Chapter 91: A New Era
Chapter 91: A New Era
At first, Jaden had thought Parallel Soft was a Japanese company. That made sense, since Japan was famous for games, and the graphics in the games released by Parallel Soft had a distinctly Japanese style.
But after staying there for a few days, he realized they were actually Korean.
In truth, Jaden did not know much about Korea. All he knew was that it was somewhere near Japan and China. In this world, there had been no Korean War and no Korean deployment to Vietnam, so for an ordinary American, it was even harder to know much about the country.
As a result, after seeing what he had at Parallel Soft, Jaden came away with the impression that Korea, like Japan, was probably a country with considerable expertise in computers and games.
“Oh, you’re here?”
“Ah! Yes!”
As he strode into the company building, he ran into Insu, the leader of the game development team.
Meeting this boy had been one of the most shocking things Jaden had experienced since joining the company.
By now, Insu had grown quite a bit, nearing 150 centimeters in height. Having entered the early stages of puberty, his frame had broadened slightly, giving him the feeling of transitioning from a child into an adolescent. Korea was still not accustomed to counting age internationally, so hearing that he was eleven could make him seem extremely young, but at that age, he was already in the upper grades of elementary school.
And because of the memories from his previous life, Insu had diligently eaten well and stayed active even while busy. Though not exceptionally outstanding physically, he still belonged to the relatively fast-growing side. On top of that, perhaps because his matured sense of self exceeded that of other children, he carried an unusually composed atmosphere.
Even so, he was undeniably still young, and Jaden had initially been uncertain before eventually learning Insu’s real age and being shocked all over again.
So true geniuses really do exist.
Jaden had always considered himself fairly intelligent, but seeing Insu, who had already developed three hit titles before even reaching his mid-teens and was now creating things the world had never seen before, left him no choice but to learn humility.
An MMORPG...
He had already seen bits and pieces through hacking, but he had only slipped in secretly and glanced at fragmented information. He had merely guessed and inferred things, without truly understanding what Parallel Soft’s project actually was.
But after being hired there, he needed to understand the projects in detail in order to design their security architecture.
Because of that, he not only read through the planning documents but also played the prototype itself, and what he found far exceeded his imagination.
Having played the TLF series himself, he already knew from experience that a sophisticated game could evoke the feeling of a virtual world.
But this MMORPG did not merely evoke one. It felt as though it was actually creating a real virtual world.
As a hacker, he had long understood the possibilities and beauty of online networks. But until now, communication through them had been extremely limited.
At least he could understand the internal workings of networks far beyond what ordinary users saw on the surface, so he could better appreciate their brilliance and imagine possibilities beyond them. But because of that, he also understood their limitations more clearly than anyone else.
Yet this MMORPG took that limited reality and maximized every available resource to create an entire world within the entertaining framework of a game.
Moreover, this genius boy had not simply attached networking functions onto an RPG. He had designed systems for major pillars of reality itself, things like economics and society.
I seriously want to play it already.
Just imagining it was enough to send chills down the back of his neck.
Jaden once again gave thanks for the fortune that had come his way. Not merely for getting hired, but for being allowed to play a role in creating such a new world.
Afterward, he desperately searched through the planning documents and prototypes for vulnerabilities that might emerge.
Not only the game, but the portal site was also an incredibly impressive project.
At first, the concept had seemed so simple that he dismissed it lightly. But after studying the detailed plans and working on it for a while, he slowly realized that its potential was enormous.
Basically, everyone who uses the internet will have to come here, right?
Jaden loved PC communication services and BBS systems, but as someone deeply familiar with networking, he knew that the internet would eventually replace PC communication. And since he himself had become completely absorbed in the online world, he believed others would come to love it as well, meaning more and more people would go online and use the internet over time.
And if internet penetration truly expanded to the point described in the plans, where the majority of people used it, then this portal site would become something even greater than television.
He thought about television’s current overwhelming influence, along with the massive capital and countless people moving within that industry.
The thought that he was witnessing the birth of something like that gave him chills as well.
No, wait. Since the internet connects the entire world, couldn’t it become far bigger than TV?
It was already difficult enough to imagine the entire American population using something every single day. But imagining the whole world using it daily made it feel less like reality and more like something from the realm of science fiction.
Once again, Jaden thought to himself just how lucky he truly was.
Developing the singleplayer prototype for the MMORPG required effort equivalent to creating an entirely standalone game.
No, in some ways it was even harder. If it were only for a single user, they only needed to satisfy that user’s experience, implementing and focusing solely on the parts the player would directly encounter. But this was ultimately intended for multiple users later on, meaning there could not be any unfocused areas.
On top of that, they also had to consider integration with systems and networks, so even if it looked like a normal singleplayer game on the surface, it required far more work behind the scenes.
And even if they had not yet reached alpha or beta stages, one of the reasons for creating a singleplayer prototype in the first place was that debugging and fixing errors was easier than in a multiplayer environment. So either way, testing and debugging still had to be done.
In fact, because external testing was impossible at this stage, the internal testing process was even harsher.
“We’re starting the second test.”
“...”
At Insu’s declaration, the team members all turned back toward their monitors with dead eyes.
They had barely managed to complete the singleplayer prototype in June and had already finished the first test phase. At first, the team members, including Insu himself, had been quite excited to play it after hearing that aside from multiplayer functions, it was already almost identical to the final release version.
But compared to TLF2, the systems were even more complex, the MMORPG genre itself was unfamiliar, and the additional systems created for adapting to a network environment caused bugs to explode right from the beginning.
As a result, the team members had no leisure to simply enjoy the game. They were overwhelmed by endlessly finding and fixing bugs and errors.
It was practically like entering the Amazon jungle with nothing but a machete and carving out a path by hand. The only fortunate thing was that unlike the Amazon, nobody was likely to die in the development room. Though thinking about it again, overwork and stress were not exactly healthy either, so perhaps it could not really be called safe.
Only after two months of hellish struggle did they finally manage to complete the first test phase.
But the fact that it had been called the “first” test from the beginning already foreshadowed what was coming.
During the six-hour continuous test, several more bugs had surfaced again.
Bugs were the sort of things that never truly disappeared completely. The more testing they did, the more would inevitably emerge, increasing the amount of work waiting for them.
So even though they knew further testing was necessary to improve quality, after already finishing the first phase, it felt like reopening old wounds that had barely healed.
I know that having several bugs appear during a six-hour test means the game still lacks polish. But still... Ah, damn it!
Brian unconsciously let out a sigh.
If he had been developing alone, he probably would have rationalized things and moved on at this point. That was why the homemade games he had created in the past had never achieved particularly high quality or success.
People really were divided into two types: those capable of working entirely alone no matter how talented they were, and those who needed to belong to an organization capable of applying pressure.
Even so, though everyone began the second test with miserable expressions, it was not all suffering.
Because they had cleaned up the fatal bugs during the first phase, the game had finally reached a state where it could mostly be played without major interruptions, allowing them to actually enjoy it like a real game for the first time.
This is probably going to be seriously fun once it’s actually online later.
As Brian purchased regional specialty goods at the village trading post, he imagined other competitors and players bringing monster byproducts from nearby areas to sell at shops.
Right now he was alone, so price fluctuations were minimal and inventory simply piled up endlessly, making things boring. But by this point, they had been developing the MMORPG long enough that everyone had come to deeply understand the team leader’s vision.
Because of that, unlike when they had first played the earliest prototype versions of the prototype, they no longer found it merely dull. Now they could actually imagine what it would feel like once the game became a real live service.
And once that imagination entered the picture, the game undeniably felt different.
Insu was enjoying himself in much the same way, though for him, the greater feeling was the overwhelming emotion of finally reaching this point.
It had already been six years since he first set the goal of creating an MMORPG.
At first, the dream had been vague. Later, reality and the overwhelming flood of future knowledge had left him confused. But after somehow pushing forward step by step through painstaking effort, they had finally reached the stage where he could see it with his own eyes and properly play it.
Of course, countless difficult challenges still remained ahead. But now that he could visually confirm its existence, the experience felt profoundly different.
I’ll just have to trust the colleagues I’ve gathered for the networking side.
Insu understood only the most basic concepts himself. He did not know the detailed architecture or development processes, so he had to trust the abilities of the people of this era. That was why he had gone through such difficulty to find and hire experts.
That did not mean he was completely stepping back. It simply meant that unlike before, he could no longer take the lead personally and instead had to work more cooperatively.
“Now let’s move on to designing the server-client structure.”
Insu and the team members first began classifying which systems needed to be processed on the server side.
“Yoonsu, please handle the database server.”
“So you mean the system that stores save files, right?”
“Yes. Individual user data.”
For now, they planned to operate the web server separately instead of using it directly within the game, so even login information would all be stored within the database.
Since the early MMORPG market was subscription-based anyway, there was no need for in-game payments. Users could simply pay through the website.
Another major headache was creating the API protocol.
(Translator’s Note: API Protocol — Application Programming Interface protocol. Structured communication rules allowing servers and clients to exchange synchronized data securely and consistently in network environments.)
Simply put, it referred to the rules specifying which transmission data corresponded to received data whenever computers exchanged information with one another.
“Can’t we just designate directories and files the way we used to?”
After hearing about the API protocol and imagining the sheer amount of work involved, Yoo Juyeon could not help but ask.
Before Insu could respond, Clayton, the networking specialist, answered first.
“There’s the issue of data synchronization, for one thing. Multiple players connect simultaneously. Especially with the database side, we also have to handle writing operations...”
“Ah. Right.”
Rick, who had been quietly observing the conversation, joined in as well.
“There are also security problems. If the client has the server’s file addresses, it’s basically handing them directly to hackers. We could encrypt them, but at that point, it’d just be better to create an API instead.”
Beyond that, determinism and maintainability were important concerns, but above all, such a system simply could not respond to real-time interactions within the game environment.