When I went back to my dorm on a full stomach and saw what a mess the place was, I took advantage of the fact that I had nothing very important to do and started tidying up.

I would only live here for another week before I had to move out.

When Game Creators graduate from college they can keep the Game Core that the college gave them to take the final test at no cost, which for Game Creators with good games, represented a stable source of monthly income.

Game Creators with good results could receive offers from large Guilds with even higher salaries to develop exclusive games for them or even large companies wanting to buy the rights to the games, since as the Game Creators system was developed by the government, all games developed were the right of the Game Creator who made that game, like a very well protected patent.

Game Creators couldn't just copy other people's games, they had to have their own changes and originality to develop it.

Sure, F-rank Game Creators didn't even have enough Mana to develop more elaborate games, so they stuck to the basic, bland training that everyone was entitled to do.

As the Game Creators rose in rank and had more Mana available to use in their games, the games started to become more detailed, with better-made battle missions, specialized training with virtual instructors, and technologies like the False Neurological Feedback that I copied.

It's not because the games weren't fun that they were badly made, quite the opposite, the realism of the higher rank games was the main focus of these games, making the greatest games in the world masterpieces of combat training.

Thinking about my future, I had no doubt about what to do after graduating.

Joining a Guild or a big company was out of the question, I didn't want to be controlled by people who didn't have a vision like mine.

Even if I lived in a small apartment for a few years while slowly developing my games, I would go my own way and do things my own way.

Looking at the clean and tidy dormitory, a proud smile appeared on my face and I sat down at my computer to check the game's statistics.

It seemed that the game was going very well.

In the two hours I'd been away from home, the game had risen from 70 Players online to 87 Players.

Retention was still as high as ever, making a big smile appear on my face.

The only thing stopping my game from growing more was promotion, people didn't know about the game, so there was no way for them to play.

But that's a problem that I don't think would stop me for long.

'Maybe I could even encourage word of mouth among players... depending on how much mana the game has gathered, I could use this to develop a reward system for inviting a friend! ' I thought excitedly.

This tactic had always worked in my other life, with me being responsible for getting several of my friends to download the games I liked just so I could get the reward for inviting them.

'What can I give as a reward? Card packs might be a bit interesting, but nothing that would make people suddenly call friends...' I stood up and began to walk around thoughtfully. 'Using other games as a reference, especially Free To Play games, the thing that Players care about the most is... Skins!'

I hadn't yet developed skins for the backs of cards like in Runestone, so this could be a good incentive to do so.

When you invite a friend and they unlock Ranked Matches, the Player you invited will receive a card back skin, and the more friends that Player calls, the more that card back skin will evolve, until it reaches its final appearance after 10 invited friends!

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Even if only a minority of Players were to make the effort to invite friends, even more so when the majority of Players might not even have 10 Player friends to call, the Players who called just one person to play would already be helping me a lot!

Having decided that I would do this, the first thing I did when I entered Runestone's Game Core was to look at how much Mana the game had accumulated.

To play this style of game, Players had to spend Mana for every hour they played.

Rank F games required 1 Mana per Hour and the higher the Rank of the game, the more Mana the game required.

This Mana didn't go directly to the Game Creator, 99% of it was only used to create the virtual world that the Player would connect to and to maintain it during the 60 minutes.

The remaining 1% was sent to the Game Core and stored there, making it available for the Game Creator to use in any way he wanted, either to enhance the game itself or to convert it into permanent mana to rank up as a Game Creator.

The use of this mana to improve the game was unrestricted.

If there were 1,000 MP available, the Game Creator could use all 1,000 MP to create and improve his game.

Usually Game Creators used only a small part of the Mana generated by the game to improve the gameplay and realism of the game while absorbing the rest.

However, the part absorbed by the Game Creator was not unrestricted.

Game Cores were extremely expensive resources, so to prevent the Game Core from being damaged, every Game Core came with a Mana conversion limitation and the limit for Game Core Rank F was 1 MP every 12 hours.

When I found out that the limit was only 2 MP per day I thought that such a low number was an exaggeration, but surprisingly most Game Creators couldn't even reach that limit.

Not because none of them could accumulate 2 MP in the game, but because converting MP available in the game to real MP was expensive.

100 MP stored in the game needed to be converted into 1 MP to increase the Game Creator's base Mana.

In other words, in order to store what was needed to reach the 200 MP daily limit in the Game Core, the game would need to keep an average of 834 Players online during the day.

This didn't mean that the game had to have a peak of 834 Players, but that the 24-hour average was 834 Players, which is why, to make it easier for students to calculate, college professors taught that only games with more than 1,000 Players online used 100% of the Game Core's potential.

As my game used False Neurological Feedback, half of the Mana that would be stored in the Game Core was used as fuel for this tool.

That's one of the reasons this tool wasn't used as much by Game Creators, as it reduced the profit the games received.

But I needed this tool to make the game I wanted, so it was a necessary cost.

Looking at the measly 2.5 MP available for use in Game Core, I laughed.

'And I thought the Mana stored would be enough to let me develop like crazy...' I began to laugh at my innocence.

But it's not as if I couldn't do something like that with my Mana base.

My 68 MP might not be much compared to other Rank F Game Creators, but that was still a lot of Mana.

Without the urgent need to develop cards for the game as I had over the last few days, I would now be able to use all that Mana to develop the game, so putting my mind to work I began to use my creativity and my Mana to develop the system I had planned.

Using my memory of how this system worked in games, with a screen where the Player could see his own code, another place where he could type in his friend's code, and a screen where he could track his friend's progress and how much was left before he received the reward, I began to control my Mana and within a few seconds Mana was accumulating on my finger.

The more complex a game system was, the more Mana it required, and this with the help of the System, if I were just a normal Game Creator I would need to spend at least 10 times more Mana on this just by trial and error.

So to deal with this problem I divided up the work.

Now I was just designing the interface that the Players would see, using as a base the interface I'd already made for the game and modeling it all following the same aesthetic the cost of this dropped to just 44 MP.

Feeling my measly 24 MP available I knew that this was nowhere near enough for the rest of what I wanted to develop, so I left the Game Core and continued planning how I would develop it while my Mana recovered.

With nothing very important to do, I just kept writing down the important things in my notebook, which parts I would divide up, which part I would do first, and how long it would take to do, just like I did with the rest of the game.

Developing an Online game wasn't easy, among Rank F games mine must be one of the only ones, as the study for it was very complex, but with the help of the System I managed it, so I was confident that the new system, which was slightly simpler than developing the Online mode of the game, would be developed without any problems.

While I was concentrating on planning my game, the few players who knew Runestone were going crazy while playing, with fights even breaking out in Ranked Matches because they couldn't accept defeat.

Involved in one of these fights was Natalie, the first Player to download and play Runestone...