“If you arrange them like this, it feels as natural as possible.”

Pana showed him several connected terrain examples while explaining.

As she said, the results looked good.

Of course, the repetitive nature was not entirely invisible, but unless someone intentionally focused on it, it was not noticeable enough to matter.

“That looks good. But with only sea and land, it feels a little empty. Please make a few ocean features too, like reefs or coral islands, things we can occasionally place as landmarks.”

Then, after staring thoughtfully at the terrain images for a while longer, Ras called Pana over again.

“Oh, and the world still feels too lifeless. I’m planning to add animation effects, so please make several types of drifting clouds and also sprite animations for waves and swells appearing and disappearing.”

“Clouds and waves, right? Okay.”

Pana immediately pictured the designs in her mind while answering.

The images themselves were not difficult, and she had already become accustomed to simplifying things for use in games, so she finished quickly and showed them to Ras.

“Hmm. One moment.”

Ras inserted the images into code he had prepared beforehand and tested the animations over the terrain graphics.

For the clouds, there was no actual wind direction or wind speed implemented yet, so he simply used temporary coordinate-based movement.

Still, even like this, they worked perfectly well.

“Please make the clouds a little smaller. They look nice, but the ships are going to be around this size, and if the clouds cover them completely it’ll feel cramped. Also, the wave and swell sprites seem to blend awkwardly into the ocean pattern.”

He was right.

Individually, the ocean and wave graphics both looked fine, but together they felt unnatural.

After thinking briefly, Pana concluded the wave patterns themselves probably needed adjustment.

“I’ll fix them.”

“Please do.”

After confirming the corrected versions later, Ras asked her to continue creating other terrain types.

Cities, villages, deserts, tropical regions, tundras, glaciers, mountain ranges...

He wanted every environment that could make players genuinely feel as though they were adventuring through a vast world.

Once those were completed, he bought a huge sheet of paper from a nearby stationery store.

Now it was time to create the world map.

First, he drew grid lines across it like a giant chessboard made of squares, then asked Pana to sketch the rough outline of the world map.

“It doesn’t need to be extremely detailed. The general shapes are enough.”

He said this because she seemed to be overthinking the precision too much.

No one would care about tiny distortions or perfectly accurate terrain shapes in a game.

And even if such meticulous people existed, players would only see areas near their ships anyway, making detailed analysis difficult.

More importantly, recreating an entire world at this scale using 8-bit computer graphics meant sacrificing precision was unavoidable.

Spending excessive time and effort on it would simply be wasteful.

After hearing Ras’s explanation, Pana relaxed and began drawing more comfortably.

“Boss, is this about right?”

Ras compared Pana’s sketch to a world map he had previously purchased from a bookstore.

Although he had lived in this world for quite a while now, he still lacked intuitive understanding of its geography because he had never received formal education here.

That made him extra cautious while examining things.

Someone more knowledgeable might have focused only on historically important regions.

But Ras lacked that familiarity, meaning he could not casually overlook anything.

“You drew it well. Now please mark the important terrain regions inside. You don’t need to actually draw them, just roughly indicate the areas ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and write what type of terrain belongs there. And there’s no need to fill everything in — just up to around this distance from the coast.”

Then Ras counted the numbered grid sections and assigned identification values to each one while beginning to create the world coding structure.

That part was not particularly difficult.

Numbering itself was repetitive work, so he simply wrote code that generated everything automatically.

And systems like scrolling and collision detection could simply reuse code from Land of Adventure.

The real problem was filling the terrain data into the map itself.

According to the grid numbering, he needed to manually place the terrain patterns one by one.

It was incredibly tedious labor.

Still, sighing would not solve anything.

Ras carefully folded up the completed world map Pana had drawn, then began filling in the world data tile by tile.