Chapter 1: You Call This a CG?

“Is this… my sophomore year?”

“Was I reborn?”

Su Cheng quickly sorted through the memories flooding his mind, only to discover that he had actually been reborn into his sophomore year of college!

In university, his major had been game design.

In his previous life, he had spent over a decade grinding through the industry before finally settling down in a major city.

Then, just last night, he dropped dead from working overtime.

Everything he had worked for dissolved into nothing.

“Why of all times did I have to be reborn back into my student days? Couldn’t they have just let me stay an executive at Yunyi?”

“I’m never working overtime or getting caught in the rat race again!”

Su Cheng wanted to weep, but had no tears left. If he had known better, he would never have pushed himself so hard in his youth, wrecking his health and dying an early death.

The game industry was brutal.

Especially the entry-level roles piecing together UIs, building packages, and integrating SDKs.

Without grinding for years or even decades, getting ahead was nearly impossible.

For an ordinary person, the best possible outcome was what he had achieved in his previous life: making it to executive at Yunyi.

Most of the rest ended up switching careers entirely.

His physical body was full of youthful vigor again, far more robust.

In terms of mindset, however, he was still in his forties.

Then Su Cheng remembered something else: right now, he was still saddled with over ten thousand Yuan in unpaid student loans!

Gradually, Su Cheng began adapting to this world.

He started noticing a few things that felt off.

Wait…

In this world, game development companies like Rockstar, Ubisoft, or Origin didn’t seem to exist at all.

“So this is… a parallel world starved of games?”

【System loading, please wait…】

【Super Game Producer System bound successfully!】

Illusory blue characters suddenly materialized before Su Cheng’s eyes.

“Super Game Producer System?”

Su Cheng could hardly wait to browse through his system.

【Producer Store】, 【Upgrade Engine】, 【Lucky Wheel】, 【Missions and Honor Achievements】.

【Congratulations, you have received a [Starter Pack] gifted by the system. Would you like to open it?】

“Open it!”

【Congratulations! You have obtained: [Super Game Engine]】

【Congratulations! You have obtained: [King of Fighters] Pack】

“Super Game Engine?”

“King of Fighters?”

Su Cheng first checked the King of Fighters Pack.

The pack contained three things: art assets, sound effects, and a promotional CG video.

After browsing through them in detail, he realized: didn’t these characters look a lot like the ones from a game he used to play as a kid?

An image flashed across Su Cheng’s mind of his younger self in an arcade, gripping the joystick of a 2D side-scrolling fighting game. Back then, playing as the “Green-Clad Fire God^[1]“, he could sometimes clear the entire game on a single coin.

“Let’s check out the CG.”

“A total runtime of ninety-eight minutes?”

“You call this a CG?”

“This is longer than some actual movies!”

Even as he grumbled, Su Cheng still clicked to watch.

One look was all it took for him to be completely hooked.

The CG consisted of seven acts in total, corresponding to the storylines of ’94, ’95, ’96, ’97, ’99, 2000, 2001, and 2003, with a total runtime of ninety-eight minutes.

Back when he was a kid, who cared about the plot? All that mattered was fighting.

As long as you won, you’d be happy for the whole night.

Besides, without subtitles, hardly anyone knew what the story was even about.

Yet this CG laid out the narrative of King of Fighters in exhaustive, meticulous detail.

Top-notch visuals, cinematic camera work, and gripping storytelling.

Whether it was the childhood nostalgia filter talking or not, Su Cheng felt the plot was genuinely more thrilling than many feature films!

“Mai Shiranui!”

“I’m completely in love!”

Su Cheng suddenly appreciated the perks of being young again.

That sudden surge of excitement hit fast and refused to fade!

It was nothing like his worn-out, sub-healthy^[2] middle-aged years.

Back then, a single distraction was enough to ruin everything.

Next, Su Cheng examined the 【Super Game Engine】.

In game development, an engine was indispensable.

In the early days, if studios wanted to make a game, they had to build their own proprietary engine first, leading to all sorts of variations.

A game engine could be compared to a theater stage.

It encompassed lighting, props, artwork, cinematography, and everything in between.

The game itself was like a play performed on that stage.

Any game studio that wanted to develop a game had to build its own stage first.

As technology advanced and competition intensified, however, most of those proprietary engines died out.

What remained were the industry staples commonly seen on the market today: Frostbite, Source, Unreal, CryEngine, Unity, and the like, which were essentially pre-built stages.

You pay a licensing fee, and they let you use their stage.

This not only saved time, but also provided a reliable, stable environment, prevented vicious competition, and drastically shortened development cycles while boosting quality.

Possessing one’s own game engine ensured that any game produced would hold an overwhelming competitive edge.

The capabilities of this engine were not the least bit inferior to the performance of engines like Source or Unreal.

Furthermore, it didn’t come with the steep learning curve of CryEngine, making it remarkably convenient and user-friendly.

Best of all, the engine could be upgraded through the system interface using honor points to achieve even higher performance and unlock additional features.

【Host’s current honor points: 0】

There were two ways to acquire honor points.

First, through the player count of his games.

Second, by completing daily tasks refreshed by the system.

Beyond upgrading the engine, honor points could also be spent in the store to purchase items or draw from the lucky pool.

Su Cheng gradually grasped the system’s core mechanics.

【You have a new mission】

【Mission [First Step on Blue Star]: Please create and publish a game within seven days using the Super Game Engine. The player count must reach 30,000】

【Mission Reward: 100 honor points】

“Accept mission!”

As a veteran game developer, how could this possibly stump him?

Now that he had the King of Fighters CG, art, and sound assets, making King of Fighters was the obvious choice!

As a childhood classic for countless people on Earth, getting thirty thousand players on Blue Star would be a walk in the park.

Time to get to work.

Thanks to the engine’s sheer power and Su Cheng’s extensive development experience,

it took only four days for Su Cheng to wrap up programming the game.

It only covered the ’94 and ’95 versions, however.

The system’s deadline was seven days; finishing the entire saga in that window was simply impossible.

So Su Cheng did his absolute best to merge the first and second acts of the CG, the ’94 and ’95 versions, into 《King of Fighters》.

Then he dragged the pack’s sound effects and art assets into the engine with his mouse, letting the system run a full optimization pass.

“Done!”

Over the remaining three days, the game was submitted for review and passed inspection.

Su Cheng thought it over, finally pricing it at 9.9 Yuan before officially launching it.

At 9.9 Yuan, buyers wouldn’t lose out, and they wouldn’t be ripped off^[3].

That wasn’t the end of it, though.

Now that the game was on the store, it needed marketing.

What was marketing?

A CG trailer was obviously the best marketing there was!

Su Cheng uploaded the CG video to the Pilipili platform.

That brought up another dilemma.

He had only produced the game content for the first two acts, but the CG trailer had seven acts in total.

“Should I use editing software to cut out the later parts and release them bit by bit?”

On second thought, he scrapped the idea.

Squeezing toothpaste^[4] like that was completely unnecessary.

If people were going to watch, he might as well let them enjoy the whole thing in one go!

The raw CG file was quite large, and the internet in his rented room was slow and patchy.

“It should finish uploading overnight.”

The hard work of the past few days hadn’t taken any toll on Su Cheng’s body; in fact, he even felt a bit energized.

Youth really was great!

Still, the moment his head hit the pillow, he fell fast asleep.

He slept straight through until noon the next day.

“I wonder if it finished uploading?”

The computer screen displayed [Upload Successful].

The pilipili notifications in his creator dashboard were at 99+…

It blew up!