Parallel World Game Developer

Chapter 5: Chapter #5: The Swear Jar Deficit

Looking at the number [1] floating across the stream chat, Boba was dumbfounded.

"That wasn’t a swear word! It was just a verbal tic!" Boba stared at the screen, genuinely trying to defend herself.

She had just let the word slip out of habit, not out of actual rage.

But the chat completely ignored her excuses. They held firm, insisting that a curse was a curse.

"Fine! I’m not someone who backs out of a bet. Fifty bucks in the jar! I can afford it!" Boba huffed.

"Everyone, just remind me to pay out the gifted subs before the broadcast ends today!"

She didn’t care too much about the chat’s teasing; it was only fifty dollars, after all.

As soon as she conceded, the spamming stopped, and the chat cleared out.

The entire broadcast went eerily silent for a moment before a new wave of messages rolled in.

[GamerDad88: Boba move the water bottle off your desk]

[xX_Sniper_Xx: yeah move the water rn before u spill it]

[Toxic_Timmy: Zoe tech incoming LMAO]

[LoreMaster_Matt: incoming ’accidental’ spill]

Boba frowned. What streamer didn’t keep a drink on their desk?

Talking for hours on end made your throat dry.

She picked up her heavy tumbler and inspected it suspiciously.

"My cup has a heavy suction base. It’s definitely not falling over."

But no matter what she said, the chat relentlessly demanded she move the water out of the splash zone.

Meanwhile, Zoe was lurking in Boba’s stream.

Watching the scene unfold, she leaned back in her chair and burst out laughing to her own audience.

"I really didn’t do it on purpose, okay?! That was a genuine accident!" Zoe wheezed, entirely unable to hide her amusement.

After chat was finally satisfied that there was nothing on Boba’s desk she could use to sabotage her own setup, they gave her the green light to start the game.

"You guys are being so weird today," Boba muttered.

She grabbed her mouse, controlling the strange man with the hammer, awkwardly vaulting him forward step by step.

"The controls are a bit tedious, but it’s not that hard."

The small dirt mound in the starting area was barely an obstacle, and she easily hooked the hammer over it to pull herself up.

She continued moving forward, reaching the end of the initial path, and stared up at the protruding rock wall.

The first stage went smoothly.

Even when she slipped and fell, it was only a short drop, allowing her to easily regroup and keep pushing forward.

As Boba got a feel for the physics engine, she climbed higher and higher.

She took a few nasty tumbles, but she kept her fifty-dollar oath firmly in mind, biting her tongue and refusing to swear.

Because of the lingering threat to her wallet, she played with agonizing caution, terrified of making a catastrophic mistake.

"I finally understand what you guys are doing. You just wanted to see me rage, right?!" Boba said confidently.

"I admit the game is a little frustrating, but swearing? Not gonna happen."

She shook her head with a smug smile. But as her mechanical proficiency grew, so did her altitude.

And the higher she climbed, the longer the falls became.

The only constant in her life was the sight of that ordinary, bare-branched little tree waiting for her at the bottom.

Finally, after slipping from the upper cliffs and plummeting all the way back to the dirt, the dam broke.

"What the actual fuck is this?! Who the fuck designs a piece of shit like this?!" Boba screamed.

"I’m playing a fucking garbage game! I’ll fucking stab whoever coded this!"

She pushed her glasses up her nose, her normally cute and well-behaved persona entirely shattering as she unleashed an endless stream of pure venom.

"Language, Chloe!" a tired, middle-aged woman’s voice yelled from the hallway outside her bedroom.

"I have no filter, Mom!" Boba yelled back, her face flushed and the tips of her ears burning red with rage.

She took a breath and glanced over at her second monitor. What she saw made her blood run cold.

The chat was scrolling at lightspeed, every single message spamming: [103 TIMES!]

"What the fuck! Did I really swear that much?!"

[104 TIMES!]

The moment the words left her mouth, she slapped a hand over her lips.

"Wait, fuck, that one doesn’t count, it’s just a habit! How could I have sworn a hundred and four times?!"

[105 TIMES!]

She stared at the number, her face turning pale.

She knew she had lost her temper, but she hadn’t realized she had been rapid-firing profanity like a machine gun.

"It hurts! My wallet is bleeding!" Boba wailed, pulling up her streaming dashboard to process the payments.

[-$5,250]

"I have never lost this much money being toxic in my entire life! I am never doing a challenge like this again. The swear jar is officially over!"

After watching her gleeful chat pocket over five thousand dollars in gifted subs, Boba felt physically ill.

Recalling the sheer psychological torture the game had just put her through, she immediately pulled out her phone and dialed a number.

"Chron! I have a great game to recommend to you, it’s super fun! Zoe actually told me about it!" Boba said into the receiver, unable to suppress a malicious giggle.

She could already picture Chron having a total meltdown live on his broadcast.

"Boba," Chron’s voice came through the speaker, sounding utterly exhausted. "My chat literally just forced me to watch a four-hour documentary compilation of your mental breakdown."

"I already know how this ends."

"You have zero conscience, Boba!" Chron yelled, his voice cracking as he angrily denounced her betrayal.

Getting Over It had gone viral word-of-mouth. The exact moment of total psychological collapse was currently being broadcast simultaneously across hundreds of different streams.

"Fuck!"

"Hook it, hook it, hook it! God damn it, it slipped! Wait, I caught it, I didn’t fall all the way! Thank Gaia! I saved— wait, no!"

"Save me, please, somebody save me..."

Marcus sat next to Ethan in the dorm room, scrolling through a grid of different Twitch and YouTube streams.

Every time he watched a streamer miss a jump and plummet back to the starting line, his own chest tightened in phantom sympathy.

Everyone online kept saying the greatest joy of the game was watching other people suffer, but even as a viewer, the second-hand anxiety was brutal.

"Dude, you monster," Marcus said, taking a deep breath.

He rolled his chair closer to Ethan’s desk and noticed his roommate was rapidly typing away in the development engine.

The screen was filled with complex wireframes, grim pixel-art aesthetics, and bizarre weapon concepts.

"I’m the one having a breakdown here, okay?" Ethan muttered without looking up. There were deep, bruised-looking bags forming under his eyes.

Transmigrating to a parallel world where the gaming industry was a barren wasteland should have been a dream come true.

Discovering he had a cheat system attached to his soul had elevated that joy to its absolute peak. But right now, he was facing a severe dilemma.

Good news: He had a system.

Bad news: The system was completely hard-locked because everyone kept sarcastically rating his game ’Very Easy’.

"What are you complaining about? What could you possibly be upset over?" Marcus blinked, completely unable to process Ethan’s foul mood.

Over the last few days, Getting Over It had exploded. It had already pushed past 200,000 downloads on the Nexus storefront.

At $1.99 a copy, the game had already generated nearly $400,000 in gross revenue, which meant Ethan was currently sitting on roughly $280,000 after the platform cut.

The sales trajectory was still climbing in a straight vertical line, showing zero signs of slowing down. The market wasn’t even close to saturated.

In the gaming industry, as long as a title retained its viral momentum, the passive income would just keep rolling into his bank account.

Not to mention, word of the game’s massive success had already reached the university faculty; Ethan’s graduation was effectively guaranteed.

"As long as people keep ironically calling my game very easy, I feel physically sick," Ethan said, clutching his chest in a display of agony that was only half-fake.

"So... you’re developing a new game right now?" Marcus asked, staring at the monitor.

It only took one glance at the engine interface for Marcus to realize this wasn’t just a guy swinging a hammer.

The mechanics were dense, the combat logic was hyper-fast, and the level design was infinitely more complex than a mountain of trash.

"Yeah," Ethan said quietly, his grip tightening on his mouse. ’And with this, I’m going to make them bleed.’

"MWUAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Marcus: "..."

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