Parallel World Game Developer

Chapter 17: Chapter #17: John K. Carter

Hello there!

My bad for the late upload, got caught up doing my capstone project.

Don’t forget to leave a comment and tell what you think of the story! Also, a review would help. Enjoy reading!

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After the riots tore through the island, the kingdom’s infrastructure completely collapsed.

The King had barricaded himself inside the high castle alongside the Collector and his royal entourage.

They prayed the Collector could synthesize a panacea, but their stockpiled materials completely ran dry long before the cure could be perfected.

Up in that mountaintop fortress, there was no fairy-tale princess waiting to be saved, nor was there any of the kingdom’s former glory.

In their final, desperate ’feast,’ the uninfected elite turned their sights on their own people.

With the Malaise spreading like wildfire and infecting everyone in its path, the King himself was ultimately not spared.

As his symptoms worsened, he demanded that the Collector produce a miracle cure.

But the alchemist couldn’t do it. Instead, he proposed a radical, horrifying alternative—the creation of artificial human containers.

By fusing mutated flora, raw red crystals, and highly specialized cells, they engineered a vessel.

That was the protagonist.

That glowing green mass of parasitic algae.

The King’s soul was violently transplanted into the sludge, while the Philosopher’s Stone was embedded into his original chest to preserve his rotting human body.

However, the traumatic separation of soul and body completely wiped the King’s memories. Outside of the Collector, absolutely no one knew the truth.

The Hand of the King, loyal to a fault, had been blindly guarding the King’s empty, motionless body the entire time.

This was the exact scene players encountered at the climax of the 0-Cell difficulty tutorial.

After violently executing the Hand of the King, the player was forced to plunge their weapon into the catatonic King seated on the throne.

The red Philosopher’s Stone shattered, destroying a body that no longer housed a soul.

Watching the kingdom fall to ruin, the Time Keeper kicked the King’s soul back into the cycle of reincarnation again and again, desperately hoping he could eventually save the island.

But the cruel irony was that her temporal powers were strictly limited.

She could only rewind the clock back to the exact morning the epidemic officially broke out.

In one of the final, desperate loops, the Collector actually succeeded in refining the panacea.

But tragically, the only ones left to drink it were the Collector himself and the Beheaded.

If a player managed to survive the absolute hell of the 5-Boss Cell difficulty, they could finally reach the Astrolabe and find the alchemist waiting for them.

Up in the Observatory, the alchemist stood completely alone. Surrounded by massive, top-of-the-line stargazing instruments, the player could finally see a clear blue sky and a massive, glowing moon.

This was where they faced the true final boss: The Collector.

"It’s a damn shame Nova ran off so fast. He didn’t even stick around to watch me flawless the Collector," Silver complained, leaning back in his ergonomic chair with a disappointed sigh.

[voidwalker_gg: flawless the collector? bro how many times have you died already?]

[MooseTracks47: literally zero self-awareness LMAO]

[CriticalHit88: The Collector: ’Oh you’re back again? You’re so persistent~’]

[Salty_Tears: ’Thanks for bringing the cells! I was getting a little thirsty!’]

[xXSlayer99Xx: ’Gulp gulp gulp~~’]

[LoreMaster: the collector literally grew up drinking the panacea from you]

[GamerDad88: ’Today is another extremely thirsty day!’]

Silver completely ignored the chat’s relentless mockery.

His eyes were locked onto the monitor, his hand furiously clicking as he slashed at the Collector with the Cursed Sword.

Every single strike sent a spray of pixelated crimson across the screen, but the Collector always managed to perfectly time his heal, pulling out a vial of the panacea and downing it in one massive gulp.

His massive health bar constantly replenished itself right before Silver’s eyes.

The community had already universally dubbed the Observatory as the ’officially designated graveyard.’

Silver desperately wanted to pull off a flawless, no-hit run, but the mechanical execution required was absurdly difficult.

With the Cursed Sword equipped, a single stray pixel of damage meant instant, permanent death.

The run was over if he made even a micro-mistake.

A sudden, erratic energy blast clipped his character’s hitbox.

The screen went dark, and Silver let out a long, heavy sigh.

The challenge had failed again. Hitting the Collector wasn’t the issue; the sheer difficulty lay in dancing through the bullet-hell attacks without taking a single scratch.

At the end of the true game, even after finally executing the Collector, the island remained completely doomed.

The Time Keeper had no other option but to violently kick the Beheaded back into the endless loop, praying that the next run would magically yield a different outcome.

But that solution simply didn’t exist.

Every possible ending made it painfully clear that the kingdom was beyond saving.

Everyone, including the Time Keeper herself, was trapped in a permanent, infinite hell of reincarnation.

"This is legitimately the most brilliant game I’ve played in years," Silver said, his voice entirely serious as he praised the developer.

The bleak, cyclical ending had completely shattered the community’s expectations.

Almost every other game on the market offered a neatly wrapped happy ending.

You clear the final level, you save the princess, and the hero lives happily ever after.

But in the rotting, subterranean depths of Dead Cells, there was no salvation—only endless repetition.

Your princess is in another castle, and this castle is already a tomb.

After the sheer narrative depth of Dead Cells was fully exposed, the game unsurprisingly cemented itself at the absolute top of the global monthly download charts.

When average gamers hit a dry spell and didn’t know what to play next, they naturally gravitated toward the trending lists.

For most people, a simple screenshot or trailer wasn’t enough to justify a purchase.

Word-of-mouth recommendations from friends, streamer meltdowns, and universally glowing reviews were the ultimate driving factors.

Alongside those metrics, dominating the storefront charts was the most powerful advertising possible.

Before Dead Cells dropped, the games that usually squatted at the number one spot would inevitably accumulate a massive wave of negative reviews over time.

Players would buy into the hype, realize the game was a shallow, pay-to-win cash grab, and immediately review-bomb it for being overrated.

Every gamer had their own independent tastes, and when a title couldn’t mechanically back up its popularity, it plummeted fast.

But this time, things were entirely different.

Gamers experiencing a content drought opened the storefront, fully expecting to see the usual corporate slop, only to find Dead Cells sitting comfortably on the throne.

When new players checked the community stats, they didn’t question why the game was still trending. It was an absolute anomaly.

The game ruthlessly abused its player base, and the vast majority of the community was permanently hard-stuck on 3 or 4 Boss Cells, completely unable to unlock the true ending.

Yet, despite the agonizing difficulty and the endless deaths, every single player who saw Dead Cells sitting at number one shared the exact same thought: ’Well deserved.’

"Hello?" Ethan Vale answered, leaning back in his chair.

He was in the middle of screening a massive stack of recruitment portfolios when his phone suddenly buzzed with an unfamiliar number.

"Hello, am I speaking with Nova from Sprout Studio?" The caller’s voice was bright and hearty, speaking with the polished, unmistakable cadence of a seasoned corporate executive.

"This is Nova. Who am I speaking with?" Ethan glanced at the caller ID again, slightly suspicious. He wasn’t exactly handing his direct line out to the public.

"Hi there, I’m John K. Carter, the regional director for the Steam platform. Your recent release, Dead Cells, is performing incredibly well. I wanted to reach out and see if you had any interest in localizing the game into additional languages? We’d love to heavily feature it across our international storefronts."

Hearing the man’s identity, Ethan’s slightly fatigued brain instantly snapped to total clarity.

He knew that localization teams or third-party publishers might eventually pitch him for international distribution, but he genuinely hadn’t expected the regional director of Steam to cold-call him directly.

"Of course I’m interested, but I’d definitely need your team’s support with the translation pipeline," Ethan replied, smoothly agreeing to the proposal.

Sprout Studio was barely a two-man operation at the moment; handling a dozen different localizations in-house was physically impossible.

If Steam was offering to facilitate the translations, he wasn’t about to turn down the free labor.

After a brief, polite exchange of corporate pleasantries and mutual praise for the game’s success, Carter’s tone shifted, growing slightly more serious as he revealed the true purpose of the call.

"I’m glad we’re on the same page regarding the international rollout. But there’s actually one more piece of business I wanted to discuss with you today, Mr. Nova."