It had only been a week since Rea’s favorite character, Saori, popped out of a game, and now another favorite character from another game had popped into reality.
Her name was Yang Bibi.
A hacker girl from “Terra,” a planet said to have a history and civilization very similar to Earth’s.
On the very day we met, she said she wanted to try playing a game I made myself, then gifted me Sunday, an AI that had clearly been created by torturing aliens. And since she had no idea how to return to her original world, she became a guest at our house as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
After that, just as naturally, she spread out the console game collection I’d been buying little by little every time I got paid all across the living room and started clearing them one by one.
And before I knew it, it had been a week since I first saw that sight.
“Argh! This trash game! How can they put a trap there?”
“You’re being loud. Can’t you keep it down a little?”
“But the big TV is only in the living room.”
It was already hard enough to concentrate, and the culprit behind all this noise didn’t seem to have any intention of quieting down, which made it even more ridiculous.
‘If she was the one who set a one-month time limit, shouldn’t she be cooperating on her own?’
I knew Yang Bibi’s setting was that she liked games, but honestly, I hadn’t expected it to be to this extent.
Aside from eating and sleeping, she was investing all her time into games.
‘This girl is on par with me back in my college days, if not worse.’
Her degenerate gamer power was that overwhelming.
“Still, the games here aren’t bad, you know? There are plenty of god-tier games I’ve never experienced in space, but there are even more shitty games.”
Yang Bibi giggled as she said something that might have been praise or an insult.
From the perspective of someone who had lived in a civilization far more advanced than Earth’s, all of Earth’s games should have felt like retro games, but surprisingly, they seemed to suit her tastes.
‘Well, unless she was that crazy about games, she wouldn’t have just handed over such an absurd AI and told me to make a game with it.’
Thinking that to myself, I looked at the computer screen, where code was being written automatically according to the prompts I had entered.
Sunday, the AI she had given me as a gift.
Its true identity was a copy created as a backup by “Metatron,” the Hive Lord of the Mecha Angels, one of the hostile races in the Star Beyond universe.
As befitting an AI with such an incredible background, whenever I gave Sunday an order, it didn’t just do the work of one person—it practically did the work of ten, whipping up whatever I wanted in no time.
Considering that even this was performance carefully restricted just enough to avoid a catastrophic electricity bill, it was easy to tell how absurd its capabilities were.
‘Thanks to it, my work efficiency has gone through the roof.’
Originally, the development process was something I would have had to plan a full year for.
But with the help of the cheat-like AI called Sunday, the efficiency of tasks that were practically simple manual labor increased exponentially.
To the point that I practically didn’t need to touch them myself.
“That’s enough for now, Sunday.”
[Terminating task and returning to standby mode.]
When I said that, a flat female voice flowed from the speaker.
[You have been coding in the same posture for an extended period of time. I recommend that Master take regular breaks.]
At first, Sunday had only spoken in a stiff voice like the AI assistants I knew, but perhaps because quite a lot of data had accumulated over the past week, its voice had become much softer.
If the voice Sunday first used had been something mixed with mechanical noise, now it was good enough to be called an actual human voice.
I don’t know if it’s okay to use this sort of expression for an AI, but should I say it had become more human?
In any case, this is what everyday life in our house has been like lately.
***
At first, I had been wandering quite a bit because I didn’t know what genre of game I should make.
After all, I was developing it alone, and since my budget, time, and resources weren’t sufficient, the genres I could make were limited.
The one that solved that problem in one stroke was Sunday.
This all-purpose assistant AI could be used exactly where I needed it, whether it was art, programming, or planning.
That was why, after much deliberation, what I finally decided to make was the genre I had given up on first: an RPG.
‘Right now, even if budget and time are still issues, I have more than enough resources.’
Of course, I still had to decide the overall direction and scenario of the game, but why should I worry when I had an AI that would auto-farm for me as long as I gave it instructions?
Now that I had taken the first step, the next thing I had to do was conceptualize exactly what kind of game I would make.
Even among RPGs, depending on the world, setting, and systems adopted, the final result could vary wildly.
And since deciding that was entirely up to the creator’s discretion, after much thought, I was able to settle on a few keywords.
Fantasy
Armor
Elf
Roguelike
Deck-building
‘I still have lingering attachment to this genre.’
In fact, there was one game in the industry that could be called the original title that first fused the genres of roguelike and card game.
Slay the Spiral.
Commonly called SlaySpi.
Night Zero Dawn, which I had previously participated in as a developer, also had a combat system very similar to SlaySpi, so it wouldn’t be strange to call it practically a SlaySpi-like.
That was why I still had lingering attachment to the roguelike deck-building genre.
If CEO Lee Hyeoncheol hadn’t interfered, Night Zero Dawn might have been released as a game with far higher quality than what was currently on the market.
It was a keyword born from that personal regret.
‘I need to maintain the core fun while adding my own originality.’
Night Zero Dawn, the game I had made before, had an SF setting, so its atmosphere was very different from SlaySpi, the original.
But the game I was trying to make this time would have the same fantasy setting as the original game.
Then what did I need to do to differentiate it?
The solution to that problem was surprisingly simple.
Go with an art style that was the complete opposite of the original work.
Perhaps because the original SlaySpi was a low-budget indie game made by two developers, its character appearances, combat animations, and UI had a slightly rough feel.
In a certain sense, you could call it a typical North American style.
In that case, I would choose a typical 2D animation style—more specifically, a Japanese-style art style often called anime—while giving it a soft, fairy-tale-like feeling.
Moreover, this was an area where I could make use of the experience I had accumulated.
‘Lastly, the story.’
Among developers, there are some who think that as long as the game itself is fun enough, there doesn’t need to be a core story. But I’m on the exact opposite side; I believe a game needs a story.
I learned that from my long career in mobile games.
Subculture game users will willingly open their wallets if the story is good, even if the gameplay is absolute garbage.
Of course, it would be best if the gameplay were excellent too, but surprisingly, there are quite a few people who think that as long as the story is good, everything else doesn’t matter much.
In that respect, since the original SlaySpi never explained why the player was climbing the tower, I personally felt something lacking even as I played it.
Of course, the game itself was incredibly fun, but if it had possessed a central story, I would have been able to enjoy it even more.
‘Good. I’m starting to see the outline of how I should make it.’
I neatly organized the things I had been thinking about in my head into a mind map.
‘A combat system different from the original’
‘Fairy-tale-style artwork’
‘Story’
In truth, if there is an answer sheet, avoiding it isn’t all that difficult.
The problem is that until you try it yourself, you don’t know whether the wrong answer you deliberately chose will be fun or not.
‘That’s what makes game development fun.’
Anyway, since I had roughly figured out the direction for the game, I decided to settle the most important thing at this point.
The character who would be the central figure of the story—the protagonist.
“Sunday.”
[Yes, please speak.]
“Can you draw an elf knight in heavy armor standing with a greatsword?”
[Generating…]
“Hmm…”
Unlike what I had imagined, the face was too beautiful.
It’s not that being pretty is bad, but if possible, I wanted to see something overflowing with a man’s romance.
“Sorry, but can you generate it again? This time, with a helmet covering the face.”
[Generating…]
“Oh, this one isn’t bad.”
And so, two completed images appeared.
One was an illustration with no helmet, fully revealing the elf’s uniquely outstanding looks, while the other thoroughly concealed that beautiful appearance behind a sharply designed helmet.
As I looked back and forth between the two pictures, an idea suddenly flashed through my mind.
What if, on the outside, the knight exuded overwhelming majesty, but the contents inside were actually a beautiful girl?
“…This is it!”
The gloomy otaku ego inside me was speaking.
This was material that would absolutely work.
I immediately discarded the orthodox knight image I had been thinking of, and decided to place the fact that there was actually a beautiful girl inside the armor as a twist element in the game.
“If I’m going to use it as a twist anyway, deliberately causing a misunderstanding wouldn’t be bad either.”
A character whose gender could not be inferred because they wore full-body armor.
Then the player would naturally mistake the protagonist’s gender for male.
But that would be for the final twist.
After defeating the final boss, the protagonist would remove the helmet, revealing to the user that the protagonist had actually been a woman.
And if, as New Game Plus content, I made it possible to acquire a helmetless appearance or bikini armor, that would be the cherry on top.
“Good. In that case, I should give the protagonist a gender-neutral name too.”
Just as I was wondering what name would be good enough to be praised, my gaze landed on the silver hair flowing out from under the knight’s helmet in the illustration.
It wasn’t glossy silver hair, but ash-gray hair that looked as if it had long gone unmanaged, like something burned and left behind.
At that moment, the perfect name came to mind.
“Good. From now on, your name is Ash.”
And so began my journey to create my own roguelike deck-building game, a.k.a. Project Ash.