Quick Shaka Ocean World (3)
Twitch-famous game streamer Brian Resh.
With his friendly face, his mischievous expression, and the teasing lilt in his voice, his streams were hugely popular with teenagers.
People even said he was more famous to teens than Hollywood stars.
His main content had originally been Minecraft, but lately he had switched over to Block Valley.
Brian tried all kinds of games inside Block Valley with his viewers, and even made games of his own.
Since new games were constantly being created in Block Valley, he was never short on content.
One of his recurring segments was called Find of The God Game, in which he would play a random unranked game and try to discover a god-tier title among the junk.
Because anyone could make a game in Block Valley, most of them were what people called shitty games.
The fun of the segment was watching him and his viewers freak out together, baffled and howling at whatever mess they had found.
"What should I play today? What is this? Kikshaka, no, Quickshaka Ocean World? Ah! Is it Quikshaka? Man, the name alone already smells like a shitty game. Let’s give it a shot."
As always, Brian went in with almost no expectations.
But then...
"Whoa! What is this?"
Before long, he was on his feet, striking a surfing pose as he threw himself fully into the game.
His viewers went wild at the sight.
Brian threw both arms into the air and shouted, "It’s a god game! I finally found a god game!"
Later, he called in friends to play with him, and whenever someone made a mistake, they blasted each other in the face with water guns. If someone got a game over, they got tossed straight into the pool.
"All right! Today, I’m setting a new high score no matter what!"
He was in the middle of happily enjoying Quickshaka Ocean World when news came in that SW Games was releasing a new game.
What? They were developing both at the same time?
Brian immediately turned on his stream and launched the new game.
"Hey, guys! SW Games just released a new game in Block Valley, so let’s check it out together. Become a designer and grow your own shop? A tycoon game? That’s not really my kind of genre. Still, it’s made by SW Games, so let’s start it up anyway!"
A little while later.
Despite saying it wasn’t really his kind of genre, Brian was completely absorbed in the game. He did not spare the developer a single compliment while he played.
"Another god game! From now on, I’m playing every game SW Games makes, no matter what!"
* * *
While Quickshaka Ocean World was riding high on popularity, SW Games released its second title in Block Valley.
A promotional game for the teen-focused casual brand Niders,
the game was called Welcome to Niders! Its genre was a management simulation, better known as a tycoon game.
The word tycoon had originally referred to a shogun in the Edo period, then came to mean a powerful business magnate, and eventually crossed over into gaming as the name of a genre.
Players became designers themselves, creating outfits, inviting friends to a fashion show, and growing their own clothing store.
One of the game’s defining features was that players could actually use the in-game production tools to make clothes, shoes, accessories, and the like, then sell them.
In addition, every season it held a design contest, and products that placed in the rankings were turned into real clothing by Niders, sold in stores, and shared in the profits.
The game became an explosive hit the moment it launched.
Word spread that anyone could become a designer inside the game, and aspiring designers flocked to it. Among teenage girls interested in fashion, it quickly became a must-play.
Unfortunately, it could not knock Quickshaka Ocean World off its pedestal, but it still landed in second place right below it.
That meant two games from SW Games held the top two spots side by side.
As expected, orders flooded in right after launch, and every Niders product sold out.
* * *
SW Games.
Even before it had released a single game, the company was already making waves in the industry. The reason was simple: it had received investment from Continue Capital.
There were only three game companies backed by Continue Capital.
Legend Games, Block Games, and SW Games.
Since the first two had already struck gold in succession, plenty of people were eager to see what SW Games would release.
Its first release, oddly enough, was a Block Valley game.
Quickshaka Ocean World rose to the top as the number one Block Valley game after launch thanks to its excellent gameplay. And the follow-up release, Welcome to Niders!, was another smash hit.
The two games SW Games released in Block Valley became nothing short of a reference point for brand promotion games.
Their convenient, attractive UI won strong praise from players, and other companies began building their games with those examples in mind.
Some of them even came directly to SW Games with requests.
It was not just fashion brands; all kinds of brands were flooding them with development offers.
I headed to SW Games.
Since it was the same building anyway, all I had to do was take the elevator. SW Games currently occupied the entire third floor.
They didn’t have that many employees yet, so they weren’t even using half the floor, but they had already left the upper floors empty in anticipation of expanding later.
When I got off the elevator, a woman in jeans and a shirt greeted me.
"Hello."
She had a slightly small frame and long, straight hair.
I smiled back.
"Oh! You must be Su-yeon, right?"
At that, she looked a little flustered.
"Ah! You know me?"
...
Wait. Was this the first time we’d met in this life?
I covered for myself with the first excuse that came to mind.
"Yes. I’ve heard a lot about you from Seon-woo. You’re Cha Su-yeon, right?"
She laughed and nodded.
"Yes, that’s right. I’ve heard a lot about you too."
She had been a member of Team 3 in LD Studio’s development department, where Kang Seon-woo had worked.
Originally, she handled character design and 3D modeling, but she had also learned coding and programming on her own.
Later, though, Seon-woo, who had been the team leader, got fired and the team was dissolved. The moment she heard he was starting his own game company, she joined him without hesitation.
That made her one of SW Games’ founding members, and she also currently served as Kang Seon-woo’s secretary.
In a small or medium company, one person always ends up wearing several hats.
I followed her inside.
SW Games currently had around seventy employees. At that size, it was already comparable to a respectable mid-sized game company.
Everyone was hard at work in the partitioned office space.
There wasn’t a separate executive office; Kang Seon-woo was seated at the farthest window-side desk. His desk was at least three times larger than everyone else’s.
That wasn’t because he was the CEO, but because he had so much work to do.
He had four computers and six monitors.
His space was a disaster. Documents and books were piled up on one side of the desk, odds and ends were scattered everywhere, and behind him sat a folding bed known as a Rakuraku bed.
Seon-woo was working in comfortable clothes: jogger pants, a T-shirt, and a pair of three-striped slippers.
He looked less like the boss of a successful game company and more like the local unemployed guy hanging around the neighborhood.
"I’m here."
"Oh, you made it?"
With a worn-out look on his face, Seon-woo got up from his seat.
We went into the meeting room.
"What do you want to drink?"
"Anything."
Seon-woo made me a cup of instant mix coffee in a paper cup.
As expected, coffee was best when it was Maxim.
"The game was a huge hit. I heard development requests are pouring in from everywhere?"
Seon-woo nodded.
"People have been asking us to make stuff from every direction. Even Amidas contacted us."
"Oh! Amidas!"
Amidas was a famous sportswear brand everyone knew.
And they were asking for a game like this?
"So, are you going to take it?"
"No. We’re already busy enough as it is."
"How’s the other game development going?"
Beyond the two games already released, they were developing five or six more at the same time. At this rate, they were going to end up lining up the entire Block Valley chart with SW Games titles.
"I’m thinking that this might be a chance to make a bunch of different genres, like role-playing games or cops-and-robbers games, all tailored to each brand’s identity."
"I feel like you could still make a killing just by making them similar enough."
Seon-woo twitched a finger.
"Nope. If I were going to make something like that, I’d rather not make it at all."
That was a fine developer’s mindset.
"But can you really produce them that fast? Charles said something like this would normally take dozens of people more than a year to make."
The games Seon-woo made had the volume of a proper packaged title.
Because he was using Block Valley’s production tools, the work was easier and there was no separate graphic labor to worry about, but even taking that into account, making something of this scale in such a short time was almost impossible.
And he was making two at once.
Seon-woo nodded.
"At first, I thought it would take that long too."
"But?"
"Once I actually started making them, it was weirdly smooth. You know how game development usually goes—it’s all build, tear down, rebuild, over and over."
"Yeah."
It was common to change direction or revise things in the middle of game development.
The most famous person in that field was Nintendo’s Miyamoto Shitaro.
He was famous for making people rebuild a game if he decided it wasn’t fun, a practice so notorious it was called flipping the table. Sometimes he even tore apart a game that was fully finished right before release and made them start over from scratch.
So when developers had their work reviewed by him, they supposedly shook in fear behind his back.
Still, the games that came out of those table-flipping sessions were masterpieces, so players didn’t exactly complain.
"Until a game is pretty far along, you can’t really tell whether it’s fun or not."
Unlike movies or dramas, games are something the consumer actually plays.
Because of that, a game can have a good story, great characters, and gorgeous graphics, and still end up being painfully boring when you actually try it.
I thought back to the founders of Block Valley.
Hard as it was to believe now, while developing Block Valley they must have doubted themselves countless times: Will this game even do well?, Did we get this wrong?, Shouldn’t we be making a different game instead?
"If what you show in the finished game is 10, then the actual development is over 100. But right now, it feels like I’m just making things exactly the way I imagine them. These games were built almost exactly as I pictured them, with barely any revisions along the way."
"Isn’t that incredible?"
"It is."
To be able to make a game without trial and error!
Even by the simplest calculation, that meant producing it at one-tenth the cost and ten times the speed of everyone else.
"Ideas keep popping into my head, and I can sort of tell what kind of structure a game should have. It’s like I’ve seen this kind of game somewhere before."
...Huh?
Wait.
Could regression have had some kind of effect on this too?
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