The Roots of Shooting Lie in Bullet Hell
The fundamentals of shooting games lie in bullet hell. The worst of the heat was finally starting to fade. At the peak of summer, Eun-ji had practically forced me into miniskirts, leaving me constantly paranoid about the space between my thighs, but that torment was over now. As if I'd ever willingly wear that chastity injector again. Still, the end of summer also meant the end of vacation. The thought of school once again stealing my time made me a little depressed.
That said, game development was slowly ramping back up. I'd reviewed all the music I'd dumped on Eun-ji and pushed the updates into the rhythm game. At home, whenever I had a spare moment, I polished up the tracks I'd already roughed out. I was recreating everything I could remember: Butterfly That Tears People Apart, the piece that visualized the free-fall of notes, the Li National Anthem, and all the other legendary songs that had defined rhythm games in my original world.
The arcade had almost completely phased out classic games by now. Half the floor was rhythm game cabinets. With the market stabilizing, it was time to start something new.
"All club members, assemble~"
The members, starving for coding work, practically drooled when I announced we were starting a new game. Hmm. They're really starting to embody the perfect coding slave mentality. This slave owner is quite pleased.
"This next game is heading to the arcade, not home computers."
Now that arcades were finally gaining momentum, we had to push hard. Becoming a one-trick rhythm game company would lead to stagnation rather than growth.
"Genre?"
"Shooting."
"Don't we already have Galaga?"
"Making yet another brand-new genre feels like..."
The new genres stored in my mental archive were still too advanced for this era. Besides, introducing another revolutionary concept to arcades would probably get me dragged into yet another debate session.
"Instead, let's make something that completely buries Space Invaders and Galaga."
I wasn't confident. Not in the slightest. Making a piece of garbage took a special kind of courage.
There were countless types of shooting games. At least in my original world. If you asked people there to name their favorite shooter, you'd never get the same answer twice—even excluding FPS titles. Still, if you asked for the most famous arcade shooters in Korea specifically, two names would inevitably come up: Metal Slug and Strikers 1945.
But making a run-and-gun like Metal Slug would guarantee another trip to the debate hall over violence concerns. So that was a hard pass. Which left only one real option.
Bullet hell shooting.
Following original history, a horizontal shooter might have been safer, but I had no desire to resurrect a genre that had essentially died out even in my old world. In the brutal capitalist marketplace, when a product disappears, there's usually a reason.
"Let's start with the design document."
"Looks like you've already thought of quite a bit. Actually, a lot. Go ahead and share."
Im Jin-bae, whom I hadn't seen in a while, flinched slightly.
"We're going with vertical scrolling. The background will move top to bottom. Top-down perspective from directly above."
"Doesn't that feel too much like Galaga?"
"Of course we'll add plenty of differentiation. The only reason I chose the shooting genre at all is the instant familiarity it provides."
Truth is, I don't have much choice. Since the ancestor of all bullet hell is Galaga...
"First, the player should be able to move freely. If we go extreme, they should even be able to reach the very top of the screen."
Same, yet different. That was the core concept of this game.
"Maybe around ten stages? We'll limit the number of stages and let players compete through scoring."
"Looking at the rhythm game, increasing turnover rate does seem beneficial."
"At least we won't have that overflow bug where after 255 stages it resets to zero and the game breaks."
Kim Jeong-jun pointed out how Galaga would glitch out after stage 255, resetting to zero and breaking. I personally disliked endless loops without proper endings. Games should have conclusions.
"We'll have bosses at the end of each stage... It'd be nice to have some kind of story too."
"Does an arcade game really need a story?"
"It's more like world-building than a full narrative. Wouldn't that make the game slightly more appealing?"
Plus I need some defensive talking points for when they inevitably drag me to another hearing.
The design document was completed overnight. Thanks to Galaga, everyone already had a solid understanding of the genre, so great ideas kept pouring in. The final document ended up remarkably similar to the original game I remembered.
"Mmm... This should be enough, right?"
All that remained was actually making it.
"I-seo, is this what you meant by insect-motif mechanical concept?"
"I-seo~ That 'sense of urgency' you mentioned last time... even after you showed me drum beats, I'm still struggling..."
"I-seo-mong! There's a bug!"
Yoon I-seo, self-appointed general director, was experiencing tremendous regret. The volume of feedback coming from music, art, and code far exceeded what one person could handle.
Music and art required translating the sensory images and melodies in my head into something others could easily understand. Code meant constantly fixing errors and hunting increasingly mysterious bugs whose causes became harder to identify over time.
The art had deviated quite a bit from what I'd imagined, but it was still within acceptable range. Yoo Ji-young's understanding of mechanical designs based on the Gundam models Kim Mu-sik had sent her was lacking in places, but her talent occasionally surpassed even my own vision.
Eun-ji, whose skills had peaked while working on the rhythm game, was handling the music admirably. A little feedback went a long way with her, so I wasn't too worried on that front.
The eternal problem, as always, was coding.
Errors. More errors. Endless errors.
"The hit detection is weird!"
"Isn't that just you being bad?"
"No, this time it's actually broken!"
There was the usual "it's the hitbox's fault" copium, but real bugs were mixed in too. It's mostly bugs. Any complaints? Is a human whose very existence is a bug allowed to complain?
Damn it, I can't even argue with that!
My deteriorating mental state was expressing itself through internal comedy routines. But as is always the case with programming, the game was slowly taking shape despite everything.
"The bombs explode so well!"
"Finally! The bombs are finally launching!! Taste some napalm, you machine federation bastards!"
"When did you even name them that?"
The KIN signboard shone brightly today as well, its light spilling through the windows and illuminating the street outside.
While I and the club members were fully immersed in resource creation and coding—practically living at the PC bang—a very serious discussion was taking place across the ocean on the internet.
Digital Inside wasn't just a Korean community—it had become a global one. Among its many galleries, the most active was naturally the Programming Gallery, home to the earliest adopters of the www-based internet. Thanks to the massive amount of Korean-language material I'd uploaded, the gallery had become bilingual, treating both English and Korean as official languages.
Recently, it had been set ablaze by a certain video: the broadcast of me debating on television. Ever since that subtitled clip of me receiving empty, illogical attacks that couldn't even be called debate—while the internet worshipped me like a god—the Programming Gallery had been expressing unprecedented rage.
This continued the day after the server crash, and the day after that. Two full weeks passed, and the negative opinion toward Korea only grew stronger.
A few suspiciously wealthy Silicon Valley figures had taken notice. Their thoughts were simple:
Wouldn't bringing this person to our country be the best path for everyone?
They'd seen the occasional Korean users appear in the gallery to lament how little I-seo's achievements were recognized back home. To them, this was an opportunity. It was ridiculous that someone capable of single-handedly elevating the entire internet and toppling corporations was rotting away in a place like Korea.
Scouting me to Silicon Valley seemed like the perfect solution that would satisfy me, the American companies, and even Korea itself—which hated games anyway. If only I didn't still feel any attachment to this country.
I still had no idea just how much reverence I was receiving online. Naturally, I had no clue how major Silicon Valley corporations were evaluating me either. Even when the other members jokingly asked, "Shouldn't you just go abroad?" my response was always the same.
"Abroad? Why would I?"
I didn't speak the language well, and I had no idea what the gaming environment was like there. Without proper guarantees, going overseas just seemed like a high-risk option.
"Ugh, another flood of emails. These impersonators need to knock it off already."
And so, the emails that had crossed the Atlantic via undersea cable once again failed to even reach my inbox. They were immediately consigned to the trash folder, becoming nothing more than "electrical signals that once were."
