Parallel World Game Developer

Chapter 1: Chapter #1: So, My Games Are Very Easy? Are You Sure About That?

[Questionnaire Results: Very Easy]

Ethan Vale sat in front of his monitor, staring blankly at the feedback metrics displayed across the screen.

Every single player who had tested his student project had submitted the exact same rating.

He leaned back in his creaking chair, still processing the sheer surrealism of the last thirty minutes. He had transmigrated.

In his previous life, Ethan had been a senior lead designer with a net worth comfortably sitting in the nine-figure range.

He had been enjoying a vacation on his private yacht when a sudden, violent squall capsized the vessel, sending him drowning into the endless dark waves.

When he finally opened his eyes, he was sitting in a cramped dorm room at the State Institute of Technology in Seattle. He was now living in a parallel world called Terra.

Sifting through the original owner’s memories had been a depressing exercise. If his original Earth had seen a golden age of gaming—a cultural explosion that elevated the medium into true art—then Terra was an absolute creative desert.

The tech was here, but the creativity was missing.

Every masterpiece game that he knew from his previous Earth—none of them existed here. The more he thought about it, the more a quiet thrill ran through him.

A market this starved wouldn’t know what hit it. He could conquer this industry with one hand tied behind his back.

He glanced back at the questionnaire results on his screen.

’Very Easy?’ he thought, a faint smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. ’You think this is easy? Just wait.’

[Ding! Game Crafting System Initialized: Objective — Super Difficulty!]

[Collecting "Super Difficult" feedback on questionnaires will improve the host’s development capabilities!]

[Current Super Difficulty Points: 0/1000]

[Next Upgrade Reward: Holographic Projection Technology]

Ethan let out a slow, measured breath.

As an industry veteran, he hardly needed a cheat system to dominate a market this stagnant, but better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it, and having an ace up his sleeve certainly didn’t hurt.

He needed players to genuinely suffer. He needed them to be so broken by his design that they had no choice but to rate it as brutally hard.

He dismissed the transparent interface with a thought and cracked his knuckles over the keyboard.

"Easy is easy. The project I turned in got the exact same feedback, and I’m totally fine with it," Marcus Shaw said, leaning over from his own desk.

Marcus was another game design major and Ethan’s roommate, currently clicking idly through a tech demo. "Isn’t a passing grade enough to graduate? C is for Complete, man. Anything more is just wasted effort."

Their senior seminar professor had recently assigned their capstone project. They were instructed to create an original game, upload it to a public storefront, and let the final grade be dictated by total downloads and user review scores.

Almost everyone in the program shared Marcus’s mentality. Just hit the bare minimum metrics, coast through the grading period, and graduate into a comfortable, boring corporate job.

"Watch this," Ethan said, pulling up the university’s development suite. "I’m going to give them something new."

He flashed a dark, knowing smile. "Let’s see who tries to fill in ’Very fuckin’ Easy’ this time."

He immediately opened a fresh project file.

In a matter of seconds, a fundamentally agonizing concept clicked into place in his mind: Getting Over It.

In his previous life, this deceptively simple indie title had driven countless players to the brink of insanity. It had earned the affectionate title of a "screaming simulator" among content creators.

Terra possessed an incredibly streamlined, hyper-accessible game engine ecosystem.

The development clients were natively loaded with massive, integrated libraries of premium assets. They boasted robust physics engines, royalty-free audio tracks, and pre-compiled logic scripts.

The technical barrier to entry was practically non-existent.

With this kind of heavily optimized infrastructure, a solo developer could drag and drop a fully functioning, highly complex title into existence in a single afternoon.

If these unified development tools had existed in his previous life, massively delayed AAA blockbusters like GTA VI would have been finished and shipped in a fraction of the time.

Ethan paused, his hand hovering over his mechanical keyboard as a sudden, bitter realization washed over him.

’... Damn... I died before GTA VI came out... Fck that...’*

The sheer scale of the hardware and software proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Terra desperately wanted a thriving gaming industry.

Yet, their creative vision was completely, hopelessly stunted.

The industry’s skill tree had been dumped entirely into technical fidelity, leaving the actual gameplay mechanics severely lacking.

They had all the tools in the world and no idea how to build something fun.

"What are you making this time?" Marcus asked, walking over to stand behind Ethan’s chair.

"Something very simple," Ethan replied evenly.

His mouse flew across the screen, rapidly dragging and dropping free-use assets from the editor’s library.

Within minutes, a bizarre, patchwork monstrosity took shape on the canvas. It was a bald, shirtless man stuffed waist-deep into a metal cauldron, gripping a massive climbing hammer.

The textures were harshly stitched together, creating an aesthetic that was intentionally jarring and absurd.

Ethan ran a quick animation test.

The man’s arms swung the hammer in a jerky, mechanical arc that looked utterly ridiculous.

"What kind of mob is that?" Marcus asked, his brow furrowing as he stared at the monitor.

"This is the protagonist," Ethan said, his expression completely deadpan.

This Man in Cauldron had once been the ultimate source of suffering for every major streamer on the internet.

Just seeing the cauldron and the hammer was usually enough to make a veteran gamer’s eye twitch.

With the character model locked in, Ethan moved on to the level design.

The map for Getting Over It looked like a careless pile of junk. It was a chaotic mess of poorly rendered rocks, discarded furniture, and random steel girders slapped together.

But as an expert, Ethan knew that every single pixel of that mountain was meticulously, sadistically engineered.

If a player made a millimeter of error at the wrong angle, gravity would ruthlessly send them tumbling all the way back to the starting line.

He worked through the afternoon, assembling the mountain of trash with surgical precision.

When the level geometry was finalized, he pulled his headset microphone close and began recording the background narration.

For the next hour, he fed a steady stream of philosophical quotes, gentle taunts, and soothing observations about the nature of failure directly into the audio files.

Marcus, who had been watching the entire process unfold, listened to the voiceover lines in mounting horror.

He stared at Ethan like the man had grown a second head. ’Is he completely insane?’ Marcus thought. ’Who actively tries to provoke their own players like this? He’s going to get crucified in the reviews.’

"Alright, that’s a wrap," Ethan said, pushing his chair back and reaching for his water bottle.

His throat was entirely dry from the endless monologue of dry sarcasm. He compiled the build, opened the Nexus developer client, and navigated to the storefront upload page.

Under the game’s description box, Ethan typed a single, provocative line:

[So, you really think my games are Very Easy? Are you sure about that?]

Marcus stared at the dark grey and teal interface of the Nexus store page, his jaw slightly slack.

He was entirely convinced his roommate had suffered a psychotic break.

Everything Ethan had done this afternoon—the intentionally janky character model, the punishing map layout, the passive-aggressive voiceovers, and now this aggressively arrogant description—was basically begging the internet to tear him apart.

"It’s live," Ethan said, shutting down his rig and throwing an arm around Marcus’s shoulders. "Come on, let’s get out of here. I’m in a good mood today, dinner is on me."

Feeling the energy of his younger, healthier body, Ethan couldn’t help but smile.

As he pulled the dorm door shut, he cast one last glance back at his silent computer. The foundation of his new empire had just been laid.

Ethan’s intentionally antagonistic store description did exactly what it was supposed to do.

It was graduation season at the local Seattle universities, a time when the Nexus new-releases tab was flooded with student projects.

Industry recruiters kept a close eye on the trending charts, knowing that a breakout hit could signal a promising new hire.

More importantly, this was prime season for content creators.

The gaming community viewed the game design and animation majors as a reliable source of accidental comedy.

The senior projects were often buggy, overambitious, or just plain weird, making them perfect fodder for live reactions.

Silver was currently live on the platform to his usual massive audience. As one of the top variety streamers on the site, his broadcasts reliably pulled in tens of thousands of viewers.

Lately, he had been making a habit of farming the student game section for content. The games were janky enough to be hilarious, providing excellent material for his stream.

His signature bit was playing a flawed student project, finding the review section, and typing out two sarcastic words: "Very Easy."

He was in the middle of closing out another underwhelming puzzle platformer when his stream chat started moving at lightspeed.

[NoobSlayer_99: SILVER YOU GOTTA SEE THIS NEW GAME]

[Toxic_Timmy: bro the dev literally called you out LMAO]

[GamerDad88: play Getting Over It. look at the description!]

[LoreMaster: he’s mocking your reviews man you gonna take that?]

[ConsolePeasant: LMAOO bro said very easy 💀]

Silver leaned forward, his ergonomic gaming chair creaking as he pulled up the Nexus store and typed the title into the search bar.

When he saw the developer’s description, he let out a sharp bark of laughter.

"Look at this guy, trying to play me for a fool," Silver laughed, adjusting his headset. "He knows exactly what he’s doing. This whole description is bait aimed right at me."

Everyone on the platform knew about Silver’s habit of dropping ’Very Easy’ on student games. The developer was obviously trying to ride his clout for free marketing.

"Are you kidding me? He actually has the nerve to charge two bucks for this?" Silver scoffed, pointing at the $1.99 price tag next to the thumbnail.

"Look at this character model! Look at the textures! Fifty cents would be pushing it!"

He clicked the purchase button anyway, holding his hands up to the webcam. "But hey, chat, we’re fair here. We give everything an honest try."

Silver smirked, downloading the tiny file size in seconds.

"I’m going to play this, beat it in twenty minutes, and drop the sharpest ’Very Easy’ review this kid has ever seen."

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