I'm Going to Make Two Hundred Levels!

Inside the base, a cardboard box was slowly making its way down a narrow, cramped passage.

Sam held his breath, his eyes fixed on the radar in the upper-right corner.

According to its display, there was a guard around the corner.

Thump.

Snake, the game's protagonist, knocked on the wall, immediately alerting the enemy.

Gun at the ready, the guard cautiously rounded the corner.

Sam could clearly see his head swiveling nimbly from side to side, as though he were really searching for the source of the noise.

He had clearly noticed the cardboard box. He strode over and stopped in front of it.

Even with a screen between them, Sam hardly dared breathe. Tiny beads of sweat already covered his palms.

A question mark suddenly appeared above the guard's head. Then he turned his back and actually walked away in confusion.

"That actually works??"

Vivian's eyes widened, utterly stunned that Sam had fooled the enemy with nothing but a cardboard box.

"Shh!"

Sam made a shushing gesture, as though afraid of disturbing the enemies in the game.

Even he hadn't expected that maneuver to actually work.

After playing for half an hour, Sam had more or less figured out what made this game tick.

He had originally thought that even if he was spotted, all he needed to do was eliminate every witness.

Throughout the first ten minutes of getting familiar with the game, Sam had kept triggering alarms, running himself ragged.

Almost all his time had gone into evading pursuit and finding hiding places.

Only after he finally couldn't take getting beaten up anymore did he settle down to study the guards' fields of view and patrol routes, and start trying to use various items to interfere with the enemies.

It was a truly remarkable feeling.

Once he started avoiding combat, the whole game suddenly changed from frustratingly difficult into an entertaining strategy game.

How to infiltrate the base without triggering a single alarm became his greatest obsession.

Sam watched the guard he had lured over on the screen with complete concentration.

After the guard's patrol was disrupted, a gap appeared in the previously seamless defenses.

He seized the opportunity and slipped straight through an extremely tiny blind spot.

Faced with a security door, Sam simply took out the access card he had collected earlier and passed through without any trouble.

But just as he was looking forward to whatever else awaited him, the screen suddenly went black.

[Thank you for playing the demo!]

That was it?

It just ended like that?!

Sam immediately felt an itch that had him scratching his ears and cheeks, wishing he could pry open Lin Lixin's skull right now to see what the later levels looked like.

"Oh no. This is actually kind of fun, huh?"

He scratched his head and readily admitted he was hooked.

The more he avoided combat, the more tense, exciting, and engrossing it became.

This design, which ran completely counter to mainstream expectations, revealed an astonishing charm!

Unlike traditional games, getting hit didn't mean instant failure and a return to the starting point.

In this game, once the player made a mistake, the price was a steep rise in the level's difficulty.

Sam could clearly feel that the more mistakes he made, the more alert those enemies became, forcing him to pay for his recklessness.

"This... this is like a..."

"Puzzle," Vivian finished for him, her eyes equally surprised. "Every area is a complex, layered puzzle."

"Exactly!" Sam hurriedly agreed. "And every puzzle has lots of solutions, which makes everyone's playthrough completely different!"

He could fool enemies with a cardboard box, or toss out useless empty magazines to make noise.

He could even steer a missile around the map.

Even though he had already completed this small section of the map in the demo, he still wanted to try again.

Sam really wanted to see what would play out differently if he used other methods to get through.

"You really only used a single eight-bit processor?"

As a spectator, Vivian hadn't felt the gameplay experience as deeply as Sam had, but she paid particular attention to the visuals.

She picked up the crude, hand-soldered board and carefully inspected its configuration.

There really was only a single eight-bit Z80.

And she and the newly arrived Uncle He had led the development of those two graphics coprocessors themselves. No one knew the exact configuration better than she did.

Achieving visuals this smooth with such crude hardware was already beyond what a normal person could do.

"Just a little trick to fool the eye, thanks in large part to these two graphics chips."

Lin Lixin smiled faintly and offered no further explanation.

The demo before them had already squeezed out almost every bit of performance this board had, without the slightest waste.

To achieve this effect, he had poured all the attribute points he had painstakingly saved up lately into programming.

"You're just too..." The corner of Vivian's mouth twitched. She could no longer comprehend Lin Lixin's heaven-defying technical prowess at all. "Forget it, forget it."

She waved a hand and turned her gaze to the screen.

Sam had already started a second run, planning to use the wild idea that had just flashed through his mind to see if he could go any faster.

Looking at the complex scene construction, Vivian asked, "How many levels are you planning to make?"

"Hmm... about thirteen for the main storyline."

"The main storyline? You're planning to design side stories too?" Vivian caught the key point in Lin Lixin's words.

"Yes. I'm planning to add a 'Virtual Training Mode,' which will be a dedicated collection of training levels."

"Then including the training mode? How many levels altogether?"

"Two hundred."

"Pfft!"

Vivian's eyes widened, and she craned her neck in disbelief.

"T-two hundred levels?! Are you serious? This one level took you a month. Wouldn't making two hundred take you past the year 2000?"

She could only take it as a joke Lin Lixin was playing on her.

Never mind the enormous amount of time and energy the design alone would take.

Even if he really had a way to make that many levels, this pitiful storage capacity couldn't possibly hold them.

"Normally, that would indeed be the case."

Lin Lixin walked over to the C64 used for development and tapped a few keys, bringing up a program.

The screen displayed an image neatly divided into several squares.

Vivian recognized quite a few familiar elements at a glance.

The crates, paths, grass, walls on the map...

Lin Lixin entered a string of code directly on the keyboard.

[map.set(0,0,0)]

[map.set(0,1,1)]

Then, in the blank preview area on the right, a complete crate appeared, made up of two texture tiles depicting its side and top.

"So I designed this. I call it a Tile Map (TiledMap). And, of course, there's this accompanying map editor."