Translator: Dreamscribe
"Hmm.... This isn't what I had in mind."
Cypher kept refreshing the page.
They had ambitiously counted down together and uploaded the ga, but the response was practically nonexistent.
[Downloads: 104]
"Barely over a hundred."
Entropy looked at the number and let her shoulders slump.
"If we subtract our classmates and friends, that ans basically nobody else downloaded it."
"I guess we were way too optimistic. Reality is this brutal, huh."
Root looked deeply dejected as well.
"I don't think we need to worry too much."
At Seo-ha's words, all three turned their heads at once.
"Why do you think that?"
Root asked, his face full of anticipation.
"Because the quality is good. An indie ga at this level barely cos along once a year. On top of that, it's free. It's just a matter of timing. People will definitely catch on eventually."
Developers can never objectively judge how good a ga they made actually is.
In Seo-ha's eyes, the MIT Simulator was an overachievent that far exceeded everyone's expectations, a masterpiece that was bound to succeed.
Color returned to the three faces.
"Really?"
"Man, I'm putting all my faith in you."
"Hearing Seo-ha say that is such a relief."
Despite their haggard faces, Spectra Works managed to find their smiles, if only for a mont.
The next afternoon, a post went up on Reddit.
[This ga is way too realistic?]
-It's MIT Simulator. I made my character do nothing but study for a week and they suddenly had a ntal breakdown and bolted out of the library. Then they started exercising on their own and t up with a friend to go drinking.
Should I have raised their sense of responsibility more?
└What ga is this?
└Free indie ga. Made at MIT. Incredibly realistic and complex.
└The character just moves on its own?
└You can set general direction. But it's not like you can force anything. There's so many factors to consider, you actually have to study the ga.
└If you play it online it becos a completely different ga. The offline version is basically just a demo.
One week after release,
word of mouth had begun to spread, little by little.
[Downloads: 485]
"Users are growing, but it's way too slow. I don't even know if we'll be able to get investnt at this rate."
Cypher sighed.
Considering a full week had passed, it was a performance that fell far short of expectations.
"But I think there's a positive sign here."
Seo-ha pointed at the server log screen.
[Queue: 23 people]
"If you look at the current users' connection patterns, once soone logs in, they almost never log out. The average play ti is over two hours."
Entropy blinked.
"It was?"
"Yeah. I looked up the statistics, and for free indie gas, the average is under ten minutes. If it goes over twenty minutes, that's already considered a very well-made ga. But our ga...."
Cypher and Root stared at the screen.
"So that ans there's nothing wrong with the ga itself?"
"Think we could suddenly shoot up at so point?"
It wasn't as if they didn't already know this. They were just anxious and wanted reassurance.
"It's not just that there's nothing wrong. The users coming in right now are getting completely hooked on the ga. The word just hasn't gotten out yet."
For them, this was a project they had invested over a year into.
Anticipation.
Anxiety.
Tension.
A heavy atmosphere pressed down on the clubhouse.
"Soone's streaming our ga!"
Entropy cried out in surprise.
"What?"
"Seriously?"
Cypher looked at the screen and his hands began to tremble.
"I, I know this person. It's a channel I watch all the ti...."
"Who wouldn't know them? They've got over a million subscribers."
Root snickered.
"If that guy posts a ga review, it'll easily get at least 300,000 views."
[Downloads: 693]
"It's going up!"
"Oh my god, this is insane!"
[Downloads: 1,024]
[Downloads: 1,441]
Cypher was on the verge of tears.
"This is it. We might actually be able to do a proper release!"
And then the numbers exploded upward.
[Downloads: 2,203]
"Oh my God!"
"What the hell is happening?"
The four of them sat together and began watching the stream.
* * *
Strear Nova adjusted his microphone volu.
"Hey guys, the ga I'm reviewing today is 'MIT Simulator.' Apparently it was made at MIT, and a gar I know recomnded it to ."
His face was full of fatigue.
"Why do I look so tired? I've been awake for thirty hours straight. I turned this ga on for a bit after finishing my stream yesterday.
I haven't been able to sleep since. This ga is seriously insane."
Click.
When Nova brought over the materials, an NPC started crafting sothing right away.
"For the record, local mode is trash. The real value of this ga is in online mode.... but the damn server capacity is thirty people.
Once you leave, you might have to wait hours to get back in. That's why I haven't slept this whole ti."
└Show us so gaplay footage. What kind of ga is it?
└30 people ㅋㅋㅋㅋ who is that even for?
└This isn't an officially released ga, right?
└Closed beta?
"This is basically a ga that simulates life at MIT. You allocate your initial stats and follow a proper route to grow. That in itself is pretty fun. It's really realistic.
The degree of freedom is insane. You can interact with almost every NPC, and then the NPCs start influencing each other too. There's a favorability system so you can ask for all kinds of things."
└Doesn't seem that special? Other gas have that too.
└Yeah. It's not like reputation grinding is anything new.
└The interactions are kind of impressive though. Is the AI they built in really that good?
"That's just normal mode though. The really fun part is the scenarios. I'm playing the alien invasion mode, and since it's MIT, I dumped all my initial stats into intelligence. But I kept getting wiped out.
So I switched to physical stats. Now I can beat aliens to death with just a steel pipe."
└All physical stats ㅋㅋㅋ how did he even get admitted with that brain?
└The scenarios are actually pretty interesting.
"The NPCs are incredibly realistic. You start thinking 'is this actually what it would be like in a real invasion?'
You guys might not realize how impressive this is. But as a reviewer who's played countless gas, I can guarantee it.
No indie ga has ever implented an AI engine at this level. Honestly? You'd have a hard ti finding one even among AAA titles."
└For real?
└It's really that amazing?
└What's it like exactly?
"I was curious what kind of magic MIT pulled off, and the credits had the answer. The engine designer is Yu Seo-ha. You know, the guy who recently beca famous for destroying LOGIA?"
Nova played a video.
Weeeeeooooo-
A siren blared across campus as the aliens revealed themselves.
A professor in the middle of a lecture looked outside, then led the students to a shelter. Campus security tried to fight back, but they were no match.
"You have to consistently build up favorability. Then you can craft items suited to each departnt. For example, this right here is the Materials Science departnt.
I'm going to make myself an aweso war hamr. This is just my guess, but I think each departnt has its own craftable weapons.
Modern firearms are probably available through chanical Engineering, and if you go to Nuclear Science and Engineering, you might be able to make nuclear weapons.
Civil and Architecture would be useful for building a base. If you get hurt, you can go to the Health Sciences and Technology lab....
So the idea is that the direction of your growth depends on the favorability you've built up.
And the major you choose at the start, just think of it like a race in a fantasy ga. I picked Mathematics, and it ca with a 5% bonus to engineering comprehension."
└What? This is way more serious than I expected.
└A math major as a strength build ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
└At this rate they'll be building spaceships next.
└Iron Man suit! It's gotta be in there. No way a bunch of engineers could resist putting that in.
"Now I'm going to make so armor. Beco a dieval knight and beat aliens to death. Later I need to raise my engineering stats and ride a chanical horse too. That's the dream!"
Nova grinned brightly with excitent as he worked the UI.
"Alright, now let get so tal from the Materials Science NPCs...."
Click.
The screen froze.
Nova blinked.
"Huh?"
No matter how many tis he clicked the mouse, the ga wouldn't respond.
"Hold on, lag? Don't tell it's down?"
[Server connection lost]
[Session terminated]
[Queue: 192 people]
The chat exploded.
└Congratulations! Server's dead!
└That queue ㅋㅋㅋㅋ
└How long do you even have to wait for that many people to leave?
└Ugh! I just downloaded it and tried to connect and there's already over 500 people in line.
└It's growing in real ti. Are the viewers teabagging Nova right now?
"No... no! My magnificent war hamr! I already gave the NPC all the materials! I still need to get my armor fitted too!"
That was the reason for the sudden explosion in downloads.
* * *
Spectra Works clubhouse.
Cypher shot up from his chair.
"Queue at 900, no, 940. It just passed a thousand!"
Entropy checked the server's status with a look of sheer terror.
"This is wrong! This shouldn't be happening! CPU at 93 degrees, this is insane. Fan RPM is over 4,000!"
The server groaned, sounding like a jet about to take off.
Vrrrrrrrrrr-
An empty can sitting on the desk was rattling from the vibrations.
"It's actually going to blow at this rate. Please hold on. If it crashes now, we'll lose every single user!"
The in-ga situation was probably a nightmare at this point.
Root clutched his head and wailed.
Everyone felt the sa.
People were showing interest now, but in a few hours they might forget about it as if it never happened. They desperately wanted to hold on to the users who had finally found their way in.
Seo-ha was just as flustered.
But he quickly regained his composure and began thinking of a way to get through this.
Clackclackclackclack.
The log window opened.
Seo-ha's eyes darted left and right, scanning the logs that poured down like rain.
If everything was working as designed, this should never have happened.
But during the developnt process, the code had passed through too many hands.
'All the computation is supposed to run locally, with the server only receiving results. Why is this happening....'
Seo-ha's eyes, which had been tearing through the logs at a furious pace, stopped at one spot.
'There it is!'
In the MIT Simulator, countless algorithms ran simultaneously.
Pathfinding, behavior decisions, load balancer, predictive cache.
These four had been interacting with each other, and a new rule had erged that no one had designed.
'Ergent Behavior.'
"Did you find sothing? A bug?"
Entropy asked in a desperate voice.
"This isn't a bug."
"Then...?"
"This is a generated behavior model. An AI that I never designed was born inside the system."
The three were stunned.
"I'll try to fix it now."
Clackclackclackclack.
"How are you going to do that?"
Seo-ha didn't answer.
Instead, he pulled up four log streams simultaneously and began tracing their flow with his eyes.
'A self-organizing behavior loop created by four entangled algorithms.'
As he read, the pattern beca visible.
One algorithm was predicting another algorithm, those results were being cached again, and that cache was being redistributed by the load balancer, giving rise to an unintended function.
Then who was the culprit?
"Right here!"
Seo-ha pinpointed a single line among the countless logs.
A module that had never been ant to exist.
"Can't we just delete it?"
Seo-ha shook his head.
"No. This routine is already connected to other algorithms. If we force-kill it, the whole system will collapse."
"Then what do we do?"
Entropy was on the verge of bursting into tears.
"I'll sort out the traffic."
Clackclackclackclack.
Seo-ha rearranged the connections between the algorithms. If each role was clearly separated, the interference would stop.
Tap.
The mont he entered the final command, the server exhaled as if it had been holding its breath, letting out a low hum.
CPU temperature and fan RPM began to drop rapidly.
[Server Load: 94% → 68% → 43% → 21%]
"What planet are you from, seriously?"
Root, the systems engineer, was dumbfounded.
Identifying the cause from logs alone, and then fixing it on the spot, neither of those things were possible by any normal standard.
"I designed the engine, after all."
Seo-ha shrugged.
"The lag is gone! Everyone's reconnecting!"
Cypher shouted.
The queue kept growing.
1,221, 1,880, 2,540....
The download count had already blown past 10,000.
"We did it!"
"It's real! We actually made it!"
"Sob. Sniffle."
The three looked at Seo-ha.
Without him, they wouldn't have been able to pull off a single thing.
They quietly walked over and held Seo-ha tight, crying.
*****
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