episode_0020

The heat is finally starting to subside.

When it was really hot, Eunji made me wear a miniskirt against my will, which made my legs feel uneasy, but that’s over now.

I’ll never wear a caution injector again.

But the end of summer means the end of vacation.

I felt a little depressed at the thought of having to go back to school again.

By the way, I’m slowly starting to make games again.

I’ve also reviewed all the music that I had left to Eunji and updated it in the rhythm game, and I’m also polishing up some music that I had made while I was lounging around at home. I’m in the process of making all the music that appeared in many rhythm games in the original world, such as a butterfly tearing people apart, music that symbolizes the free fall of notes, and Lee Guk-a.

Now, arcades have almost completely lost the classic games and are now half-filled with rhythm game machines.

Now that things are starting to stabilize, I need to start making new games.

“All members, gather together~”

At a time when everyone was thirsty for coding, the story I brought up about developing a new game was enough to make the club members drool.

Well, I’m starting to develop the qualities of a coding slave. This slave owner is really happy.

“This game will also go to the arcade, not the computer.”

Now that the arcade is starting to become active, you have to row as much as possible. If you become a rhythm game one-tool, there is a high possibility that you will stagnate rather than grow.

“What genre?”

“Shooting”

“There’s already a galaga?”

“It’s a bit much to create a new genre again…”

The new genres in my brain’s archive are still too early to be released to the world. More than anything, if I bring a new genre into the arcade, I’ll probably be called to a discussion again…

“Instead, let’s make something like Space Invaders or Galaga.”

I had no confidence. No confidence that I could make a shitty game.

***

There are so many types of shooting games. Of course, only in the original world.

If you were to ask people in the original world to choose their favorite shooter game, there would probably be no end to it. Even excluding FPS games.

Anyway, if you were to pick the most popular arcade shooting games, at least in South Korea, there would be two that would come up.

MeO slug, and StrIOO 19OO

However, if you make a run-and-gun shooting game like MeO Slug and release it, you will definitely be dragged into the discussion for its violence. So, pass on this one.

So there’s only one thing left: bullet hell shooting.

If I were to follow the original history, I would prioritize horizontal scrolling shooting, but I don’t want to bring back a genre that was virtually extinct even in the original world.

In the cruel world of capitalism, there must be a reason why goods disappear.

“Let’s start by drawing up a plan.”

“It looks like you have a little, no, a lot of things in mind, but tell me first.”

Im Jin-bae flinched when he saw her face for the first time in a long time.

“It will be a vertical scroll style. The background will move up and down. The viewpoint will be a top view looking from the very top.”

“Isn’t this too much of a Galaga feeling?”

“Of course there will be many differences. The only reason I chose the shooting game genre is because of the familiarity that comes from the same genre.”

Actually, there’s nothing we can do about it. The ancestor of bullet hell shooting games is Galaga…

“First, let the player move freely. In extreme cases, they can go all the way to the top of the screen.”

Same but different. That’s the point of this game.

“Let’s make the number of stages around ten. Let’s limit the number of stages and let’s compete for records based on scores.”

“Even if you look at rhythm games, it definitely seems like it would be good to increase the rotation rate.”

“There won’t be an overflow in the stage count, causing stage 255 to become 0 and crash the game.”

Kim Jung-jun pointed out that when Galaga passes stage 255, it becomes stage 0 and the game crashes and resets.

Personally, I don’t like it because it feels like an endless loop with no ending. Games should have an ending, after all. Hmm.

“If a boss appears at the end of each stage… I think it would be good if there was some kind of story.”

“Do arcade games really need stories?”

“Actually, it’s more of a setting than a story. If there was something like that, wouldn’t the game be a little more appealing?”

Additionally, you will need an excuse when you are called to a discussion.

The plan was written overnight. Thanks to Galaga, everyone had a high level of understanding of the genre, so good ideas kept pouring in, and as a result, a plan was completed that was very similar to the original work that I knew.

“Hmm… I think this should be enough?”

Now all that remains is to make it.

***

“Hey, is this what you mean by the bug-motif machine concept?”

“Lee Seo~ The excitement I ordered last time doesn’t seem to work well even if I teach the drum beat like I did last time…”

“Lee Seo-Emong! There’s a bug!”

Yoon Ee-seo, who had appointed herself as the self-proclaimed general director, was feeling great regret.

Music, art, code. The amount of feedback coming from all these fields was beyond what Yoon-seo could handle on her own.

Music and art had to express the sensory images and melodies in my head as easily as possible, while code had to fix errors that occurred frequently and bugs that became increasingly difficult to identify.

In the case of art, it was quite different from what Lee Seo had in mind, but it was within the acceptable range.

There were parts where Yoo Ji-young’s understanding of machines based on the mecha he was fascinated by from the Gundam that Kim Moo-sik had sent her was lacking, but it was thanks to him that he sometimes surpassed even Yoon Yi-seo.

Eun-ji, who was at the peak of her form while making music and rhythm games, was doing well somehow. Since she was able to get a lot of enjoyment out of this with just a little bit of feedback, Yoon-seo wasn’t particularly worried.

But the problem was always in the coding.

Error, error, endless error.

“The hit judgment is strange!”

“Isn’t that something you can’t do?”

“No, this time it’s real!”

The problem was that although there were some judgment calls, there were also some real bugs mixed in.

Most of them are bugs. Are you dissatisfied with the fact that your very existence is a bug?

‘I can’t refute that damn thing!’

Yoon Yi-seo’s mental state, which seemed like she was going crazy, was expressed through the banter in her brain.

But as is always the case with programming, somehow the game was taking shape.

“The bomb explodes well!”

“Finally!!! The bomb is finally going off!! Taste some napalm, you machine union bastards!”

“When did you give it a name?”

The KIN sign was still shining today, illuminating the street with the light streaming in from the windows.

***

While Yoon I-seo and her team were busy creating resources and coding, and staying at a PC room, a very serious discussion was taking place on the network across the ocean.

[Shouldn’t we bring FoxC to our country?]

[Digital Inside] was a community used not only in Korea, where it originated, but also all over the world.

The most active of the digital insiders, which consisted of several galleries, was, unsurprisingly, the programming gallery, an early adopter of the www-based Internet.

The gallery, which uses Korean as an official language along with English due to the massive amount of Korean material uploaded by Yoon I-seo, was recently on fire after watching a video.

The video of Yoon Yi-seo debating on TV.

[Are you saying that Korea is a country that even oppresses arcades?]

[It is certain that even the symbols of a small country like Korea are small-minded]

Since that day, when a video with subtitles was broadcast in which Yoon Yi-seo, who is worshipped as a god, engaged in an empty argument with absurd logic that could not even be considered a debate, the programming gallery has been expressing unprecedented anger.

This continued the day after the server crash, and the day after that, for two weeks, and as time went on, negative public opinion toward Korea spread more and more.

This is what some of the most suspiciously wealthy Silicon Valley figures who caught on to this thought:

‘Wouldn’t it be better for everyone to bring this person to our country?’

For them, who occasionally saw Koreans appearing at the gallery and criticizing the lack of recognition for Yoon Eui-seo’s achievements, this was an opportunity.

It’s ridiculous that she, who has the power to single-handedly raise the bar on the internet and bring down corporations, is rotting away like that in a place like Korea.

So, rather than going to Korea, scouting here was a solution that would satisfy Yoon, Silicon Valley companies, and Korea, which hates games.

If only Yoon Yi-seo still had feelings for Korea.

Yoon Yi-seo still hadn’t realized how much she was admired on the Internet, and naturally, she had no idea what the big companies in Silicon Valley thought of her.

Sometimes, other members would jokingly ask me, “”Can’t you go abroad?””

“Foreign country? Why?”

She doesn’t speak the language very well and doesn’t know much about games. With no guarantees for the environment, going abroad seemed like a risky option to her.

“Oh, man, I got a ton of emails again. You should stop sending out phishing emails.”

In that way, the email that passed through the transatlantic underwater cable today was thrown into the trash bin in Yoon Yi-seo’s mailbox as an ‘electrical signal’ without even being saved.