WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Potter

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ The Game Director that Returned from Hell ◈

Chapter 6

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Han Seorim’s question was one I’d already answered when I decided to make the game.

What I was going to make was horror.

The setting was a living hell where the screams never stopped, and there was no way out.

If the playable character were a prisoner, we would be the ones suffering.

Following the rules of traditional horror, we would have to run from enemies we couldn’t defeat, and that situation would frighten us.

But the stress that came with fear was never going to appeal to a mainstream audience.

In the end, the game would struggle badly with mass appeal, which certainly wouldn’t help with making games in the future.

So I was going to turn it around.

Think about it. What would happen to the game if the player’s role changed?

“...The main character is a jailer?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean the monster is the main character?”

“You’ve got it.”

“Can that work?”

“Of course.”

It had to work.

The concept had already been proven.

Humans were basically built to enjoy other people’s misfortune.

To put it crudely, your misery was my happiness.

Plenty of people cried out that this was morally wrong, but really, strip away the mask of morality, and everyone was ready to enjoy someone else’s suffering.

Wasn’t there a simple example?

We laughed when celebrities suffered through penalties on variety shows.

We felt satisfied when villains met miserable ends in TV dramas.

Looking at it that way, this wasn’t much different.

I asked Han Seorim a question to make it easier to understand.

“Let’s say you had to choose between hitting someone and getting hit. Which would you pick?”

“...Hitting someone, I guess. I don’t want to get hit.”

“And between being scared and doing the scaring?”

“...Oh.”

Han Seorim let out a quiet sound of realization.

It seemed the idea had sunk in.

I nodded and continued.

“This is a game about hunting prisoners. The main character is a rookie jailer who hasn’t been in this hell for long. The player will grow as they learn the job. They’ll get stronger and punish prisoners, and that’s where the fun will come from.”

Rather than raising stats... Yes, it would be better to get new torture tools and use them to crush prisoners in new ways.

That would be a more direct fit for the jailer’s role.

Then Han Seorim asked, “But is that okay? Would anyone openly say they enjoy hurting people? Even if they tried to enjoy it, wouldn’t they feel uncomfortable?”

A good question.

Nobody could openly say they enjoyed becoming a villain and making other people suffer.

Society could only exist with rules called morals, and humans were animals willing to deceive even themselves to uphold those rules.

But Han Seorim had missed something.

“I told you.”

“What?”

“The jailer hunts sinners.”

As in my earlier example, we were built to feel satisfaction when villains in fiction met their end.

“What’s the problem? The main character is justice here.”

If I really wanted to, I could even attach a message to it.

Don’t ruin your own body.

A message could mean whatever you wanted it to mean, depending on how you framed it.

Han Seorim fell into a daze, lost in thought.

I asked, “Well? Think you can work with that?”

The answer came after about three seconds of silence.

“...I’ll try sketching whatever comes to mind first.”

Han Seorim immediately turned on the computer and connected the drawing tablet.

I began to feel a little excited.

* * *

It didn’t take long for Han Seorim to finish the rough sketches.

“What do you think?”

The confident voice tickled my ears.

But I couldn’t answer.

I was too caught up in what I saw on the monitor.

A thought suddenly came to me.

‘Right. That’s what they looked like.’

With nothing but my explanation, Han Seorim had done an excellent job of recreating my memories.

Of course, it wasn’t exactly the same.

But the illustrations had enough detail to bring that place back to me.

The playable jailer had blue skin, a skinny body, and unusually long limbs. Just as I’d requested, the black clothes that wouldn’t show bloodstains, the sewn-shut eyes and mouth, and the ears pierced with nails were all clear at a glance.

The prisoners each looked different.

One was as thin as a starving person, while another sagged beneath folds of flesh. There were others with horribly twisted arms, holes in their bodies, or black blood pouring from their mouths.

Each had a clear identity of their own.

The background images followed my requirements well too.

The layout really made it feel like the inside of a cancer patient’s body.

My heart raced.

The words came out on their own.

“Good work.”

Han Seorim had done an excellent job.

No, better than excellent. The best possible job.

Developing a game’s visuals was an important process that could shape the identity of the game itself.

Only once the visuals were complete could I add details to the setting and progression that suited the atmosphere, along with character changes at each branch in the game and the enemies’ abilities.

As I kept looking over the illustrations, thoroughly pleased with the results, Han Seorim began to show off.

“I’ve tried character design before, so it was easy.”

Not a trace of modesty.

Well, that was far better than getting depressed over how bad the drawings supposedly were.

Individuality came from the self.

Without confidence in yourself, your work would only turn out half-baked.

“So what do we do next?”

“There’s nothing major for you to do right away. Just keep refining these sketches. Now it’s my turn to suffer.”

“What are you going to do?”

“System design.”

“System design?”

“Just what it sounds like. Designing things. I’ll establish the detailed systems based on what I wrote in the game design document. What the rules will be, how the game will progress, how to set character stats and balance them against enemy abilities, and so on.”

“...Wait. My head’s starting to hurt.”

“Yeah. It’s a headache of a process.”

At this stage, a single mistake could become poison that brought down the entire game.

That was why I had to be thorough and certain.

A mistake here could waste time later during full development. It could even force me to scrap the game and start over.

‘Still.’

I couldn’t deny that it was one of the most enjoyable parts.

I was quite literally creating a world and shaping it however I pleased.

If I didn’t enjoy imagining and trying new things, I would never have dreamed of becoming a game director.

A smile crept onto my face.

That was when it happened.

“Hey.”

“What?”

“You look like a total pervert right now.”

“...”

That blunt remark, pure MZ generation, shut me right up.

* * *

The next week or so was devoted entirely to design.

The game’s core idea was “a jailer in hell who uses various torture tools as weapons to catch prisoners trying to escape.”

The genre was top-down survival horror action.

The player would wake up unarmed somewhere in hell.

There, they would acquire their first torture tool, or weapon, and fight the enemies in front of them.

The basic progression involved moving between rooms, collecting new weapons along the way, and hunting down each chapter’s boss.

That meant I had to research all kinds of torture tools, turn them into game mechanics, and assign values to them.

Once I had the framework down and documented, I considered the other parts.

The game I was making wasn’t meant to be a simple action game. I was aiming for survival horror.

The enemies had to be grotesque, the mechanics frightening, and the tension could never drop.

I needed various tricks and presentation techniques to achieve that, and there was a problem.

‘I need audio assets.’

For a horror game, sound required just as much care as the graphics.

Did I even need to explain how much hearing contributed to fear?

‘I’ll mostly use open-source audio, but...’

The game needed its own character.

It needed sounds unique to it.

I was still turning that problem over in my head when Han Seorim spoke.

“Hey, I’m done coloring.”

I nodded and put my thoughts aside.

The fully colored illustrations were on the monitor.

I walked over and gave them a quick look, but couldn’t find anything worth criticizing.

‘I’ll have to think more about the sound.’

It didn’t matter if I added audio much later, anyway.

For now, I needed to focus on design, item details, and balancing.

And before any of that, there was something else I had to do.

“Are you busy today?”

“Me?”

“There isn’t anyone else here.”

“Hmm. I don’t have anything special planned.”

Han Seorim sounded wary.

It was five in the afternoon. By now, I could more or less tell what Seorim was thinking.

“I’m not asking you on a date. I’m not asking you to dinner either.”

“Then what is it?”

“If you’ve got time, let’s play a game before you leave.”

“Out of nowhere?”

“It’d be pretty funny for someone making a game to have never played one.”

“That’s true, but this is still pretty sudden.”

“That’s because the right game just came out.”

Confusion spread across Han Seorim’s face.

“Just came out? What are you talking about?”

“You’ll see.”

It was time for Han Seorim to start working on the pixel art.

This probably applied to every profession, but exposure to other work was especially important for game artists.

Understanding how a game flowed through firsthand experience would make it easier to apply that knowledge to design and production.

If I could, I would have made Seorim play through all the famous masterpieces already available at this point, one after another. But we didn’t have that much time. More importantly, I needed to avoid overloading someone who was still a blank slate with more material than she could absorb.

After all, filling someone’s head with ideas when they barely had any experience would only send their work in every direction.

That was why a game in a similar genre to the one we were developing was the right choice.

And as it happened, a survival horror action masterpiece that would go down in history had come out just four days ago.

“This is what you’ll play.”

I showed Seorim the boxed game I’d brought.

Seorim narrowed her eyes and read the title.

“Dark Space?”

Dark Space.

A survival horror masterpiece of its time, still remembered nearly twenty years into the future.

That was the game Han Seorim would play.

“Set aside about four days. I brought the console too, so you can play here. You’re not doing anything else until you finish it.”

Han Seorim gave a disbelieving laugh.

“So my first-ever game is something this gloomy.”

“Do you dislike scary things?”

“Of course not.”

Tap! Han Seorim snatched the box from me.

A crooked smile hung at the corner of her mouth.

“I’ve never been startled by a horror movie in my life. Honestly, I don’t really understand people who get scared by them.”

That confident attitude put me at ease.

I’d been a little worried Seorim might be too scared to play.

“Good. Let’s get started. Want me to buy some food?”

“Instant noodles.”

“Sure.”

I stopped by the convenience store and bought something to eat.

At last, we turned on the game. After learning the basic controls, Han Seorim began to play.

It took exactly five minutes.

“Aaaah!!!”

For Han Seorim to scream, that is.

* * *

It went without saying, but the level of fear varied by medium.

That was because each offered a different amount of information you could experience directly.

Comics tended to be scarier than novels, and movies scarier than comics.

And games, without question, were the medium that made fear feel the most real of anything currently available.

“Aaaah!!!”

When you played a game, you had to become the person experiencing the fear.

You weren’t simply watching a frightening situation. You had to take control and solve it yourself.

From that perspective, it wasn’t strange for Han Seorim, who claimed to have never been startled in her life, to react so strongly.

Anyway, that wasn’t what mattered.

“Why are you jumping out of there?! Ah! Go away! I said go away!”

Even while screaming at the top of her lungs, Han Seorim never let go of the controller.

Teeth clenched, Seorim kept playing with fierce determination. It was obvious that sheer stubbornness was driving the effort.

And amid all that, something stood out.

“Aaaah!!!”

What a wonderfully clear, piercing scream.

Inspiration surged through me.

‘Found it.’

My audio asset.

“Eeeek!”

A thought struck me.

What if I remixed that scream and used it in the opening?

What if I used it for each monster?

What about sound effects? Yes, it might be good to make the monsters scream differently depending on the weapon.

My gaze turned to Han Seorim, who was jolting around in the seat.

I needed to collect more screams.

‘What horror games were famous around this time?’

Luckily, a few came to mind.

Easter Egg

Footnotes:

“MZ generation” is a Korean label grouping millennials and Generation Z together.

Dark Space appears to allude to the survival horror game Dead Space.

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