The Second Character
The Second Character
If you ask someone in the same industry as me, that is, a colleague in the same field, what the three elements of game development are, they'll usually list planning, art, and programming.
Planning, that is, the game designer, sets the overall direction of the game. Art produces artwork matching the game concept and scenario provided by the designer. Programming implements the primarily realized images into the world inside the computer using the C language.
Of course, this is only the story when an ideal division of labor is achieved at the team level. In most indie game companies, a single employee often takes on at least two of the aforementioned job roles simultaneously.
In the case of a one-person developer, needless to say, that one person had to handle all the roles.
That's why for me now, having given up on changing jobs and deciding to start my own indie game company, the most necessary thing was, first of all, planning, and second of all, planning.
No matter how good your programming skills and drawing ability are, without a concrete plan of what to make, you can't even stand at the starting point.
So what is it that I, as a developer, truly want to create?
Only by clearly defining this first could I move on to the next step.
Two days had already passed since the day Saori and I did a major cleaning to clear out a small room that had been used as storage.
It was all well and good that I boldly declared I would start a business in front of her, but when the question 'What will I make?' was actually placed before me, I felt choked, and today too I sat at my computer desk, idly wasting time.
'Did I think too easily?'
Of course, all creation comes with pain.
But game planning, unlike ordinary creative activities, required considering many factors.
First, money.
Next, time.
Lastly, resources.
Only when you know how to properly allocate these three could you be called a top-tier developer.
'Since I'm a solo developer, I should avoid making a game with too complex a system.'
In that sense, the RPG genre is out.
If it were a matter of making an RPG Maker game using existing commercial tools like RPG Maker, that would be one thing, but if you're making it from scratch with no base, the RPG genre inevitably requires immense time and effort.
However, I had no plans to hire additional employees right now, and since I had set a one-year time limit for myself, I had no choice but to exclude it from the candidate list.
'Tycoon games... I like them, but they're not the kind of game I want to make myself.'
The tycoon genre has high development accessibility, so dozens or hundreds of tycoon games have already been released on the market. Adding one more now didn't seem like it would make much of a difference.
Besides, most of them have similar gameplay, making differentiation difficult.
'SLG that's popular these days... This is a genre optimized for mobile, so no.'
Of course, I could make it in a spec that allows soloing, but SLG games are fundamentally games that make money by burying players in interpersonal relationships.
Without that, there's no motivation for continuous play, and since a few games with enormous capital already dominate the market share, there was almost no room for a new IP to squeeze in terms of game quality or operations.
Above all, for this type of game, the number of users is most important, and there's no way I could afford server rental fees.
So, excluded.
After that, action, FPS, horror, puzzle, music, sandbox.
I put various genres of games up as development candidates, but there was nothing that clearly felt like "this is it."
Of course, someone might see me like this and say I'm overly cautious, but from my perspective, I had no choice because the moment I made a mistake on the first step, I could ruin the entire year's work.
I had no choice but to keep thinking until I found something I truly felt was okay.
Anyway, while I was agonizing alone like that, scanning up and down through the list of games registered on the Steam store and my library.
Dalgeurak-
"Seonsaengnim, is it going well?"
Saori, who appeared behind me without any sign, asked that and placed a glass of iced coffee on the desk.
"Ah, thank you."
When I said that and gave a grateful look, Saori covered her mouth with the tray and winked one eye.
"Not at all."
After saying that, Saori withdrew with quick, short steps.
Currently, to keep her word from two days ago, she was taking charge of all household chores in my house.
She said she didn't know anything about game development, so she would help me as much as she could in the ways she could, and it seems that this supportive behavior is exactly that.
'If I had been alone, the house would definitely have been a mess.'
Considering that, I could only say thank you to her.
'Of course, if only that expectant look weren't there.'
Basically, she 'admires' me.
Probably because she identifies me with the seonsaengnim in the game, but the characteristic sparkling gaze she sends me for that reason honestly feels burdensome to me.
It's like the look a mother gives when she says, 'I believe in you.'
Thanks to that, the longer I spent time doing nothing and wasting away, the more the strange guilt inside me doubled.
'This won't do. Emergency evasive action.'
In the end, unable to bear Saori's gaze piercing the back of my head any longer, I jumped up from my seat and said, "I'll go to the bathroom for a bit," choosing to temporarily escape reality.
Of course, since I planned to hole up in the bathroom for a long time, I made sure to bring my smartphone.
Deolkeok!
The 3-pyeong bathroom I entered like that.
It had a slightly small bathtub for an adult male to enter, a sink, and a toilet - that was it.
But at this moment, it had become a comfortable space that nothing could replace, so I sat on the toilet and turned on the smartphone screen.
The game I launched afterwards wasn't Red Asterisk, but the turn-based RPG game I used to play, 'Star Beyond - The Cross'.
A space opera game where you become the captain of the spaceship Galaxy, traveling the galaxy and solving incidents occurring on various planets.
Of course, it was a game I had quit earlier than Rea because I couldn't stand the inflation unique to turn-based RPGs, but I heard the latest story was well-received, so I reinstalled it after a long time.
"It's been almost three years, huh."
Actually, among people who play subculture games, it's quite rare for someone to stubbornly stick to just one game.
Even if you play a game like crazy at first, once it reaches the so-called 'bonsai' state where your daily homework is done in five minutes, it's natural for subculture gamers to shift their attention to other games.
In my case, when I was playing a lot of games, I was a Summoner, a Commander, a Teacher, a Producer, a Savior, a Master, a Traveler, a Trainer, a Pioneer, and a Captain.
If not for real-life issues, I'd probably still be playing four or five of those simultaneously.
~♪~♩
Perhaps because it's a Chinese-made game, instead of proudly shouting the game's name on the title screen, only a calm BGM plays.
Thanks to that, there's no sudden assassination in public places like subways or libraries, so it could be described as the optimal game for cosplaying as a normal person outside.
'By now, the characters I pulled are probably all obsolete.'
It was a game that suffered from inflation issues until just before I quit.
In this game, characters pulled with a pity system costing 300,000 won often became obsolete after just half a year, so the inflation that occurred in Red Asterisk over two years would be almost cute compared to Star Beyond.
'Well, there's no big problem in watching the story with just the characters I pulled before.'
Thinking such thoughts, I logged into the game, and on the main bridge of the Galaxy, where I had last quit, a female character with silver short hair stood with her hands in a baseball jacket, standing with one leg crossed.
Yang Bibi.
A character with a bizarre name unique to Chinese games that naturally brings to mind the meme 'How can a person's name be...'
The biggest external characteristic is that her outfit is overall avant-garde, which I assume is because of her setting as a super hacker who operates on a cosmic scale.
In the early days of the game, she was so good that people said 'I'll use her until the end of service,' but within less than a year of her release, she became an icon of bad luck, treated as obsolete... that kind of character.
'Because I invested in maxing out Yang Bibi, I researched all kinds of builds to try to use her somehow.'
Thinking back now, it's all memories.
As I was reminiscing like that, I placed my thumb on the virtual controller to control the character I hadn't seen in a while.
Beonjjeok!
'Huh?'
Along with a flashbang that felt somehow familiar, belated pain rushed in.
"Kyaaak! My eyes!"
This is already the second time, but I haven't learned the pattern at all.
As I thought 'Oh no,' the smartphone slipped from my hand and almost had a passionate kiss with the bathroom floor, but fortunately, such a tragedy didn't occur.
Because there was a hero who saved the smartphone just inches before it collided with the floor.
"Yo, long time no see, Captain. And that was pretty dangerous, huh?"
Seeing the smartphone resting on the instep of that hero, I couldn't help but shout in an involuntarily excited voice.
"Nice catch!"
"Thanks to that, I saved on repair costs!"