If you asked someone in the same field as me—someone in the game industry—what the three elements of game development were, they’d usually name planning, art, and programming.
“Planning,” meaning the game designer, presents the overall direction and flow of the game. “Art” produces concept art in line with the concepts and scenarios the designer lays out, and “programming” implements, in C, the images first realized through that artwork inside the computer.
Of course, that’s only when an ideal team-based division of labor is in place. At most indie game companies, one employee often ends up handling at least two of the roles I just mentioned at the same time.
And in the case of a one-person studio, needless to say, that one person has to do everything.
That was why, now that I had given up on changing jobs and decided to found an indie game company, what I needed most was planning first, and planning second.
No matter how good my programming skills or drawing skills were, without a concrete idea of what I was going to make, I couldn’t even stand at the starting line.
Then what, as a developer, did I truly want to make?
Only after defining that clearly could I move on to the next step.
***
Three days had already passed since the day Saori and I did a major cleanup to clear out the small room we had been using as storage.
It was all well and good that I had boldly declared in front of her that I was going to start a company, but once the difficult question of “what am I going to make?” was actually placed before me, I found myself choking up. Today, too, I sat at my computer desk, endlessly wasting time.
‘Did I take this too lightly?’
Of course, all creation comes with pain.
But unlike ordinary creative work, planning a game required taking all sorts of factors into account.
First and foremost, money.
Next, time.
Lastly, resources.
Only someone who knew how to allocate those three things properly could be called a first-rate developer.
‘For starters, since I’m developing alone, I should avoid making a game with an overly complicated system.’
In that sense, the difficult-to-make RPG genre was immediately out.
If I were making a Tsukuru game with an existing commercial tool like RPG Maker, that would be one thing. But if I were building it from scratch with no base at all, the RPG genre would inevitably demand an enormous amount of time and effort.
But I had no plans to hire additional employees for the time being, and since I had put a one-year time limit on myself in the first place, a genre like RPGs that required a lot of manpower for development naturally had to be excluded from the candidates.
‘Tycoon games… I like them, but they’re not the kind of game I want to make myself.’
Because the tycoon genre had a low barrier to development, dozens—hundreds—of tycoon games had already been released on the market. I didn’t think adding one more now would stand out in any meaningful way.
For one thing, most of them only differed in subject matter while their gameplay was similar, making them hard to differentiate.
‘The SLGs that are popular these days… No, that genre is optimized for mobile environments.’
Of course, it would be possible to make one with specs that allowed solo play, but SLG games fundamentally make money by drawing players into relationships between people.
Without that, there would be no motive to keep playing the game. On top of that, several games into which enormous capital had already been poured had practically monopolized the market share, so there was no room for a new IP to squeeze in, whether in terms of game quality or operation.
Most importantly, the number of users matters most for this kind of game, and there was no way I could afford expensive server rental fees.
So, excluded.
After that, action, FPS, horror, puzzle, music, sandbox.
I put all sorts of genres on the list of development candidates, but none of them struck me as the one.
Of course, someone might look at me and say I was being overly cautious, but the moment I buttoned the first button wrong, I could ruin an entire year’s harvest. From my perspective, I couldn’t help it.
All I could do was keep agonizing until something that seemed truly all right came to mind.
In any case, as I continued to torment myself alone while scrolling up and down through the list of games in the Steam store and my library—
Clack.
“Teacher, is it going well?”
Saori appeared behind me without a sound and asked that, placing a glass of iced coffee on the desk.
“Ah, thanks.”
When I said that and thanked her with my eyes, Saori told me to let her know if I needed anything, then returned to her seat.
‘I’m grateful, but it’s kind of burdensome.’
At present, in order to keep the promise she had made three days ago, Saori was handling all the household chores in our home.
She said she didn’t know anything about games, so she would help as much as she could in a way she was capable of. Apparently, that took the form of the domestic support she was providing now.
‘Still, if I’d been alone, the state of this place would definitely have been a disaster.’
Considering that, all I could say to her was that I was truly grateful.
Meals, laundry, and even cleaning.
‘Of course, it would be nice if she didn’t look at me with those expectant eyes.’
It was probably because she identified me with the Teacher from the game, but honestly, that gaze of respect she directed at me for that reason couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable from my perspective.
It was like the look in a mother’s eyes when she said, “I believe in my son.”
Thanks to that, the longer I spent this time doing nothing and letting it pass in vain, the more that strange sense of guilt inside me doubled.
‘This won’t do. Emergency evasion, for now.’
In the end, unable to endure Saori’s gaze drilling into the back of my head any longer, I decided to flee and shot up from my seat.
“I’m going to the bathroom for a bit.”
Of course, since I planned to stage a long-term sit-in inside the bathroom, my smartphone was essential.
Click!
And so I entered the three-pyeong bathroom.
It contained only a bathtub slightly too small for an adult man to get into, a sink, and a toilet, but at this moment, it was a comfortable space I wouldn’t trade for anything.
Sitting on the toilet instead of a chair, I turned on my smartphone screen.
The game I was going to play now wasn’t Red Asterisk, but one of the games I used to play, “Star Beyond - The Cross.”
It was a turn-based RPG with a story where you became the captain of the Galaxy, a dreadnought-class ship traveling through the galaxy, and resolved incidents occurring on various planets.
Of course, I hadn’t been able to withstand the power inflation unique to turn-based RPGs and had quit it a little earlier than ReA, but after hearing that the latest story had been well received, I installed it again last night.
“Has it been almost three years since I came back?”
Actually, among people who play subculture games, it’s fairly rare to find those who stubbornly keep digging only one well.
At first, they play like mad, but once the game runs out of content and enters the so-called “bonsai” state, their eyes naturally turn to other games. That’s the basic nature of a subculture gamer.
In my case, when I was playing a lot of games at my peak, I ran ten games at the same time.
If it weren’t for real-life issues, I’d probably still be comfortably playing four or five.
~♪~♩
Perhaps because it was a game made in China, only a calm BGM played on the title screen.
Thanks to that, there was no chance of being suddenly assassinated in a public place like the subway or a library, so Chinese games could be described as the ideal games for cosplaying as a normal person outside.
‘I wonder if all the characters I pulled are obsolete by now.’
Actually, even right before I quit, the game had been suffering from issues with power inflation.
In this game, there were often cases where a character you paid 300,000 won to guarantee would be treated as obsolete after only half a year. Compared to Star Beyond, the inflation that occurred over two years in Red Asterisk was almost cute.
‘Well, I probably won’t have much trouble seeing the story with the characters I pulled before.’
Thinking this and that as I logged into the game, I found a small girl with short silver hair standing with one hip cocked on the bridge of the Galaxy, which seemed to be the place where I had last logged out.
Yang Bibi.
She was a character with the uniquely bizarre name of a Chinese game, the kind that naturally made you think of the meme, “How is that a person’s name?”
In the early days of the game, her performance was so good that people said she’d be used “until the servers shut down,” but she was an icon of misfortune who ended up being treated as obsolete less than a year after her release.
‘Because I got stuck with a fully limit-broken Yang Bibi, I researched every kind of build I could to try and use her somehow.’
As I reminisced like that and placed my finger on the virtual controller to move Yang Bibi—
Flash!
‘Huh?’
Along with a blinding flash that felt strangely familiar, an intense aftershock swept over me.
“Aaagh! My eyes!”
This was already the second time, but I hadn’t learned the pattern at all.
As I thrashed around, the smartphone that slipped from my hand nearly had a passionate kiss with the bathroom tile floor, but fortunately amid misfortune, that tragedy did not occur.
Because someone had caught the smartphone just in the nick of time, right before it collided with the floor.
“Yo, long time no see, Captain.”
When I saw that person’s face, I couldn’t help but be shocked.
“Yang Bibi?!”
Why are you here?