Rewritten Past

A Princess Maker styled game where you raised a Yuusha instead until it was time to fight the Demon Lord.

But jokes on you! Various events occurred based on your stats, and countless endings triggered based on the event flags too.

"...Yeah. This should be fun." I chuckled and then opened up MS Paint. "Now... should we show the world what pixel art from the 2020s looks like? ...Oh wait."

A thought crossed my mind.

Music was needed too.

But I didn't have a DAW to work with.

Yet.

"Scrap that. First step: make a programmable DAW for synth sounds." I started speccing that out first.

Worst case, I could toss it into the web for upcoming music artist.

I nodded. "Always gotta be thinking about the next money project..."

===

In what seemed like no time at all to Yue, the filming session for her role as the Pink Power Ranger came and went. A week, gone in the blink of an eye.

At first, she'd been worried. She'd never been gone for so long without Alex. And she was concerned about what they'd do without her since they were just at the hotel and without any means of transportations.

She needn't have worried though.

The moment she walked back into the hotel room, a strangely ominous synthetic soundtrack echoed, along with what sounded like distorted speech.

*Yuusha! You dare come here alone without even a single piece of divine equipment?*

*Hah! Demon Lord! I come bearing all I need! Have at thee!*

Yue blinked and saw Alex and Serena huddled around April, who was staring wide-eyed at Alex's laptop screen.

And on that laptop screen...

A cute little pixel hero rushed at a towering pixelated demon. The screen flashed a few times, playing sound effects to emphasize the flashes, and then the demon exploded into fire.

*Impossible...!*

*Nothing's impossible for me! I maxed my stats, Baka~*

After the synthetic dialogue echoed, the screen panned to reveal a cute female knight with long blonde hair and blue eyes, holding her fingers in a peace sign.

Then beneath it, there was a dialogue box.

[True Ending achieved: End of the Cycle]

The moment that came up, April screamed and hugged Alex. "I did it! I did it, Alex! I made Miss Hero beat the Demon Lord!"

Alex laughed. "You did it, April. Congrats." He reached over and saved a screenshot before the image- No, the game.

Right.

That was a game.

A game that Yue didn't recognize.

A game that Yue was VERY sure didn't exist. Because that art style was VERY much Japanese, but the user interface, the dialogue, and the fact that the garbled synthetic speech was English proved otherwise.

"Oh, Mom!" Alex waved at Yue. "Welcome home! Look, I made a game!"

Yue shut the door behind her and deadpanned. "A game. You made a game. As in, a video game. From scratch. On your computer. Alone."

Serena finally shifted her gaze away from the laptop screen to look at Yue. "...He did. I'm still in disbelief too, Yue. Just... look at it." She pointed at the laptop.

After the scrolling credits... which listed script, art, music, and scenario by LexAli, the screen changed back to a title screen with the words "Hero Creator" hovering over "Start Game", "Load Game", "Options", and "Exit Game."

But within a few seconds, the menu faded to reveal a completely rendered opening cutscene in beautiful 16-bit pixel art.

An ambiguous toddler growing up after being marked by a goddess. Scenes of a male knight and female knight fighting monsters. Then a beautiful mural of the male and female knights amidst numerous scenes all while the goddess looked down from above and the demon lord glared up from below.

In short...

"...What the fuck?"

...It was such a ridiculous feat that Yue's brain shortcircuited and she actually cursed.

April gasped and pointed at Yue. "Miss Yue said a no-no word!"

Serena sighed. "Yes. That's... about what I felt."

Alex blinked and tilted his head. "What? It's not that crazy. I mean, it was pretty simple once you split everything up, you know?"

"Al. Sweetie." Yue slowly said.

Alex looked at her. "Yes Mom?"

"Just shut up for a minute."

"...Right. Being quiet."

Yue sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose.

...She loved Alex. But GOD, did he have to ALWAYS pull out something else ridiculous?

===

I, uh. MAY have underestimated how ridiculous my game development abilities were with respect to the current standard.

In the future, I practically lived and breathed in Ren'Py and other game engines, so I had internalized how to strip a game apart to optimal pieces to run efficiently. I'd also developed enough to cobble together basic assets.

Even though I didn't have a game engine to work with, I had C++ and experience using it in Unreal Engine.

While it took a bit to figure out how to pipeline the graphics to a new window as well as output sound to the audio driver, I managed to figure it out by cracking open the OS.

I mean, when I was an attorney in the future, a good chunk of my work near the end had been reverse engineering all sorts of software for patent infringement, so it didn't take much for me to figure out how things worked by popping it open in DOS and a debugger.

But judging by April's sparkling eyes, Miss Serena's expression like she'd seen the second coming of Jesus, and Mama Yue's face that looked like she didn't know whether to laugh or cry in disbelief...

Yeah. Uh. Underestimated my skills.

To be fair, I HAD participated in a lot of gamejams in the future. And I DID have a lot of unreleased game prototypes in the future too. Not to mention working to help develop various fan games under pseudonyms. Plus my experience doing romhacking for some GBA games in high school...

...Okay. Yeah.

Maaaybe I was overqualified.

Come to think of it, video games were still a fledgling field at this time, right? Like, the rough genres existed and all that, but they mostly rode on graphics, storytelling, or cinematics. Big budget stuff.

Indie games were literally nonexistent. No imaginative game mechanics or things like that really. Too high risk, low reward.

Unless you were a one-man team like me, apparently.

Huh.

"Alex. My precious nephew who I love as my own son." Mama Yue slowly spoke. "You realize that you could sell that, right? Like, for real money. Substantial money. A CONSIDERATE amount of money."

I blinked. "I mean, I COULD. But I was thinking of just putting it out there. To inspire people. Plus, I think it's nice to let people have a good game, right?"

Mama Yue's face twisted into an unreadable expression.

Miss Serena let out a deep sigh and muttered, "Lord. This child is too good for this world..."

April hugged me and said, "Aleeex! You're so cool! Let's have lots of other people play too! It was super fun! And Miss Hero was so cool! She was like, swish, swish! And then the Demon Lord went BOOM! And I leveled up so much... Kyaaa!"

...Yeah. April's in full sensory overload heaven.

Considering how she loved comicbooks, she must have adored playing as a 'superhero' herself.

Yuusha, superhero... close enough, right?