The Dedicated Engine
It had been exactly one week since I started game development.
I had to admit I had underestimated the year 2010.
“GAAAAAHH!”
It was heavy. Hellishly heavy.
Game engines of this era simply couldn’t be handled by smartphones of the time.
“There really is no such thing. A one-piece engine that satisfies every single one of my ideas.”
I had combed through GitHub for an entire week, checking every open-source engine available.
I called it poverty in the midst of wealth.
There were indeed quite a few open-source engines made for struggling developers.
But none of them would work for Dot Hero.
Roguelikes were easy to make. Top-down shooters too.
But when it came to running on mobile in this era, it got tricky.
So what was the ultimate fun Dot Hero was supposed to deliver?
Slaughtering hordes of monsters and bosses that kept spawning as you leveled up and cleared stages.
In short, “feel-good growth.”
As the planner, how could I maximize that feeling for players?
Pay-to-win like the old days at Next?
“What kind of idiot would think that way?”
I wasn’t stupid enough to drink seawater because I was thirsty.
Pay-to-win business models weren’t always bad, but at least in this game it would be poison.
“Better to make fun systems than let outsiders buy in.”
The direction I wanted was “qualitative growth” through ability-card bonuses that appeared every time you killed a monster and leveled up, and “quantitative growth” where you went from struggling with one or two monsters to mowing down six at once.
Qualitative growth was easy. Just balance the formulas and code carefully.
Before my regression I’d been called “Red” by my senior at Eternal Tail Director.
If one job stat blew up, I’d patch it immediately.
“Broken balance creating demand is old theory.”
Players in exhausted 2026 had stopped waiting for patches and just deleted games if they hated a character.
“Compared to MMORPGs, solo games are easy to balance.”
Small mismatches didn’t matter because players wouldn’t line up trucks outside headquarters.
The real problem was quantitative growth.
Hundreds of monsters spawning and despawning at once.
It looked simple, but it devoured resources like crazy.
“If I don’t optimize well, I’ll forget this genre used to cause frame drops even in the 2020s.”
Following the plan would mean these pathetic smartphones couldn’t run it.
Even perfect optimization wouldn’t help if the engine itself was heavy.
“The world is huge. Where’s the engine that fits Dot Hero? I just haven’t looked hard enough yet.”
I tried commercial engines too, but they had way too many useless features for Dot Hero.
No choice.
One-year deadline, so I had to rush.
I looked for the fastest way, but this era’s engines couldn’t create the Dot Hero I had in mind.
But that didn’t mean I’d give up.
“Give up? My motto this life is challenge.”
No fast way, but there was still a way to make the game.
“If it’s urgent, go back. This is exactly that.”
Build a Dot Hero–specific engine as fast as possible.
Slow, but it was still the fastest.
Building your own engine sounded grand.
I was going to make the engine that Next’s hundreds of programmers had created, all by myself.
Sounds like claiming to do a hundred people’s work, but it was different.
“What I’m making is the perfect engine for Dot Hero.”
In game development, an engine is like a toolbox.
Imagine someone building a hut on an island with nothing.
Breaking rocks by hand and swinging an axe thousands of times to make it in thirty years.
If you had a saw, hammer, nails, and ladder instead?
The hut would go up in record time.
A skilled person could finish in a year.
That’s exactly what an engine does in game development.
It hands developers the tools they need so they don’t have to code from scratch.
Of course civilized people use tools, and developers are civilized.
But here’s the catch.
The tools given to me? A crane.
Hammer, nails, ladder, everything, but I had to use the crane to get the hammer and nails?
“I’m making a little doghouse, right? A tiny Chihuahua-only…”
“Yeah. No. You have to borrow the crane.”
“Fuck. Why the hell do I need a crane for a doghouse?!”
“You have to use a hammer and nails anyway. Without the crane you can’t get them.”
That was my situation.
The engine had too many useless features to keep.
I had to strip them out.
“Remove 3D rendering module.”
Dot Hero was a top-down 2D game that only moved on X and Y axes. Why bother with Z?
“Remove gravity, friction, and inertia too.”
No Z, so no gravity. Immediate controls meant no friction or inertia.
“Lights and shadows must go.”
They added life, but it was like bringing a flamethrower into a thatched hut just to catch a flea.
Lighting and shadows were the biggest causes of RAM overload even in the future.
“Particle system… let’s drop that too.”
It was important for flashy skill effects, but I could fake it with dots.
“Replace with hand-drawn 2D animation.”
That was the dirty trick my teammate once used in the early days of Eternal Tail.
I was glad I hadn’t heard the senior’s heroic tale.
With the list complete, it was time to build the engine.
I searched GitHub.
“Oh! This one’s good.”
I bought the framework that would become the engine’s skeleton.
All open-source, zero cost.
I paid for the external libraries I needed, but this was reasonable shopping.
Then I started coding, twisting the framework together.
The most important thing was optimization.
I had chosen the painful path of a heavy engine, but being heavy meant I couldn’t avoid it.
“Ah. Coffee.”
I was drinking coffee like water and living on ramen, so my body was struggling.
But my age was the cheat code.
“Hehe. Four hours of sleep a day and my body holds up.”
Before regression I’d slept only one hour more, yet I was wrecked.
Now even an hour less and my mind was clear.
My body was tired, same as always, but thinking I was working to make my game gave me endless energy.
The engine’s skeleton was up and running, so I tested it by making a prototype of Dot Hero.
Checked if basic character controls worked.
“Argh! Go left!”
Checked if monsters spawned properly.
“Ah. It died. Memory leak?”
Checked if damage and experience calculations worked.
“This can’t be right. Why am I suddenly 100 levels from 1? Did I mess up the formula?”
I coded, fixed bugs, repeated.
Three months passed.
“Hyeon-ah. It’s Hyung.”
Suddenly a call from Hyung.
“Hello? Hyung. What’s up?”
Only one call since discharge.
The only time we’d seen each other’s faces was once.
And I’d never called him first.
I was too busy with game development and he was the type who thought no news was good news.
Besides, the newly married Hyung was busy raising the five-year-old nephew Seongsu and working.
“Why is he calling?”
It wasn’t strange for Hyung to call his brother, but it was unusual, so anxiety crept in.
“Did I get caught?”
Tuition, deposit, equipment—did Mom find out about the three-grand prize?
The repressed fear I’d buried for years started to surface.
As a child I’d taken a lot of hits from Hyung instead of my parents.
Other siblings said they got beaten for no reason too, but I knew exactly why and the fear never went away.
My hands trembled, but I stayed calm and waited for Hyung’s answer.
“I heard from Mom.”
“Huh?”
“You’re struggling with studying lately, aren’t you? I heard you’re not calling much and rarely coming home. I’m worried.”
I thought I was hiding it well from Mom.
Did she have intuition? She’d noticed something was off with me.
Good thing I hadn’t been found out.
“So I’m at your place right now.”
“What?!”
“Hm?”
Total emergency.
Every hair on my body stood on end.
“D-did only Hyung come?”
“Yeah. Mom asked me to check on you. And eat together.”
“I’m fine. Hyung. You’re already busy, why come all the way here.”
“It’s fine. I have time to eat after seeing you.”
Raising a kid, working a real job—where do busy people even have time?!
He’d already said he was coming, so if I kept dodging he’d suspect something.
I’d meet him first, then figure out the rest later.
“When are you coming?”
“Navigation says about thirty minutes.”
“Thirty minutes?!”
Time was tight.
Hyung probably thought I lived in Gwanak-gu, where I was supposed to go.
But I lived in Geumcheon-gu right now.
Gwanak-gu was at least twenty-five minutes away.
“Got it! See you soon!”
“Yeah.”
I hung up and ran to the bathroom to wash my face.
I splashed water on my face and rinsed my hair.
That was one minute.
Next I needed normal clothes instead of the sackcloth I usually wore at home.
But I’d neglected laundry, so I had nothing clean.
“Ah. I was supposed to do laundry today…”
Of all days.
The black t-shirt and shorts I was wearing were all I had.
Just go like this.
I roughly dried my hair and left the house.
That was five minutes.
Twenty-five minutes left, but getting to the subway or bus stop took ten.
“I have to take a taxi.”
Money was precious.
I was developing a game and didn’t know when the next payment would come, so I ate ramen or rice with energy bars.
A taxi?
I sprinted toward the nearest major road.
Luck was on my side—a taxi was coming down the road.
“Taxi!”
I caught it with tears in my eyes.
“Seoul University, please! How long will it take?”
“Right now, about thirty-five minutes.”
“Twenty minutes? Can’t you make it in twenty?”
Only twenty minutes left.
If Hyung said thirty, he probably meant exactly thirty.
He didn’t lie.
“Twenty minutes? Traffic must be bad.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and shouted.
“Double if you make it in twenty!”
In the rear-view mirror the driver’s eyes widened.
“You’re really busy, huh. Twenty minutes, right? Fifteen would be even better.”
“Of course. Thank you, driver.”
“Seatbelt. This is my first time driving this type of taxi.”
The driver’s superhuman driving.
I kept checking the time anxiously.
Two minutes.
Five minutes.
Eleven minutes.
Sixteen minutes.
“Fifteen minutes and he’ll bring me there…”
The destination was still far and the car wasn’t moving.
“Driver! Please pay! I’ll get out here!”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine!”
I handed him three ten-thousand-won bills and jumped out.
Then I ran at full speed.
“Huff… huff…”
For three months I’d stayed inside, just coding. My heart was pounding like crazy.
Should I stop running and walk?
“Development must not stop…”
I’d heard parents could suddenly gain super strength when their child was in danger.
This was that moment.
I had to protect my child from the natural disaster of stopping development.
Ignoring the roar of my madly beating heart, I sprinted full throttle.
In the distance I saw the villa I thought was my place.
And an unfamiliar car parked in the villa lot.
Sure enough.
A familiar bulky man got out of the car and headed toward the villa.
“HYEON! HEY!”
I yelled Hyung’s name with everything I had.
Please don’t go inside. Please.