Chapter Text
On the day of the launch, Kim Dokja drags himself into the empty office and makes himself a cup of coffee.
He knows today is supposed to be The Big Day, but he can’t bring himself to feel anything above mild terror.
The open-world RPG, Ways of Survival, will transition over to paid content starting from 7PM today. As their company’s only product, a lot is riding on this. Everyone’s jobs, for example. His future career. Maybe his life. No big deal. No pressure at all.
Kim Dokja is just a lowly coder on the team. Actually, he’s the only programmer on the team, and he’s mostly just telling the game engine what to do and letting the massive cluster of machines do the rest of the rendering. He’s spent his entire life loving open-world RPG games, and the last few years working on this game. Like it or not, this game has sort of become a part of his life.
He catches sight of himself in the dark office window and grimaces. There are bags under his eyes from several months of poor sleep. He’s gaunt from far too many meals consisting of cup ramen and coffee. His muscles ache even though he hasn’t hit the gym in a year. At least there isn’t anyone else around to see. Yet.
Han Sooyoung is the next person to sweep into the office. Unlike Kim Dokja, her hair and clothes are immaculate. The only clue that she’s been feeling stressed from the deadlines is her lack of makeup.
“Hey,” she says briefly, before making her way over to the coffee machine. Kim Dokja flips open the lid to show her the freshly ground coffee beans, and she shoots him a grateful look.
“Morning,” he says, sipping his hot, tasteless coffee. “Did you get a chance to look at the Epilogue? I was supposed to start on it yesterday, but our servers went down and they won’t be back till next Monday.”
Han Sooyoung grimaces in annoyance, as she violently stabs at the hot water button. “Yeah, I saw. We’re not gonna get them in time.”
“What are we gonna do then?”
Han Sooyoung shrugs. “I’ll come up with something.” As if she hadn’t stayed up all of last night rewriting the entire War of Demon and Saints subplot. The coffee machine spits out her requested cup of coffee. She grabs it and gulps it down, scalding hot.
“At this point, we’re just gonna have text scrolling over a black screen.”
“I mean, that’s what Minecraft did, and it worked out well for them.”
“We’re not Minecraft, though.”
“We try to be,” Han Sooyoung mutters under her breath, before they both share a smile at their old joke.
“This is going to be ugly,” Kim Dokja says lightly.
“Yeah, yeah.” Han Sooyoung stares glumly out the window. Their office is located on the 20th floor, and Kim Dokja has heard the following joke more than a few times in meetings: What’s the difference between jumping from the 2nd floor vs the 20th floor? One is “splat, AAAAAAAAH” and the other is “AAAAAAAAAAH, splat”.
He sincerely hopes, from the bottom of his heart, that that look out the window had simply been that.
“When do you think you can get it done by?”
Han Sooyoung checks her watch. “Uhhhhhh, by about late afternoon.”
The door to the office opens, and Yoo Sangah arrives. Unlike the rest of them, Yoo Sangah always looks put-together and perfect. She gives them both a brilliant, blinding smile when she sees them next to the coffee machine.
“Good morning!” she chirps. “Launch day! Isn’t that exciting?”
Kim Dokja returns her smile with a weak one of his own. They move aside to make room for her as she begins to brew tea. (“It’s less addicting,” Yoo Sangah had explained once. “And plus, when I have time for it, I really need to bring some of my custom blends from home.” But then again, she still drinks at least three cups of tea a day. No one has pointed this out to her yet.)
“How do you feel about translating the entirety of the Epilogue into English in an hour?” Kim Dokja asks.
Yoo Sangah’s smile fades. She casts Han Sooyoung a puzzled expression. “Huh?”
Briefly, Kim Dokja summarizes their situation. Their situation being: they have no Epilogue.
Han Sooyoung gets the hint, and puts down her empty coffee cup with a sour look on her face.
“Okay, okay, I get it.” Looking vaguely hunted, Han Sooyoung makes her way over to her desk and turns on her desktop in a clatter of jackets and keyboards.
“I’m sure it’ll be alright,” Yoo Sangah says reassuringly.
“Of course it’ll be alright,” Han Sooyoung replies, matching her tone, and then whipping right back to her sarcastic self. “Now can everyone shut up for a bit? Inspiration doesn’t come easy.”
But then, after stretching out her arms and cracking her knuckles, she starts typing away. Within moments, a steady stream of keyboard clacking sounds come from her desk.
Kim Dokja and Yoo Sangah share an amused smile. Despite the tight deadline, neither of them is that worried about the content of the Epilogue. After all, Han Sooyoung is legendary for her ability to produce top-tier content under insane conditions without missing a beat. Both of them are secret fans of her work. Officially, they’re supposed to be her first two readers and suggest any changes if necessary, but in all their years of working together, the only possible feedback has been: “It’s perfect. No notes”. The writing is not the part they have to worry about.
Yoo Sangah lowers her voice. “Do you know if the Dokkaebi King has found us any official playtesters yet? With the launch date coming up soon, we’re going to need a QA team for any future updates.” Her concerned gaze sweeps over Kim Dokja’s appearance, and she frowns. “He’s not planning on making you do all that work, is he?”
The Dokkaebi King is really just their company’s CEO, a Chinese man that Kim Dokja has only ever met via teleconference calls. He tends to keep his video off. In fact, he rarely ever even speaks, preferring to type troll comments in the chat. His background picture was apparently set to one of those ancient Chinese historical paintings in an attempt to seem cultured, but Yoo Sangah and Kim Dokja had once spent an entire meeting guffawing over the ugly goblin face painted front and center. Ever since then, just between the two of them, they’d started calling the CEO the Dokkaebi King. At this point, Kim Dokja doesn’t even remember the man’s name.
Still, he is the one spending all this money to create their game - Ways of Survival. Plus, all of them technically work for him. So Kim Dokja just tries to keep his head down and stay out of his way.
“We really need to hire more people,” Yoo Sangah says. It’s a tired old complaint. All of them are overworked, even her. Even with the help of Google Translate, there is localization work that only Yoo Sangah can do. The beta version of the game is set to be released in three separate countries: Korea, China, and the U.S. Kim Dokja doesn’t envy the amount of work that she has.
“We definitely need an in-house playtester,” Kim Dokja agrees. “I can try to do it, but I’m really not well-suited for it.”
“Not well-suited for it?” Yoo Sangah looks amused. “You basically coded the whole thing - surely you know all the hacks for it. How to enable god-mode, and fly around?”
Kim Dokja snorts. “There’s no such thing. Ways of Survival is 100% a skill expression game. I guess exploration is a part of it, and I’ve got an advantage there. But the fights? I could never.”
“You didn’t build in any hacks?” Yoo Sangah teases. “You know, with no one around to review your code, you could have built in a bitcoin miner and made loads of money. No one would’ve stopped you.”
Right at that moment, the door opens, and Han Myungoh, their head of finance, comes in.
Kim Dokja immediately stifles his retort and concentrates on his coffee, making his presence as small as possible. As much as the idea amuses him, it would probably send Han Myungoh into hysterics.
“Oh! My! My oh my! Well, isn’t it our very own Yoo Sangah?” Han Myungoh is dressed in a thin suit, with a pinstripe shirt. As usual, he ignores Kim Dokja completely.
Kim Dokja looks down into his empty cup of coffee, and zones out a little as Han Myungoh and Yoo Sangah trade niceties.
He wonders absently if he should put more effort into his appearance. He rarely ever wears well-tailored suits into the office, even though it’s technically company policy. His excuse is that most of his day is spent hooked up with the game engine, coding, and that nobody ever needs to see him anyway. All of his teleconference meetings tend to have the video off, and so as the years wore on, it just made more and more sense to wear slightly more comfortable clothes.
In contrast, both Yoo Sangah and Han Myungoh wouldn’t look out of place at any large company. After Ways of Survival was done, they would probably have no problems finding jobs at any other place.
Not Kim Dokja, though. He had spent so long specializing in working with this specific game engine, which isn’t even industry standard. Unless the language he’s working in suddenly becomes incredibly popular, which it won’t unless Ways of Survival itself becomes insanely popular….he’s sort of out of luck.
“-talking about hiring a QA person,” he hears Yoo Sangah saying. Kim Dokja’s attention drifts back to the conversation. “Do you know if there are any resumes that have made it into the pipeline? I’d offer to interview them myself, if we’re short-staffed on that front. It’s just, we really need one.”
Han Myungoh has a pinched expression on his face that means he hasn’t given the subject much thought. Kim Dokja is pretty sure the job description hasn’t even been written, let alone posted, despite the number of times he and Yoo Sangah have brought the issue up.
“Let’s just get past launch date first,” Han Myungoh says. “We’ve gotta have a product before we start testing it, right? And besides, once we have players, they’ll naturally start to file bug reports themselves.”
“But that’s not a great user experience, isn’t it?” Yoo Sangah says, a small crease in between her eyebrows. She’s still trying to reason with him; Kim Dokja can’t help but both admire and shake his head at her persistence. Han Myungoh, however, seems to be more and more done with the conversation.
He catches sight of Kim Dokja, as if noticing him finally, and says: “Well! If there are no bugs in the code, then we’ve got nothing to worry about right?!? Haha!”
Yeah, that’s not how this works, Kim Dokja bites down his retort.
“Shut up!” Han Sooyoung yells from her desk. Han Myungoh jumps.
Out of everyone in the office, Han Sooyoung is the only one who can sometimes put him in his place. Even though none of them work under his department, he sometimes sees the other two as underlings. Not Han Sooyoung. As the company’s first hire, its architect, and main writer, her job level is roughly at the same level as his, if not higher.
“It’s launch day!” Han Sooyoung yells. Amazingly, the sound of clacking from her keyboard still hasn’t stopped. “Why am I the only one working?!? Get your ass into your cubicle, Han Myungoh! Do your damn job and find us a damned QA playtester!”
Han Myungoh scurries off, but not without a muttered “but I’m not HR…” under his breath.
Unlike the rest of them, he has his own office room. As soon as the door closes behind him, Han Sooyoung pokes her head out from behind her monitor.
“What does he even do anyway?” she complains. “Anyway, sorry for yelling. Both of you are sort of blocked on me, so it’s fine if you don’t work. Go sleep in the break room or something. Take a walk. I promise I’ll have the Epilogue done by today.”
Yoo Sangah gives her a grateful smile. “Don’t push yourself too hard,” she says fondly. “I’m sure whatever you come up with will be great.”
“Aw, shut up. It’s going to be absolute fucking trash.”
“That’s not true!” both Kim Dokja and Yoo Sangah exclaim.
“It’s really nothing new,” Han Sooyoung continues, pulling her head back, but not before Kim Dokja catches sight of a faint reddening on her cheeks. Her typing speed slows down briefly, and then speeds up again. Kim Dokja had once challenged her to a wpm contest, and had been horrified to discover that she could break over 80 wpm while eating pocky sticks with one free hand. “I’ve seen a million post-apocalyptic video game settings and storylines. They’re like Isekai light novels now, they’re all the rage. I don’t think anyone will be surprised by the Epilogue - the groundwork for it has been laid out for a while now. Just gotta stick the landing.”
“It’s all in the execution,” Yoo Sangah says, beaming. “And yours is perfect. You have a real way with words, Han Sooyoung.”
“Shut uuuuup,” Han Sooyoung groans, but her typing speed increases. “Okay, but actually though, save all the praise for when you read the whole thing. Not right now. That’ll give me more motivation to finish.”
When the work day is done, but there’s still no Epilogue, Kim Dokja goes outside to find Han Sooyoung not writing, but pacing back and forth in front of her desk.
It’s not a good sign. In all his time knowing her, Kim Dokja has never seen Han Sooyoung look this conflicted. Instantly, his estimation of how much longer he will have to stay goes up by several hours.
“Hey,” he says carefully. Please don’t have writer's block, please don’t have writer's block, please don’t have writer's block. “Is everything ok?”
Han Sooyoung stops pacing. She turns to look at him, and her forehead creases in a worried frown.
“You’re getting awfully thin,” she says randomly.
Huh? What did that have to do with anything?
Kim Dokja stares blankly at her for a moment. But Han Sooyoung doesn’t offer an explanation for the sudden observation. She just stares at him, her expression slowly growing more and more determined.
“I think…I have an idea.”
Han Sooyoung resumes pacing. She brings a fist up to her mouth and bites the soft pad of her thumb, very gently. Kim Dokja can tell that she wants to chew on her fingernails, but years spent undoing that habit had softened the gesture. He watches her worriedly.
“Right now,” she says. “Can you give me an estimate of how much of this game feels complete? As in, based on how far you can currently get, and how far the storylines have gone, how much longer do you think it will take to reach a satisfying ending?”
Kim Dokja looks at the clock, but Han Sooyoung waves a hand. “Ignore the deadline! I know it’s in two hours, but - as a player, as this game’s first player, you’ve lived and died in that game more times than I can count. How much of the story feels done?”
Helplessly, Kim Dokja can only look at her.
The Ways of Survival takes a game mechanic from the Doki Doki Literature Club, Virtue’s Last Reward, and other meta rule-breaking games in that genre. Players are meant to die, restart the game, and play through multiple iterations of the game in order to reach the final ending. It starts out in a subway train in the middle of Seoul, and as the game progresses, the player explores further and further out into remote areas of the map.
As of this moment, Kim Dokja has played through over a thousand restarts and has explored every generated area so thoroughly that he knows every nook and cranny of it in his sleep. But thanks to the way the game is structured, and in part thanks to his personality, he never gets tired of it.
“The only piece missing from the map is the Epilogue,” he says slowly.
“I know,” Han Sooyoung says abstractedly. She makes a frustrated gesture with her hands, nearly ripping her finger out of her mouth. “God, why are endings so hard?”
Silently, Kim Dokja looks down. He can’t really put into words what he truly wants to say, which is that a part of him wishes the game would never end.
“I think it’s time we stood up for ourselves,” Han Sooyoung says. “When I signed up for this, I was fine with making any old game. But I’ve seen how much work you’ve put into it, and I don’t think any other company is using the same game engine we are. I’ve played with it a little. I went back to the beginning of the game, just to see if I could get any ideas. It’s amazing. There’s a lot of potential here, and management is just pissing it away in favor of a rushed, third-rate game.”
“Uh…” Kim Dokja says, not entirely sure how to take this.
“I think I’m gonna ask for a beta release,” Han Sooyoung says abruptly. “We don’t have a complete product. We shouldn’t sell it as one. I think I’m going to hold the Epilogue hostage until we can get a QA person and more time to actually develop the games.”
Kim Dokja stares at her, open-mouthed.
“Are you serious?” he asks, his voice an embarrassingly high-pitched squeak. “You’re going to hold the Epilogue hostage?” The launch is in two hours, and now this?
“Dead serious! Tell me, Kim Dokja, what percentage of this game is actually tested? What do you think will happen if we actually launch this game for real?”
Kim Dokja closes his mouth. He grimaces bitterly.
“Half of all players will run into a game-breaking bug within the first twenty minutes,” he says. “None of this code is tested, save for happy paths that were used for company demos. And even those may have broken, with some of the later additions that were forced into the game.”
Han Sooyoung lifts an eyebrow at him. “Surely not that many,” she says.
“We’re going to get review bombed for sure,” Kim Dokja says. “It's frustrating, cause there is probably over 400 hours of content. And most of the player base won’t even make it past the starting area.”
Han Sooyoung grimaces.
She knows it’s true, and she won’t even ask him if he’s gone to management about it.
“So it has to be a beta release,” she says. “We can’t fix bugs if we don’t have a player base. And we won’t have a player base if they buy a ‘completed’ game, only to find out that it’s not actually completed. This entire time, we’ve been using the metric of “how much of the story is complete”? Without actually considering how much of the actual game is complete.”
Kim Dokja shrugs. This is something he has brought up before, but then again, he’s just a lowly coder. No one listens to him. After a while, he’d just given up.
Han Myungoh sticks his head out of his office.
“Do any of you know how to set up the conference room projector?” he asks. “The board wants to be on a video call for the launch announcement.”
Han Sooyoung grins. Kim Dokja feels his emotions rise from slightly mild terror to full-out terror.
“Are you sure about this?” he asks in a strangled whisper.
Han Sooyoung barks out a short laugh. “I’m not afraid of the board. What are they gonna do to me?”
“Pull our funding?” Kim Dokja suggests. “Can the project? Fire us all and bring on a team that will rush out a third-rate product by the deadline?”
“Good luck finding anyone else in the world that can manage the Star Stream,” Han Sooyoung scoffs. Her dark eyes seem to light up with an inner fire. “And good luck finding anyone good enough to replace me.”
“What’s happening?” Han Myungoh calls from his office doorway, not having heard their whispered conversation. “What are you talking about?”
Kim Dokja looks at Han Sooyoung. Han Sooyoung looks back at him. The dangerous light in her eyes isn’t dimming. If anything, her smile is just dragging wider and wider as she sees the dawning horror on his face.
“Well, whaddaya think?” she says cheerily. “Plot twists!”