Chapter 62: Casual Team and Tetris 2
Chapter 62: Casual Team and Tetris 2
When exports continued instead of ending as a one-time deal, Panchi Games practically entered a festive mood. However, Ras’s feelings were a little complicated. After all, those two games were copied games that could not really be called his own creations.
Still, that did not mean he felt no joy at all. In the case of Tetris, it was a game from Earth that he had enjoyed long ago, and the fact that it also worked in this world and became popular gave him a strange sense of pleasure. Besides, it had passed through Ras’s hands one way or another.
Because of that, Ras began thinking that he wanted to recreate other arcade games he knew in this world as well.
However, the development team currently operating still wanted to make games with his own color in them. So Ras began considering creating one more development team.
It was not an idea that had only just occurred to him. Ever since Arcade Game Land began operating successfully, he had considered an arcade-game-specialized development team in order to keep that popularity going and continue giving people enjoyment.
Of course, there was no reason to exclude the PC market, so he planned to keep developing games for PC and porting them afterward.
Ras turned on the computer and began writing recruitment documents. Normally, he would ask Ella to do it, but she was currently in the kitchen of Ras’s room, saying she would cook for him using the dishes she had recently learned, so there was no helping it.
They had gone out together earlier and bought a lot of ingredients from a grocery store, so he was half worried and half expectant about what kind of dish would come out. The first dish she had made for him before was, though he did not want to say it, food waste.
This time, I should hire experienced people, right?
The development team Ras directly commanded did not matter much, but for this arcade development team, Ras would only handle the planning while the development had to proceed on its own. That meant he needed people who at least roughly knew how development was carried out.
In the past, it would have been difficult to find such people. But Ras trusted the value of his own name.
He had released consecutive works that could be called huge hits, succeeded in exporting games overseas, and was the chairman of Arcade Game Land, which was thriving nationwide. If there were no capable people, then there was nothing he could do, but if there were, they would not be able to ignore the company name Meta Soft.
“It’s done!”
“Mm. Just a second.”
After confidently writing the recruitment advertisement, Ras soon had to eat the food Ella made. Fortunately, something edible came out this time. Unfortunately, it did not taste good.
The new development team’s office was set to use one of the vacant rooms on the second floor of the Meta Soft office space. He also had Ella make a nameplate that read “Casual Game Development Team.”
He could have entrusted it to a sign company or a woodworking shop, but she made it herself. Ras thought about saying something, but decided to leave it alone as long as it was not too crude. As a result, the Casual Game Development Team’s nameplate ended up with a handmade quality that was obvious when viewed up close.
Still, her craftsmanship seemed far better than her cooking skills.
Three days after posting the advertisement, Ras began receiving a large number of applications. It was just as expected. No, there were more than expected. Since he had specified that he was hiring experienced workers, he thought there would only be around five or six final applicants despite his name value, but over the fifteen-day recruitment period, no fewer than twenty-two applications arrived.
Ras once again realized the value of his own name.
He sat on the sofa and reviewed them one by one, first removing everyone who did not meet the application requirements. Some had graduated from decent universities, but that only spoke to their potential, not their actual ability, so it meant nothing to Ras right now.
Then he removed applicants whose experience was unrelated to games. They might be skilled at programming, but that would not do if they did not know how to make games.
“Ella. For the people here, contact their previous workplaces and find out what their reputation was like and why they quit.”
“Mm. Leave it to me!”
Ras split the remaining sixteen documents in half and handed one half to Ella, then took the rest of the applications and began contacting their previous workplaces.
After removing those with bad reputations, those whose abilities were not mentioned, and others who gave him a bad feeling, six people remained. Among the rejected applicants, a man named Dekil had apparently borrowed a lot of money from his previous workplace and then run away, so it would have been a disaster if Ras had not checked.
After thinking for a moment, Ras decided to hire all the remaining people. Ras had developed games with only a small number of people so far, but looking back afterward, he felt he should have had more staff. It seemed he had been covering too much through passion alone.
Having at least three people coding felt reasonably stable. And Ras did not necessarily intend to run only one casual team. There were many games he wanted to make.
Of course, he still intended to conduct one final interview. There was still a chance that a land mine he had not filtered out remained.
Ras then hired a graphics team and a sound team as well. For these, he did not specifically require experience and accepted applicants from relevant majors.
“Whew...”
After looking through applications for a long time, Ras pushed them aside and leaned back against the sofa. He was starting to feel lazy. Hiring development team members was something he had personally done before, and he had thought there were not that many people, so he had started it himself. But now he felt he understood why companies had separate HR departments.
However, for the time being, he could not dump this work on Arcade Game Land’s management team. So he decided to finish things up to this point first, then create separate departments in Meta Soft to handle management and HR.
This was not only because hiring people was difficult right now. Even now, he could visibly see the company growing larger and larger, and if Ras handled all of these matters himself, he would soon hit his limit.
In any case, Ras worked hard under the thought that this would be the end of it, and soon managed to organize the development team and establish the HR Management Team as well.
Because of that, Meta Soft’s vacation ended before he knew it. If he had not at least gone to Ranchelt with Ella, it would have been a truly empty vacation. No, even with that, it still felt somewhat empty.
“We’ve arrived.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Ras rode to work with Ella in the car driven by Mr. Radmi. It definitely felt more convenient than taking a taxi in many ways. A cellphone would have made things easier, but since such a thing did not exist, Mr. Radmi either had to wait downstairs with the car or come up to the office.
Ras simply left it up to him.
“Good morning.”
“Ah, everyone came early.”
When he climbed the stairs and arrived in front of the office, five or six people were already gathered in a small group. The existing team and the newly recruited casual team were mixed together.
Ras received their greetings and first opened the door.
Then, after all the employees arrived, Ras gathered the existing team and the new team and had them greet one another.
“You’ll be making different games, but there may be times when you cooperate, and you’ll be working in the same office anyway, so at least learn each other’s faces.”
He did not go so far as to tell them to memorize everyone’s names, but they at least needed to exchange nods so things would not be awkward.
“Ella. Make employee IDs for everyone.”
“Mm. No, yes!”
Now that there were more people, Diska and the other employees guarding the front entrance might get confused, so he planned to have everyone wear employee IDs around their necks. Since this was a company that made games, every piece of data was valuable, so there was a need to pay some attention to security.
No, I should just establish a security team altogether.
Thinking about it, Meta Soft was no longer just a small office. On the second floor alone, there were already two development teams, and there were several businesses on the third floor as well. So he decided to establish a proper professional security team to block outsiders from entering and maintain security.
Ras had Ella write the recruitment advertisement, while he took out the plan he had prepared toward the end of vacation and handed it to the development team.
“The team that has been making games with me until now will be Development Team 1. Anyway, Development Team 1, for now, think about ideas for what you’ll make next. I’ll go talk to the new people first.”
“Yes.”
Then he entered the casual team’s development room inside, and everyone’s gazes immediately gathered on him, as though they had already been waiting. Well, it was their first day at work, so of course they had no choice but to be nervous.
Ras went to the conference table and picked up a piece of chalk.
He had already decided what they would make. Ras wrote the words “Tetris 2” on the chalkboard with a clicking sound.
“Ah...”
At that, exclamations mixed with admiration came from the casual team members behind him.
The games currently extremely popular in the Brunyard Federation, and which had once again become a hot topic in the Republic of Smite thanks to that popularity, were Pac-Man and Tetris. Of course, these games had strong and deep game quality, so their popularity would not fade quickly. But when a fire was burning well, more firewood needed to be added.
And the more popular something was, the more its image was consumed and the more fatigue increased, so a sequel was also necessary in that regard.
There was no particularly special reason why he chose Tetris among them. Tetris was simply the game he had made first, and a decent work suitable as its sequel happened to come to mind.
Naturally, there was no original work called Tetris 2. It was one of the many Tetris-like games that existed on Earth, and it remained the most vivid in Ras’s memory.
It was “Puyo Puyo.”
“Tetris 2 has several differences from the original. First, the falling blocks themselves are different.”
Ras drew several Tetris blocks, then drew the simple block shape of Puyo Puyo.
“They’re much smaller and simpler. It’s just two blocks attached together. And the rule for breaking these blocks is different too. In Tetris 2, the same blocks only react when connected vertically or horizontally, and when four or more are connected, only those connected blocks break.”
Then he erased the connected blocks with an eraser and used drawings to explain that the remaining blocks would fall downward.
“And this falling gives the player a chance to connect blocks again, even without stacking other blocks. That can lead to deleting more blocks, and we’ll call this a chain reaction.”
After explaining that far, Ras looked around at the employees and asked:
“Is there anything difficult to understand? Even if not, feel free to ask questions or give opinions.”
Naturally, since they had only just joined the company, no one stepped forward immediately, and everyone quietly watched one another. Ras knew this was a natural reaction, so he was not particularly disappointed and was about to continue explaining when one of them raised his hand sharply.
“Ah. Yes. Please speak.”
He was a very thin man who looked to be in his mid-thirties, and Ras remembered his name was probably Dure.
Actually, since the casual team had only just arrived and had as many as seventeen members, Ras could not remember all their names. But this man had good experience and was currently serving as the temporary team leader, so Ras remembered him.
“I don’t know if it’s all right to say this, but it seems too simple. Of course, simplicity isn’t necessarily bad, but I feel like people may get tired of it too easily.”
Ras thought the way Dure spoke up as the representative was fitting for a team leader, but the opinion itself was bolder than expected. However, rather than feeling offended, Ras was pleased. If they only said yes to everything, it would be difficult to produce a proper work.
Only by having doubts and presenting opinions could problems be corrected and improved.
“Yes. It does have a somewhat simple side. But there’s a reason I intended it that way.”
In fact, as Ras remembered it, Puyo Puyo had not been a success from the very beginning either. The first game had really been made with exactly the parts Ras had described so far, and the response to it had only been so-so.