1988 Retro Game Tycoon - Chapter 110



Only Noblemtl

Episode 110 – Pickling

With the addition of the 8-bit team, our company now has four concurrent projects underway.

Although I feel relieved that I’ve been able to resolve the MSX porting issue, it also means that I now have more work to manage.

Still, it is better to solve the problem by working hard even if you are busier than to carry a burden on your mind.

Things that are not resolved in time do not just remain as a debt in your heart. Later, they become real debts, and you will be billed with interest.

Jeong Byeong-cheol was the same.

“Captain Jung, I’m hungry.”

“Huh? Oh, Ji-seok is hungry. Then let’s go eat!”

Jeong Byeong-cheol, who owes Ji-seok many debts, becomes Ha Ji-seok’s food shuttle.

Well, I thought it was a fairly fair deal, but as always, debt comes with interest.

“Hyung Woo-seok, have you eaten? If not, let’s go together.”

“Huh? Is that so?”

Ji-seok never went out to eat alone. He always ate with one or two other people.

As soon as we joined, we were thrown into the project without any chance to get to know each other, so I was a little worried about whether the 8-bit team would be able to adapt well to the company.

Fortunately, Ji-seok became the bridge between them.

There’s no faster way to become friends than talking about games while eating.

The cost of food will be a bit high, but unlike when I was a junior, I will be getting paid properly now.

Feeling relieved, I concentrated on the Mega Drive port of , but at the same time, I checked the progress of other projects from time to time.

Fortunately, Dark Moon and the fighting game genre have not yet fully taken off, so I didn’t have to invest much time. Still, if you set up the trajectory wrong in the beginning, it will be much harder later on, so you shouldn’t just pass over it.

Keep meetings as short and concise as possible, focusing on important and emerging issues.

Every time I had a meeting, I felt like I was turning the TV dial in my head.

Every time I change the channel, a new game appears, and the information is quickly loaded into my brain’s memory accordingly.

The human brain is different from the CPU in that it does not have multi-cores. It is impossible to think of several thoughts simultaneously and accurately.

To make accurate decisions on each project, you need to focus on just one thing at that moment.

I’ve been involved in a number of game projects over the years, but I’ve never worked on multiple projects simultaneously like this.

I was struggling to adapt to an environment that was both very familiar and very unfamiliar at the same time.

In fact, we all did.

Captain Park and Captain Ko were working hard to take the lead in game development from the planning stage for the first time, while the non-development team was busy managing company resources and supporting the development team so that they could focus on their work.

Every day was a new step and a challenge for us.

The same was true for the 8-bit team, who were struggling to prove their mettle in a new company.

In some ways, porting to an 8-bit game was a more difficult task than making it for the Mega Drive.

Even though the Mega Drive uses a 16-bit CPU, the 8-bit team has to make the game as realistic as possible on an 8-bit system that is far inferior to the A1 board.

The 8-bit team led by Jeong Byeong-cheol was clearly inferior to other development teams in terms of pure coding skills.

However, the skills and experience that Jeminan has accumulated while developing (and replicating) various games regardless of genre can never be ignored.

“The MSX 2+ and A1 boards have different resolutions and screen ratios, so I think we’ll have to reduce the character size, but the art team is busy right now. It’ll take some time to start over, so first, try to figure out the basic system configuration.”

“Is it really necessary to have an art team involved? We’ve always done it ourselves. Just give us the original source code and we’ll add dots and do it ourselves.”

“Are you going to do it yourself?”

“That’s about it. I’ve never tried making something with any source before. I just looked at it and made it. Just having the original source is heaven. I’ll show you after I try it.”

Their work was not systematic, but on the surface it went without a hitch.

It was similar to a theater stage, or a drama set.

The places the camera scans look plausible, but if you look a little closer, you will see that everything is a makeshift expedient full of tricks and illusions.

But if you look at the final result, it works very well and without any major flaws.

“Is this okay?”

“How did that happen?”

I thought that if their experience and improvisation were combined with our company’s good environment and structural thinking, it would create good synergy.

So we were all crossing the unknown territory, each in our own place, doing our best for the best result.

The development team met every two weeks to present the progress of each project, share how they were working, and why they were doing it that way.

“While readjusting the colors overall, the background was toned down a bit to give it a slightly darker feel than the original, while the characters were made as bright as possible to make them stand out more in terms of color. The TV screen is smaller than that of an arcade, and you have to watch it from farther away, so the characters are more noticeable.”

“ is designing various weapon systems along with the spaceship body. We are working on dividing the bullet styles into linear, range, and guided types, and we plan to create different effects for explosions and other things according to each characteristic. In addition, we need to think about the staged power-ups, and the aliens’ fighting styles need to match, so there is more to think about than you might think.”

“Our fighting game ‘Project Fighters’ is designed with character-specific actions with a target ratio of 30% realistic fighting action and 70% exaggerated and flashy fantasy action. Kim Do-kwon and Su-ji are also in Fighters, but we plan to make their powers and techniques more diverse beyond the basic settings of using fists and umbrellas.”

“Uh …

Although we were all busy with our own projects, it was still absolutely necessary.

A developer’s job doesn’t end with neat, efficient, and structured program design and coding.

You need to understand the entire game development process, and you also need to see how the games you create are sold to the audience and what kind of reactions they get.

“In the future, the game development process will continue to become more complex and specialized. That means communication with others will become more important. It’s important to be good at your job, but you also need the ability to organize and explain how you did it and why you did it that way. This is also practice for improving your communication skills.”

I explained to people why internal sharing was absolutely necessary and made sure they never overlooked it, no matter how busy they were.

To be honest, when I’m really busy, it’s really annoying to organize and explain what I’m doing, no matter how simple, for sharing.

However, these communication skills need to be continuously trained through practice. They will never improve overnight after attending a special lecture once or twice.

In addition, in the process of explaining your work to others, you naturally organize what you are doing now. Then, it is easy to figure out what you are doing well and what you are missing.

Our company has grown to the point where it has already achieved sales of hundreds of billions of won in less than a year since its establishment. Usually, in such cases, the size of the company’s workforce also increases explosively.

But I was very careful about hiring people.

When the number of people increases suddenly, it is inevitable that there will be a period of chaos. Now that we are on the verge of full-scale overseas expansion, we decided that we need to focus more on development rather than increasing the size of the company.

The existing workforce also still needs to grow more. They need to become stronger.

This way, when the expansion period comes, the core will not be shaken and the company will be able to maintain its balance.

On the surface, Starbeat seemed to be taking it easy after the release of , without doing much and just counting the money that came in.

But inside, something really big was brewing.

In the meantime, the work of transplanting to Mega Drive is also nearing its end.

I asked Mr. Nishikawa to send me a ROM pack for the Mega Drive with no content. Soon, a black ROM pack case without any stickers arrived by airmail.

By the third week, the transplant work was nearing completion. I thought it would be a bit delayed due to the 8-bit team composition, but it was actually 2-3 days faster than I had expected.

The art team and Lee Yong-ju handled the graphics and animations well to suit my needs.

And Ji-seok had become a specialist in this field by repeatedly creating and modifying physics engines from 8-bit to 16-bit.

“It was done faster than I thought? I thought it would take a long time to optimize since it was reduced from dual CPUs to a single CPU.”

“So, in order to minimize the amount of calculation work, we changed it so that the collision detection calculation work is not performed if the distance between each character is measured using trigonometry and they are not within the range. We also added on/off switches for each function, and only turned on acceleration processing when it is absolutely necessary, such as in the car chase scene.”

“Looking at the code, it looks like the formulas have been reorganized a bit.”

“Going to an academy during vacation was somewhat effective. At school, the physics and math teachers all avoided me, but the academy teachers were different. They even recommended textbooks for college students. They said they had the best teaching staff in the country, and I think they weren’t lying.”

“That’s right. How much is the tuition? But even so, I’ve already paid the tuition and still have some left over.”

I sent Ji-seok to a private academy to get him into college, but it had an unexpected side effect. After all, high school physics covers all the basic laws of motion, and in math, differentiation, integration, and equations all come up.

The CPU does the calculations, but the developer must decide what calculations to perform.

You can’t give a command to the CPU like this: ‘When two 10 kg objects are moving at a constant speed of 20 km/h and are facing each other from a distance of 1 km, calculate the time until they collide and the kinetic energy generated at that time.’

Because the CPU can’t understand such questions.

The developer must specify variables such as mass, speed, and distance one by one and enter the correct formula for the CPU to calculate and derive the answer.

So, programmers must first know what calculations are needed under various situations that will occur in the game. Then, they must be able to write code by specifying an appropriate mathematical algorithm to obtain the correct answer.

In the future, when all characters and backgrounds are made in 3D, games will soon become a world of physics and mathematics. If you want to become a top game developer, physics and mathematics are not liberal arts, but essential.

As Jiseok continued to work on creating, refining, and modifying his physics engine, and as he went to academy during summer vacations, he seemed to finally understand why I kept telling him to go to college.

I’m not telling Ji-seok to get a college degree. I’m telling him to go to college to study physics and math in more depth and learn how to do research.

It seems like there’s no need to push Ji-seok to go to college anymore. The academy really played a big role during the one-month summer vacation.

After applying the physics engine system, finally started to feel like an action game.

After two days of intensive QA testing and minor bug fixes, we have finally completed the Mega Drive version of v0.99.

Now all that remained was to go to Sega and get approval.

I took out my ROM writer after a long time and saved the completed game data to the ROM chip. The codes I had densely written over the past month were converted into 0s and 1s and flowed into the ROM chip.

The game size is approximately 4.86 MB. Fortunately, I was able to break it down to less than 5 MB.

Due to the capacity, the content was inevitably reduced slightly for each stage. The playtime was also slightly shorter, but there wasn’t much of a difference from the original.

Before leaving for Japan, I contacted a gaming magazine and made an interview appointment in advance.

“We’re always OK with an interview with you, CEO. But, is there anything special you’d like to say during the interview?”

“I’ll tell you when I get back. I’m sure it’ll be huge news.”

“Big news?”

I didn’t reveal anything about the content to the magazine reporters, but I just built up a lot of anticipation.

If this fails, it’s a real problem.

Rather than the determination to not come back if he fails, it was the confidence that he could never fail.

Unless Sega messes up their internal politics again, this game will definitely pass.

This game has a quality that transcends whatever reasons the opponents may have for it.

I believe so.

“Then I will return victorious.”

I headed back to Japan a month later with the MD version of .

It had been exactly 27 days since the game was demonstrated at Sega headquarters.