When you're fully immersed in something, time has a way of slipping by without you even noticing.
After Frank woke up, he stayed in the hospital for two days, underwent a comprehensive physical examination, and was finally discharged once the doctors confirmed there were no major health issues. That same afternoon, he decisively returned to Redbird Studios, called a high-level company meeting, and officially announced that the company would be taken over by Evan going forward. At the meeting, Frank also candidly admitted the complete failure of the previously aborted game project, took full personal responsibility for all the mistakes that had been made, and gracefully stepped down from his leadership position.
Frank's actions served two purposes. On one hand, he was paving the way forward for Evan to lead without baggage. On the other hand, he was winning over people's hearts and loyalty within the company. In his previous life, Evan had once heard someone who worked in engineering say something that stuck with him: "Behind every accident, there are twenty-seven hidden hazards, and behind every hidden hazard, there are hundreds of small errors." What that meant was that engineers fundamentally believe no accident is ever truly accidental—everything has underlying causes. Evan felt that statement applied to pretty much all mistakes and failures in life.
The primary reason for Redbird's previous project failure had been Frank getting deceived by the lead planner, which accounted for the bulk of the responsibility. However, other people besides Frank weren't entirely blameless either. One major reason for the widespread panic that had gripped the company ever since Evan had returned from Harborview City was that certain individuals were genuinely terrified of being held accountable for their roles in the disaster. But now, Frank had shouldered all the responsibility himself and retired with dignity, thereby eliminating those potential hidden hazards and tensions before they could fester.
And so, Evan finally, legitimately and officially, began leading the company forward at full speed on the new project. And Emily Warren—the very first employee he'd "recruited" after taking charge of the company—had also successfully won over all the other members of the project team.
Initially, due to the whole situation with Emily's mother constantly showing up, quite a few people at the company had serious reservations about Emily. They assumed she must have some kind of inappropriate relationship with Evan that explained her hiring. However, over the past month, Emily had diligently finished her assigned work every single day and then left the office right on schedule, never once staying late to work overtime. Evan, on the other hand, had been having dinner with the technical department every single day and continuing to push the project forward afterward, practically eating and sleeping at the office with them. The two of them had barely any interaction at all over the past month, so those kinds of rumors naturally died down on their own.
Beyond that, Emily's actual abilities were genuinely impressive and spoke for themselves. Within just one week of joining Redbird Studios, Emily had developed a solid foundational grasp of the balance requirements for Swallowing Heaven and Earth. What followed after that was the continuous construction and refinement of numerical models for the game. However, before diving into that, Emily had spent nearly an entire month—under the guise of "practice and getting familiar with the company's work"—completely rebalancing every single game that Redbird had released over the previous years. It was only then that all the employees at Redbird finally realized that while a systems designer and balance specialist does indeed manage numbers and statistics, the concept of "balance" in game design encompasses far more than just raw numerical values.
Take visual novels and dating sims, for example—which had been the primary focus of Redbird's predecessor company in earlier years. Although visual novels don't really involve traditional numerical stats and calculations, the branching dialogue options presented to players at each decision point absolutely constitute a form of numerical game balance. For instance, if you want to pursue a particular romantic interest in the game, a dialogue sequence might trigger three different response options, and players should have legitimate reasons to potentially choose any of them based on the character they're playing or the outcome they want. Then they make their actual choice based on their own goals and preferences—that constitutes a healthy, well-balanced set of options.
However, if a dialogue offers you options A, B, and C, but choosing option A or B leads to immediate character death or causes the plot to completely halt and dead-end, with only option C actually allowing you to progress the story forward at all—then that's an unhealthy, poorly balanced choice system. Essentially, while the game is ostensibly giving players the freedom to choose, in reality there's only one viable path forward. That's clearly terrible game design.
The exact problem that Emily had been systematically correcting over the past month was precisely this kind of poor balance in Redbird's older titles. However, since all personnel at Redbird were currently dedicated entirely to the development of Swallowing Heaven and Earth, even though Emily had successfully rebalanced these already-released games on paper, actually implementing the new story branches and creating new character illustrations to match was currently impossible given their resource constraints. Emily could only file away her corrections with some regret and submit them to the relevant department heads with a note saying "please implement these fixes when resources allow."
This thorough display of her analytical abilities and game design knowledge completely convinced everyone at the company. Nobody had any remaining doubts whatsoever about her qualifications as their systems designer and balance specialist.
Over this past month, the progress on Swallowing Heaven and Earth had also been steadily advancing right on schedule. Guided by Evan's impossibly detailed design proposal, Owen Matthews and his subordinates in the technical department basically only needed to follow the documentation step by step to implement everything. Evan had genuinely considered every possible contingency and detail in his proposal—from the specific types and quantities of Kun Beasts in the game to even the decorative art patterns that should appear on the cards themselves. People working under Owen had even started joking around, saying things like:
"With Director Carter's proposal and the technical support we're getting, honestly even a trained monkey could probably make this game at this point."
Owen just smiled when he overheard that comment. The past month had genuinely been the easiest, most stress-free month of his entire career in game development. He didn't have to constantly deal with endless changing feature demands from above, and he didn't have to stay up late every night pulling his hair out trying to calculate revised project timelines and schedules. He was earning a manager's full salary while essentially doing straightforward implementation work—could there possibly be any better job situation in the entire world? Absolutely not!
Whenever the team wasn't too swamped with immediate work tasks, Owen's entire department had been diving deep into front-end web technology. Relying on the two technical specialists that Director Tate had loaned them as teachers and mentors, and using their daily work progress on Swallowing Heaven and Earth for hands-on practice and learning, the department's overall technical skill level had been improving at a genuinely rapid pace.
The only person who was legitimately working incredibly hard was Evan himself—diligently managing the project and handling business during the day, then rushing to make additional development progress in the Reaper Server space late into the night. Holding the highest position in the company while simultaneously doing the most technically demanding implementation work, he'd honestly almost considered just directly firing the relatively leisurely Owen on multiple occasions out of pure jealousy.
After an entire month of genuinely intense work from the technical department—well, mostly from Evan if we're being honest—the demo version of Swallowing Heaven and Earth was finally nearly complete and ready for internal review. Evan directly gathered a large group of key people and brought them all to the main conference room for the presentation.
With the laptop all set up and the projector properly configured, a blank white screen appeared before everyone in the darkened room. Evan sat down in one of the chairs below the screen, watching with genuine interest as Owen stepped up to demonstrate and walk everyone through the demo version trial.
Upon launching the application, the first thing that immediately caught everyone's eyes were four bold, powerful characters displayed prominently: Swallowing Heaven and Earth. The plain, bare background clearly highlighted the unfinished, stripped-down nature of a demo version.
Upon actually entering the game itself, there was none of the usual nonsense that plagued popular games in this world—no village chief immediately popping up to tell you that you're the chosen one who needs to save the world, no dying old master imparting his mystical powers to you with his last breath and begging you to avenge his death, none of that tired crap.
Instead, on a clean and uncluttered interface page, a giant Kun Beast occupied a large prominent space on the left side of the screen. Its basic visual design—still largely referencing and recreating the majestic image of a whale from Evan's previous life—came across as generally powerful and imposing, yet also full of untamed wildness and primal energy.
In Evan's core design philosophy for the game, players would initially start with only one basic-tier Kun Beast, and in this first version of the game, they could only actively maintain and raise one Kun Beast at a time. Each time a player drew a new Kun Beast or exotic creature from the gacha system, they would be presented with two fundamental choices.
The first option was to let their current Kun Beast devour and absorb the newly drawn creature over a certain period of time, which would allow their existing Kun Beast to evolve and grow stronger based on what it consumed.
The second option was that when they managed to draw a particularly rare and powerful Kun Beast from the gacha, they could choose to completely replace their current Kun Beast with this higher-tier drawn creature—which would then devour and absorb their old Kun Beast to gain its accumulated power.
The basic starter Kun Beast excelled in versatility and adaptability, with wildly different possible evolution paths depending on what types of creatures it was fed over time. Meanwhile, rare Kun Beasts that you could draw already had their evolution direction and specialization predetermined and locked in.
On the right side of the screen were several large, clearly labeled buttons: "Dao Court," "Kun Transformation Pond," "Shan Hai Scroll," and "Mall."
"Dao Court" was the designated space for players to trade items and resources with each other and provide mutual assistance. In future updates, this area might expand to include guild systems and other social features.
"Kun Transformation Pond" was essentially the gacha pool—the place where you'd roll for new creatures. It was also where Kun Beasts would devour other Kun Beasts to evolve and grow stronger.
"Shan Hai Scroll" functioned as the standard story mode section, or more accurately, as the dungeon and quest system. This was also where players could earn free gacha tickets through gameplay rather than spending money.
"Mall" was simple and straightforward—a place where only real money could be spent, period. For this first version launch, Evan had temporarily set up only two purchasable items with real currency. The first was an upgrade to expand and unlock a second card slot, which would allow you to keep and raise a second Kun Beast simultaneously instead of just one. The second item was where bundles of gacha tickets could be purchased directly with cash.