Chapter 14
Chapter 14
Insu already guessed what his father thought by observing his expression and reaction. Still, he asked just to confirm, and Seongcheol nodded before raising a thumbs-up with an emotional expression.
“Yes!”
Seongcheol simply could not believe it. He genuinely could not believe that this tiny child, a child who pumped his fist around excitedly like any other kid, had created such a masterpiece.
But honestly, the game’s true value revealed itself more the longer it was played, and the portion Seongcheol experienced would not have been moving enough to this degree by twenty-first-century standards.
However, Seongcheol was a man of the 1980s, so he could only judge it by the standards of this era.
In any case, Insu was delighted by his reaction.
Of course, he had to account for the fact that family members would naturally look upon it more favorably, but Seongcheol’s response still mattered. He was someone interested in games while also being distant from game development itself. For Insu, that was an extremely difficult sample group to find right now, making his opinion highly valuable.
And since Seongcheol was enjoying it this much, it became much easier to ask him to continue testing.
His father was already extremely busy, so he could probably only play after coming home late from work or during precious weekends. If it felt like he was being forced to do it, Insu would have felt guilty.
But this feels like the right timing.
Seeing how strongly his father was impressed by the game, Insu remembered something he had been considering for a while.
“Um... Dad.”
“Hm? What is it?”
Seongcheol was reluctantly getting up from the computer, but he still looked completely overwhelmed by emotion. Thanks to that, Insu spoke with a little more confidence.
“When this game gets released later... could you help me with it?”
Seongcheol was not slow-witted. The moment he heard it, he immediately understood what Insu meant. Before this, he thought of the game as practice work his son was making for experience, so he had not deeply considered this issue. But with this level of quality, not releasing it would be stranger.
It’d practically be a crime not to show something like this to the world.
But this child was only five years old, so there was no way he could sell a game by himself.
I’ll have to handle it for him. But it feels a little strange to sell my son’s game under my own name. Should I establish a separate corporation?
Seongcheol decided he needed to think about it more. Of course, helping sell the game was already decided. What he needed to consider was simply the method.
“Of course I’ll help.”
“Ah! Thank you!”
Afterward, they also asked Mom to test the game for the time being. But it only confirmed once again that no matter how well-made a game was, it meant little to someone who simply had no interest in games.
On top of that, RPGs tended to have relatively complicated systems and rules players had to learn, creating a higher barrier to entry.
“But the art is pretty, and the music is nice.”
Mom patted Insu’s head proudly. Insu decided to be satisfied simply knowing she did not view games negatively.
The next tester was Eunha noona. It was not that he assigned priorities to the order. It was simply because the prototype was finished in the evening, and his father happened not to have overtime that day.
“Wow!”
Eunha exclaimed in admiration upon seeing the title screen featuring artwork she herself drew. But this reaction felt less like admiration for the game itself and more like emotion from seeing her own work appear inside a game.
Still, compared to someone who originally had no interest in games, she showed remarkable immersion. Well, perhaps by now she did have some interest. Whether that extended to actually playing games was another matter.
“Huh? How did you say I do this again?”
“You just click the character with the mouse there. You know what the pointer is, right?”
“Y-Yeah.”
Since she knew little about games, she fumbled around at first. But because she was still young, she learned quickly and soon started adventuring skillfully.
...Looks like it’s actually enjoyable.
And that continued for two whole hours. The fact that someone completely new to this kind of game became this absorbed was an extremely positive sign.
“It’s kind of difficult, but it’s fun.”
The reason she stopped before playing as long as Dad did was not because she got bored, but because she got stuck progressing due to unfamiliarity. After dying and reloading in one dungeon around three times, she irritably pulled her hand away from the mouse.
“Really? It’s really fun?”
“Yeah. Really.”
Her opinion was just as important as Dad’s. She represented first-time players, light users, and people unfamiliar with RPGs.
Attracting new audiences was incredibly important.
As a hardcore gamer himself, the kinds of games Insu wanted to create naturally leaned toward more hardcore experiences. But he was not aiming to remain an amateur developer. He intended to become a professional.
And on top of that, since he harbored ambitions of conquering the world with MMORPGs, he wanted games enjoyed by as many people as possible, not games made only for a small niche.
To accomplish that, it was not enough for the game to become fun only after spending a long time with it. It needed to provide enjoyment immediately from the very beginning.
That was why he focused heavily on graphics and sound that would instantly grab attention, while also trying to make the systems as simple and intuitive as possible.
And it seemed to have worked to some extent.
But regardless of how fun the game was, bugs were unavoidable.
“Huh? Why’s this happening?”
“What?”
Looking over, he saw that the attack range was not appearing even when she clicked Attack. And it was not just that. There were all sorts of bizarre bugs: damage suddenly becoming absurdly high, random teleportation, and characters recovering health instead of losing it when hit.
He could identify the causes of some immediately, but others left him completely clueless, forcing him to write them down and agonize over them for a long time.
Wow. Even though I made all of this myself, it’s still this bad.
Once he eventually hired employees and started developing with multiple people, it felt like debugging would consume an unbelievable amount of time.
Afterward, Insu fixed some issues simply by estimating the causes in his head, but for the ones he could not identify that way, he had no choice but to follow proper debugging procedures exactly as he learned.
He suffered through recreating situations, nearly destroyed his eyes analyzing logs, and had to insert multiple breakpoints while concentrating hard enough to wrinkle his brow just to observe variables changing.
Then he would trace where the issue was being called from all the way to the end, only to discover that the actual problem was often something absurdly trivial, like forgetting a period or adding a single extra space, leaving him feeling utterly defeated.
Fortunately, memories from his previous life of hearing that this kind of thing was completely normal helped steady his emotions.
At first, when making the prototype, he worried not only about the time spent creating it but also about development halting during the testing phase. But once testing actually began, the endless flood of bugs left him completely overwhelmed just trying to fix them.
If I hadn’t done this, it really would’ve been a disaster.
He suddenly remembered Korean games from his previous life that were nearly unplayable because they were riddled with bugs. Looking at things now, it seemed less like those developers lacked ability and more like they simply failed to catch the bugs.
Whether they were crushed by deadlines or simply underestimated bug fixing, he did not know.
“But is it really okay to just keep playing games like this?”
After spending the last several months working at a relentless pace, Eunha noona apparently felt uneasy after spending several days doing nothing but playing the game. She suddenly looked over at Insu, who was sitting beside her organizing bugs into a notebook and mentally tracing their causes.
“This is absolutely necessary. And since I’m the developer, I naturally only play the way I intended people to play. Plus, I already know everything, so it’s not very fun for me. It’s a relief that you’re doing this, noona.”
If possible, he wanted to recruit even more testers. But there simply was no way.
At the very least, if he had friends, maybe things would have been different, but Insu had already quit kindergarten. And even if he had kindergarten friends, there was still the question of whether six-year-olds could properly understand and enjoy an RPG, or whether they could keep the project secret.
I really miss the internet.
If this were the twenty-first century, he could publicly recruit testers online while simultaneously proving himself as the game’s developer, making leaks manageable. But now, even that was impossible.
And because only two people were developing the game, there were barely any witnesses or evidence, making things even more troublesome.
Though honestly, since it’s a 386 game, there probably aren’t many people who could even run it anyway.
Insu designed the game with these specifications because he expected computers to rapidly spread and improve in performance once the 1990s arrived, just like in his previous world.
He desperately felt the absence of collective manpower. If they were even a small company, multiple developers could have participated in testing. But right now, it was just three people, including himself, taking turns playing on a single computer while testing the game. It was frustrating beyond belief.
Still, there was nothing he could do about it. All Insu could do was stubbornly continue testing and fixing bugs.
Fortunately, the game itself seemed to have turned out largely as he envisioned. If it felt fundamentally wrong and required major revisions, or worse, a complete overhaul, he might truly have been crushed.
Though considering my age and how much life I still have left, I probably would’ve just started over anyway.
And bug fixing required caution too. There were no version control systems like Git yet, so he constantly had to make backups and leave comments explaining every modification.
(Translator’s Note: Version Control System — Software system used to track changes in files, code, and builds. In development, it helps manage different versions and coordinate updates.)
Someone might wonder why previous versions needed to be saved when fixing a bug should theoretically clean things up, but the problem with bugs was that it was often impossible to know whether the fix was actually correct. Worse, fixing one bug could easily create another.
Saving pre-modification data was absolutely essential.
This is driving me insane.
Earlier, he thought the bug where getting hit restored health was simply caused by an error in a conditional statement. But after fixing that section, not only did the original bug remain, now every single attack restored health instead.
At that moment, he genuinely froze in confusion while staring blankly at the screen.
Only after restoring the original code and digging through everything for a long time did he finally discover that the issue was caused by an error in data loading.
Actually, this particular case was simple enough that he could roughly remember it and manually fix it without needing backups. But most situations were not like that.
And more importantly, that was only possible because Insu himself wrote all the code and carefully documented it with comments.
If he had been trying to fix someone else’s spaghetti code, he definitely would not have managed this way.
Insu truly did his utmost to hunt down bugs, and only after an entire month was he barely able to end this endless game of whack-a-mole.
Of course, even then it was not perfectly finished. He merely reached the point where no major problems immediately surfaced.
Once development progressed further, they would have to hunt bugs all over again during alpha testing.
“So now we’re going back to development?”
Eunha noona spoke in a slightly excited voice.
Development was far from being enjoyable all the time. And before the prototype was completed, Eunha definitely looked exhausted and worn out. It was only natural after a middle school student spent such a long period working continuously across school years.
But the rest period grew so long that it started making her anxious. And while testing was fun at first, later it simply became a tiring game of spot-the-difference. Because of that, returning to actual development felt welcome instead.
“That’s right. Once we finish alpha and then beta, we’re done. Percentage-wise... maybe twenty percent left? There’s not much remaining.”
“Then we release it right away? But how are we going to release it? Do we just bring it to some company or something?”
“Ah. I already asked my dad to handle that.”
“Mmm.”
Since she did not receive a very clear answer, Eunha looked slightly uneasy. But because she was still young, she placed more importance on the act of creating itself than on selling the game.