After his meeting with Logan, Evan helped Emily clean up her new office, and then it was finally time to head home.
Stretching his arms above his head, Evan suddenly remembered something from their earlier introduction. Logan had seemed a bit awkward when he'd first said his name—the kind of hesitation that came from years of getting teased about it. Evan could relate. Names could be a pain sometimes.
Helping Emily wipe down windows, mop, and sweep all afternoon had left Evan completely drenched in sweat. But on the bright side, after all that work together, Emily's attitude toward him had improved noticeably. This talented designer he'd basically tricked into joining the company seemed to have finally climbed aboard his battle wagon for real. One more piece of the puzzle clicking into place for the game's success.
Just before leaving the office, Evan got a call from his mom. She told him not to worry about coming to the hospital tonight—she'd be the one staying with his father. She wanted Evan to focus on helping the company get through this crisis and to actually get some proper rest. Evan didn't argue with that. He also remembered that he'd promised Director Tate to work on some upgrades for Killing Planet. Speaking of which, Tate had already called earlier today to let him know that the agreed-upon front-end technical specialist was on the way and would arrive at the company tomorrow. Evan had almost completely forgotten about their request in all the chaos, which was honestly a little embarrassing.
Just as Evan expected, Emily's mother appeared at the company entrance right at closing time, precisely on schedule. To avoid getting weird looks from the entire company, Evan quickly escorted Emily downstairs to meet her. Of course, during this whole process, Emily's mother was positively beaming, automatically filing this behavior under "considerate boyfriend material."
Hands in his pockets, Evan watched with a slightly melancholic expression as Emily's mother's car drove away. He sadly realized that not only had he completely failed to rescue Emily from her mother's meddling—he seemed to have gotten himself even more deeply entangled in the whole mess instead. Great, he thought with resignation. I'll just grab some ramen and get to coding.
After a shower, Evan threw himself onto his bed with a satisfied groan, burrowing into the covers. It had been two full days since he'd come back home, and this was his first time actually touching his own bed. Lying on his back, Evan mentally accessed the prepared Reaper Server and entered its internal space.
Sitting cross-legged on the open ground within the internal space, Evan looked up at the starry sky above and immediately noticed something different. The internal sky had originally been dim, with just one small red planet glowing faintly. But upon entering today, Evan realized there seemed to be two bright points now. One was the familiar alluring red planet, clearly identifiable as the celestial body representing Killing Planet.
The other, however, remained mostly dim—but it had a faint glow compared to a truly unlit planet. If he had to describe it, it was like a flickering light bulb running on insufficient voltage with a loose connection.
Evan gestured with his hand, forming a fist, then pulling it open. The seemingly underpowered celestial body rapidly expanded before him. At that moment, Evan could also see the data for this celestial body:
First Strike ("Swallowing Heaven and Earth")
Status: Unfinished, Progress (4.53%)
Usable Rewards: None
Next Usable Reward Requirement: Completion reaches 50%
Looking at the data display, Evan instantly understood. It seemed that ever since lighting up the first planet, the functions of the Reaper Server had been gradually expanding and increasing. The second game was currently only in the project initiation stage and nowhere near complete, yet this starry sky had already registered feedback. This suggested that perhaps it wouldn't be impossible to directly facilitate and promote the creation of real-world games from within this space in the future?
However, thinking about possibilities like that felt a bit premature right now. If he wanted to actually test that theory, he would have to wait until the initiated project reached the halfway point to see what rewards became available. For now, Evan made a grasping motion with his hand, and the flickering celestial body before him rapidly shrunk back down, then returned to its place in the starry sky above.
Same familiar posture as always. Evan once again pulled down Killing Planet from the sky. With a light tap of his index finger, the planet rapidly began to disintegrate, and then its fragments reassembled in front of him, forming a vast wall of streaming information. This was the source code for Killing Planet.
Director Tate had requested some additional features for Killing Planet, so Evan only needed to add to the existing code.
"Online multiplayer, hmm..." he muttered to himself, thinking it through. "True online multiplayer is clearly not very feasible right now.
Maybe once Silver Ridge's licensing period expires and I get the rights back to operate it myself, I might be able to implement proper online multiplayer. Hmm... provided people still actually play this game by then. So for now, I only need to add local network multiplayer—LAN support."
"If multiplayer is being added, then naturally, other features have to come with it too. Player rescue mechanics, simple class distinctions and roles—those are the absolute basics. For more advanced features... this should work."
Evan continued muttering to himself while performing various operations on the source code wall in front of him. Although technically he was doing work for Silver Ridge Games, according to their contract, Silver Ridge only held the rights to Killing Planet for three years, after which ownership would naturally return to his hands. So ultimately, he was still investing in himself.
However, speaking of operating rights, Evan suddenly realized something else. Silver Ridge had only obtained the domestic operating rights. Now that he had his own company, didn't that mean he could potentially negotiate overseas distribution rights separately? Evan made a mental note of this, planning to bring it up with Logan tomorrow. After all, with the company's survival on the line, any additional revenue stream would be extremely welcome.
It was late at night by the time he finished all the code modifications. Evan checked his watch—he'd spent approximately four hours total on the work. Fortunately, this was inside the Reaper Server. If he'd been working on his old desktop computer in the real world, Evan couldn't even imagine how much time the same work would have taken.
And after the final code upgrades and modifications were complete, the multiplayer-evolved version of Killing Planet had respectably grown to 198KB, more than doubling its original file size. However, for ordinary players downloading the game, this should still be considered an extremely small file size.
It was also while modifying the multiplayer features that Evan thought of another problem entirely:
There didn't seem to be anything like a proper multiplayer gaming platform in this world?
In his previous life, when it came to PC gaming, multiplayer platforms had been absolutely indispensable infrastructure. Numerous companies had taken off and built empires by capitalizing on this. Whether it was playing Warcraft 3 and Dota on dedicated multiplayer platforms during the ancient internet café era, or later custom maps and mods that had built massive communities, or even the retro console and arcade games that had become popular to play online through emulator platforms not long before his transmigration—all of these were deeply missed and remembered fondly by gamers everywhere. And now, it seemed like his Redbird Studios might be able to capitalize on this gap in the market?
But of course, the reason he was even considering this direction was also because attempting to create a full digital distribution platform currently seemed far too unreliable and risky. Creating "America's Steam" sounded like a very tempting slogan on paper, but the domestic and international markets in this world were already monopolized by their respective major corporations. Although there didn't seem to be an actual Steam platform, each major company had its own official store and distribution system. At most, they hadn't yet fully realized how important a complete, unified PC client could be. If he were to lead Redbird to foolishly jump into that arena head-on, Evan believed his company would be instantly crushed by the competition. And then the big players would think: "Huh, although Redbird's ambition was foolishly overreaching, that independent unified client idea is actually quite valuable. We should do it ourselves."
The absolute best outcome Evan could imagine from that approach was losing on all fronts and ending up with nothing to show for it—and his foresight advantage from his previous life would also completely disappear in the process. Given all of that, a focused multiplayer gaming platform seemed like a much smarter and more realistic choice.
300 Powerstones for extra chapter