episode_0037

Undertale has taken the world by storm.

I’m not just talking about gamers who have switched to silk.

The bait of ‘separation of player and game character’ has completely destroyed public opinion led by the anti-game camp, which was still hiding.

Nowadays, if you bring up the idea that games are ruining people, you are looked down upon. At least in America.

Of course, the situation was different in Korea. The Game Rating and Administration Committee, the root of all evil, was launched. Do we need any further explanation?

The first thing the Game Rating and Administration Committee did after it was launched was to make a rating system and prior review mandatory for games.

Naturally, the Korea Communications Commission also requested that we be reviewed, but they ignored us, saying, “Alphano?”.

If you ask, “What can you do if I ignore you?”, you really can’t do anything.

As a result, PC rooms and games were cruising along in Korea, riding the wave of the ongoing IMF crisis.

To an excessive degree.

“Wow! Sans! You know! ”

“It’s.really.scary.difficult.”

People who are overly immersed in Undertale, commonly known as spoilers, go around spreading spoilers wherever Undertale-related content appears.

This has since expanded further, to the point where they start exclaiming in admiration and sprinkling spoilers whenever a skeleton appears.

Despite Yoon-seo and Tobi Team saying, “Please stop spewing spoilers,” this continued and has become one of the oldest and longest-lived gaming-related memes.

Of course, this was happening all over the world… but it was frustrating for the censorship committee to see the target of censorship run wild outside of their control.

***

That’s when summer passes and fall comes.

“Did you get enough rest?”

“Yes…”

After a month-long break, we jumped into game development once again.

“What should I make this time?”

“I think you probably have something in mind.”

“Uh… There are a lot, but since games are made together, we have to see if there’s something everyone wants to make.”

“Um… Not really.”

“Me too. People’s expectations are so high…”

“Isn’t this dereliction of duty?

“You’re the weird one, because you keep coming up with endless ideas…”

***

Kim Jung-jun is in awe of Yoon Yi-seo.

This isn’t just because of Yoon Yi-seo’s physical strength and coding ability.

In Kim Jeong-jun’s eyes, Yoon Yi-seo’s true value lay in her imagination and execution ability.

Even after a month of rest, he couldn’t think outside the box, so he couldn’t help but be in awe of Yoon Yi-seo, who would come up with innovative ideas at any moment.

When I look at her, I sometimes think, ‘Am I just a tool to create the game that Yoon-seo thinks of?’

Actually, it didn’t really matter to him.

Because I found satisfaction in making games themselves. Every time a masterpiece was born through my hands, I was able to gain an indescribable sense of satisfaction.

But he also had a dream.

A dream where a game created with one’s own ideas is talked about for a long time.

That’s why he first said what he wanted to create.

“Strategy simulation… how about it?”

During his break, Kim Jeong-jun’s imagination took flight as he played board games, especially miniature games.

***

“Strategy… simulation?”

“Building buildings, producing units, etc. This is how war is implemented in the game.”

“Uh… I can tell just by looking at it that the code is going to be a mess. Is it just me?”

“Hey, can’t this be harder than SimCity or Undertale?”

Who said words become seeds? Later, they had to handle an unprecedented amount of work.

“What’s the story?”

“Um… I have two ideas in mind. The first is a fantasy world where orcs and humans fight.”

“The Lord of the Rings?”

“… I was influenced to some extent.”

“Then what about the second one?”

“Humans and aliens fighting in a sci-fi world. But I can’t get the feel for this, so I’m more drawn to fantasy.”

“Okay. Then let’s go that way. The viewpoint will be top view…”

“3D is impossible, right?”

“Absolutely not. There’s no reason to burn your computer.”

As it stands now, even with a dedicated motherboard, 3D fighting games like Virtua Fighter can barely be played. It’s about time that computer performance inflation began, but there’s no sign of it happening.

It’s too late… If I keep doing this, will I end up becoming a grandmother?

“It would be good to divide the floor into tiles like SimCity.”

“There’s going to be another flood of terrain-related errors…”

“The map is like that… How are you going to play the game?”

“The core mechanism will be [resource gathering-building-unit production-battle]. You will do this mechanism at least once per round.”

“If that mechanism continues, I think it will get boring… Wouldn’t it be better to just give the unit from the beginning and have them complete the objective?”

“Uh… I’m not the only one who thinks this is a little off, right?”

“Hmm, I guess I didn’t explain it well enough.”

Kim Jeong-jun paused for a moment and then began speaking again.

“This will be a game where you compete against other people.”

Everyone’s eyes widened.

That makes sense, because all the games made so far have been focused on solo play.

Multiplayer was an innovation they could never have imagined.

‘oh…’

But to Yoon Yi-seo, he was just cute.

“No, wait. Then you have to implement it with real-time communication.”

“Huh?”

When Im Jin-bae pointed it out, everyone realized what kind of thorny path lay ahead.

“Hey, this is awesome.”

The coding slaves opened the future city and saw the future they would be trained by Yoon Iseo.

“Can’t you make another game?”

“Can I?”

This is the game development you chose! Fight with evil and courage!

***

“We… are going to be together?”

Everyone was in agreement.

This was because an unmanageable number of errors occurred during the process of implementing real-time multiplayer.

“The network is such a crappy thing…”

Eventually, we decided to focus on developing a single-player, or ‘campaign’, game first.

But of course, this wasn’t easy either.

“Why can I only select one unit when I drag?”

“The unit won’t move! What the hell is wrong with it?”

“The amount of memory consumed is strange. When you move one unit, memory usage doubles.”

My head, my head hurt. An endless number of bugs, such as an infinite loop and population overflow caused by the crazy collaboration of the pathfinding algorithm and the immovable tiles, continued to explode with tens of thousands of causes and causal relationships.

“Why is there a bug here when all the basic principles are included?”

“That’s…a bug…”

In the end, Yoon made a decision.

“Let’s recruit more people. This time, in a more ordinary way.”

Yoon Yi-seo puts into practice the adage, “If you don’t make any progress even with coding slaves, think about whether you don’t have enough coding slaves.”

***

Here’s another guy.

This guy is a developer working at Microsoft, a company that is eliminating its competitors and growing by leaps and bounds.

He was an extraordinary person who was directly involved in the development of the OS, and it was difficult to call him an ordinary person.

But he saw a new industry that was outselling his own operating system.

Looking at Doom, which had sold an astonishing 3 million copies in just three months, he thought:

‘Aren’t games the future of the computer industry? Isn’t that the blue ocean? If I were to exclude KIN, I think I could make something that’s even better than other games?’

He started thinking about quitting his job. He started to tear apart Doom, making mods, learning how 3D works, and became ensconced in front of his computer at home.

Meanwhile, a job posting on the pipe was enough to make him quit his stable job.

The background was a man who was so terrible at counting to 3 that he came to the garage.

“Hello. My name is Gabe Newell.”

A man with even more presence than Ned has joined the garage!

***

The moon was caught. In fact, I didn’t have high expectations for this job, but someone with an unrivaled portfolio and someone who was clearly leaving a mark on history rolled in.

I was satisfied with just doubling my coding workload, but I also reaped an unexpected harvest.

Although the number of coding slaves has doubled, work efficiency has not doubled, but this alone is a sufficient benefit.

If this happens, the next game is pretty much set…

Now, we need to get listed on NASDAQ. In addition, we need to hire more employees and create a system where multiple teams can work simultaneously…

Oh, I have a lot to do.

So happy!

I’m not a workaholic or anything, but I’m getting closer to the things I enjoy!

Of course, even if no one said anything, everyone only saw Yoon Yi-seo as a workaholic. Yoon Yi-seo herself was the only one who didn’t know it.

It didn’t take long for the new hires, including Newell, to realize Yoon Yi-seo’s true nature and think something was wrong.