Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Ch. 1 .｡.:✧ The Last Cry of an Old Game Company ✧:.｡.
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Translated By Arcane Translations
Translator: FusionX
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– The Ugly Struggle of a Dying Star
When our company announced the development of a new game, we were met with nothing but derision. A company that had been milking the same outdated game for over 10 years suddenly deciding to develop a visual novel which it had always despised – it was deserving of ridicule.
But this time was different. It was a massive open-world project combining visual novels and RPGs. If this failed, it would be the end for our company.
“Wow, this is something else.”
“Our guys can make something like this? Then why haven’t they done it until now?”
“Instead of making useless stuff, they should’ve just told them to keep drawing pixels…”
The development team delivered. They separately developed a physics engine for hunting and action, which could be called the core of RPG games, and its completion was surprisingly high.
When you swing a sword, it goes beyond simply wearing down the monster’s HP – wounds appear on the hit body part or it gets severed. It’s quite realistic.
I had thought that with talented developers constantly being snatched away by startups, we only had pixel slave labor left in our company, so this was unexpected.
I was writing the story for the visual novel part. Since I was the one in the company who had played this type of game the most, I was abruptly put in charge of it. I, who had only played exactly two visual novels in my life, was in charge of the visual novel story.
An ominous feeling was already rushing in, but I decided to gather courage looking at the development team working overnight again today.
“Hey, this is all good, but isn’t this too unnatural?”
“What is?”
“In the morning you meet the Saintess, at lunch you meet the Witch, and in the evening you meet the Lord of Frost. But none of these three suspect cheating at all?”
“…”
The first problem of an old company: Looking for realism in strange places. Who would want to play a visual novel and be suspected of cheating by the heroines? No one would want to sit in front of the computer to heal only to have their head ripped apart being chewed out.
“That’s just how visual novels are. So elements that easily tire the user are generally left out…”
“Do we have to follow other visual novels to a tee? We’re making our own game, not copying others. Being unique is good, isn’t it?”
“…”
The second problem of an old company: Being innovative in useless places. What were they doing not exhibiting that innovative spirit until right before the company went under?
“Plus, if we do this, the difficulty of achieving a ha-, hare… what was it?”
“Are you talking about a harem?”
“Yeah, harem. The difficulty of achieving that will go up too. Kids these days like high difficulty games, right? Am I wrong?”
“You’re right…”
*Squeak*.
The story was completely revised. Unlike the devoted love route where you pour all your time into one heroine, the number of cases greatly increased in the harem route.
The less time you allocate to a heroine, the more her suspicion grows, and that suspicion directly leads to her lines and actions. When suspicion reaches its peak, the heroine sometimes turns into a psycho.
-You said you love me! You said you love me! Then why can’t you say where you went?
As I scribbled down the lines, I wondered if this was right. I couldn’t tell if this was a visual novel or a horror game.
Still, I decided to spin it in a somewhat positive direction. You could taste the flavor similar to other visual novels in the devoted love route anyway.
And if limited to the harem route, you could experience a unique horror game-like non-horror game-like horror game visual novel that only our company makes, so maybe it would be popular with people who like that sort of thing.
“Ah, whatever. If they say to toss it, I’ll toss it.”
We pushed ahead like this. The story was completed in an instant, and the ‘realistic’ lines that the CEO mentioned started being added.
Now, users would have to use their heads a little to see the harem ending. It was also possible to make excuses to a heroine asking where you went by showing her a pre-prepared monster’s horn and saying you were out hunting.
“Wow, this seems plausible.”
“It’s a good thing we went with an open world.”
As game development progressed, the atmosphere in the company improved. Separately from how everyone’s complexion was not very good due to frequent overtime, that is.
The protagonist levels up through hunting, obtains equipment to become stronger, protects the heroine, helps her, and gradually grows closer.
When his reputation rises from slaying monsters, heroines take interest and approach first. And sometimes, when partying up with an S-rank heroine and entering a specific dungeon, the hellish difficulty suddenly drops.
Visual novels and RPGs. At first I thought they didn’t suit each other at all, but seeing it like this, they seemed to fuse well together, movingly so. I had been worried my story would be too sloppy compared to the high-quality physics engine…
“There’s three months left until release! Let’s all do our best!”
Three months until release. Even if they said that, I had almost nothing left to do now. I ran spell check again, which I had already finished several times. I checked if the font was broken anywhere.
I reviewed if the line distribution per cut was appropriate, just to pass the time. The development team was working overtime until the last day, so I couldn’t slack off even if I wanted to out of guilt.
“10 seconds until open! 9! 8…”
Finally, the long-awaited opening day arrived. The in-game stills and PV released to the game industry that had been in a drought for new releases for a while were enough to draw the attention of the public.
The aggressive marketing, to the point of being cursed at for covering an entire subway car with ads, also played a part. Whether in a good or bad light, our game was garnering great interest even before release.
And the moment the game finally opened.
“Huh?”
The server crashed. Everyone was flustered, but their expressions were bright. It was the first time traffic poured in to the point of making our ever-loose company servers tense up.
But after 1 hour of the server being down, 2 hours, and nearing the 4 hour mark, no one was smiling anymore.
“What the hell are you doing! Hurry up and fix it!”
“I think we need to expand the servers…”
“Where’s the money for that! Stop spouting nonsense and fix it!”
In the end, we succeeded in server restoration after giving up on a fundamental solution. But the phenomenon of servers continuously disconnecting whenever people gathered couldn’t be avoided, and with tears in our eyes, we had to greatly reduce the simultaneous connection limit.
To how many? 5000 people. The servers couldn’t handle any more than that. Hundreds of thousands of people were waiting to play the game, but only 5000 could enjoy it.
The CEO, belatedly recognizing the gravity of the situation, decided to pool together all the money we had, even money we didn’t have, to expand the servers.
-Is this really an RPG game? It’s too brutal.
-It’s too scary to hunt. Look at them running away dripping blood after having their arms cut off.
-Other games probably can’t make this kind of realistic system, so they don’t, lol.
Unexpected criticism poured out on internet communities. The action utilizing the physics engine that the development team had ambitiously created was too much.
The overall game atmosphere was heart-fluttering like a visual novel, but as soon as you entered combat, it felt like a bloody battle between a goblin patriarch who set out to protect his family and a psychopathic protagonist, making immersion difficult – this opinion was prevalent.
-The visual novel story is pretty good though?
-Damn it, I keep wanting to just do the visual novel parts but having to go out and hunt for materials in between is freaking annoying.
-Wow, Yulia’s slut moving is so hot. What have these b*stards been doing not making visual novels until now???
Amidst that, there was a lot of praise for the visual novel story. I didn’t know whether to be happy about this or not. I felt conflicted.
-Why did these b*tches suddenly all catch paranoia as a group??? They go crazy whenever I go somewhere and come back.
-I don’t know if I’m playing a visual novel or a mental health care simulation for psychotic yanderes.
-Is this game by any chance a public service ad to prevent cheating?
The criticism was all directed at the stupid systems the CEO had proposed to make. I told you. If you raise the harem difficulty like this, everyone will be grossed out.
-Did you want to show off your newly made physics engine that badly? (★☆☆☆☆)
-They don’t seem to know what genre of game they’re making. (★★☆☆☆)
-Let’s do one thing at a time. (☆☆☆☆☆)
Then, even game critics piled on additional hits. It’s not that we didn’t try to respond.
In the end, we discarded the self-proclaimed realistic system where blood splattered by hit location and bodies were severed.
Like other common games, we added an effect where monsters stagger and flinch when hit, and made corpses disappear upon death.
The development team having to pull all-nighters was a bonus.
Also, by expanding the servers, simultaneous connection of up to 100,000 people became possible. All of this was achieved 3 months after release. It was fast considering the time it took to purchase servers. It was a feat made possible thanks to the CEO’s connections he always bragged about.
“Is it working? The server expanded, so why are the concurrent users decreasing?”
“…”
But 3 months was enough time for users who only saw the reviews to be disappointed and leave, and for users who were waiting to try it themselves to get tired and drop off. It was way too late.
And if you ask if no problems occurred even after the update, that’s not true either. As if we had messed with the code wrong, a bug also popped up where the lines would come out jumbled after a certain point.
In most cases, it would turn into such a mess that normal game progress would be difficult, but very rarely, things meshed well too.
The lines would flow smoothly as if the heroines remembered the events of the previous playthrough. A user who beat those lottery-like odds posted on the community that the heroines gave him the chills.
I laughed so much seeing that. In the end, the game failed. If we tried to fix this bug, another bug appeared, and if that bug was fixed, two more bugs showed up.
They said it was a problem that arose because the code was too messy from the beginning. It was a problem that could only be solved by overhauling everything, and putting aside that it would take a long time, it was unknown if it was even possible with just our manpower.
The game failed. There was one person who still couldn’t accept that fact.
“You f*ckers! I bought servers, so why can’t you fix the game! If we just get rid of the bugs, the traffic will bounce back up too!”
Ignoring the development team’s opinion that we needed to bring in outside manpower to develop because the code would obviously get f*cked up like this, and being wishy-washy when they said early on that we should expand the servers, missing the golden time – that was the CEO.
He knew that well himself too. He couldn’t hold on without blaming others.
Even when the interest on his private loan debts piled up and up and the game showed no signs of revival, the CEO refused to let go, fiddling with the balls of the already failed game.
Even that CEO finally raised the white flag when 6 months had passed since release with our ambitious new title declaring its end of service.
“Sigh…”
Entering the empty office, I felt uneasy. The development team practically lived here, but to think I’d see the day the office became quiet.
It hit me that this was really the end. What should I do after the company goes under? Should I go back to writing drama or movie scripts? Or I heard web novels are hot these days, should I try writing those…
“Come to think of it, I never got to play the completed version.”
Perhaps because it was the seat of a developer who worked all day, I turned on the computer after roughly cleaning up the trash scattered here and there and propping up my chin.
Although I didn’t create the characters, I wrote all the lines for the heroines, protagonist, and supporting roles. I became curious how those kids looked in-game and wanted to experience it myself.
The game had already failed, but I wanted to enjoy it to the ending at least once too. I also wanted to check just how stupid it was to get cursed at so much.
“What’s wrong with this?”
But even after the loading bar filled up completely, the game didn’t start for a long time. Like a true liberal arts student, I tried tapping the computer but the loading bar still refused to budge.
Were there even launch bugs now with everything that was going on? I sighed and got up from my seat, and suddenly, the game launched.
[ID: Yoo Jin]
[password: ********]
[Login complete.]
What the. I didn’t touch anything but the ID and password were entered on their own and it logged in. How did it even know my name…
“Ugh…”
A bright light suddenly poured out from the computer screen. Entranced, I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen, and soon the light enveloped my body completely.
It was so bright I shut my eyes tight, and by the time I opened them again.
[Welcome.]
“…?”
A lush forest scenery unfolded before my eyes. Not knowing if this was a dream or reality, I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and even slapped my cheeks, and in that moment.
“Kek! The enemy of my father! Kek!”
“Now what’s this…”
Suddenly, a goblin rushed at me, shedding tears while holding a club. Now I had an idea of where this was.
I wanted to cry.
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