Rewritten Past

What else...?

Ah, right. Speaking of family...

Aunt and Uncles on my Dad's side.

Yeah, they were out of the picture now.

Eldest Uncle Long was stuck in a scandal since Dad had personally talked to my ex-aunt and confirmed what I'd said at the family dinner.

Mostly about the whole 'beating your wife who was trying to stop you from beating your kid' thing.

Aunt Xia was dealing with the bombshell that Mama Yue threw, namely the fact that her husband was very much cheating on her with his secretary.

And youngest Uncle Luo...

Well, no one knew where he was.

After that dinner, he went AWOL.

Smart move. He always DID have the best survival instincts on Dad's side of the family. Even if he had poor tastes in women...

Long story. Might come up in the future, but I'd put a pin on that for later if it came up.

Anyway, for now, that situation was resolved.

There was a small chance that they might try something if they were REALLY pushed into a corner...

But I'd made it clear that I ALSO would try something if they pushed ME into a corner.

So mutually assured destruction would make sure nothing happened.

And that threat of mutually assured destruction would just exponentially grow as I grew up, so no worries there.

Mm... They might try something with my grandparents and the elder generation of our family though. Like, my dad's uncles and aunts...

I'd deal with that when it happened.

They couldn't really do anything anyway. Financial pressure wouldn't work. Social pressure *existed*, but considering that it was only a matter of time before I stepped into the limelight, it would only turn into a noose around their neck. And attempting threats or coercion...

Well.

But that aside.

Relationships, A-Okay. A-OK? Never knew how that saying worked...

Moving on.

Skill checks.

Physical training was progressing splendidly. I couldn't spend as much time as I wanted these days due to lack of privacy and training access since we weren't at Mama Yue's condo most of the day, but that was fine. I'd just reroute those hours to other activities.

But in terms of metrics... Mm, I had pretty much hit a cap anyway, so it was good timing. Sadly, the 'youth' buff had a limit. I was putting on muscle and leaning out, but it was starting to look a bit freaky so I eased up and focused on just pure skill training instead of actual physique development.

I wasn't bodybuilding after all, I was training for performance.

Slow and steady was the gameplan.

I also needed to get started on training for the Olympics... Fencing and Tennis were definitely my plans for getting in. But I needed to qualify... Hm. Well, that's still a bit away. We'll start that in middle school.

Video game development was going well. The miscellaneous related skills were too. I wasn't on the level of a professional just yet in terms of rendering art, but I was at least above average. Good enough for turning it into pixel art at least.

I really wished I had a drawing tablet though. I really missed that. And Clip Studio Paint...

Well, no use complaining.

Mm... I might be able to win some art competitions at this rate though. Something to put a pin on too.

Writing was writing. I was still doing research into if Naver or Syosetsu existed so I could start uploading NovelFires onto a proper platform, but I think it was still the era of blog websites...

Being a pioneer was fine too though. Since I was hosting my own website, and since I was DEFINITELY leagues above other sites in terms of UI design with nonobtrusive ad placements... not to mention the fact that I had embedded Hero Creator onto a page of said website, it would eventually kick off.

Hell, maybe I should go out of my way to host it all myself-

Wait.

...Note to self: make a visual novel that calls back to a server to update latest chapters of a web novel and automatically populates it with chapters.

If it was just text, I could reduce the load time. And I could add assets in game like background music. Then I could reuse the save and load functions for bookmarking...

...Why am I coming up with all these ideas now of all times? Hah...

Well, that's a useful project. I could even reuse the character creator function from Hero Creator so people could make cool cover art if they can't draw. Eye-catching covers went a long way towards attracting readers.

Not to mention that the art-style I was used to for anime was the modern one with softer and a bit more realistic features rather than the current huge eyes and outlandish hair that existed in the 90s and early 2000s.

Speaking of anime...

...I could TOTALLY spoil people on the Big Three... Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece...

No, no. As tempting as that was, it was too cruel...

Wait.

...Hm. Self-published webcomics weren't really a thing yet either, were they? At least, not like in the 2020s with indie webtoon makers.

Tapas, Webtoon itself, and other sites like that didn't exist yet.

Mostly because the data infrastructure for that wasn't there yet.

But if I backpacked off the prebuilt assets in Hero Creator and just expanded that, then had people download the framework first, I could convert my drawings to a vector render and reduce the download size into just coordinate and shading data. Plus it could scale infinitely then.

Of course, that would require learning to draw in that style... But since I was learning to draw anyway, it shouldn't be any harder to start drawing with vector formatting in mind than any other form of digital drawing.

Neat.

Alright... That was something to work on. And something I could do at my old house as well as Mama Yue's house if I got a flash drive.

...I think those existed now. Probably really low memory, but I could make it work.

Dad had a computer, so I could use that.

To summarize...

Turn Hero Creator's framework into a proper visual novel framework. Then adapt it to allow NovelFire and webtoon hosting via pinging a server. Also make proper documentation to allow other people to upload their own creations.

We'll make a proper kinetic novel niche in this timeline alongside classic visual novels.

Ah, I should also work on composing. Since I was at it, I could make a royalty free asset pack. Lo-fi didn't quite exist yet, but it was super simple to make. And I could also compose with MIDIs to save space since that was generated on the client-side due to basically just being sheet music...

'Man. The 2020s were such a generous time for creatives, huh?'

Right now, everyone was still being SUPER stringent about copyright and wanting to hoard everything they created. Piracy was a major issue. Like, I think this was around when Limewire and stuff went mainstream as headline topics, right? Or at least a few years later.

Not many people if at all were organizing free assets... like, QUALITY free assets for people to use.

If I jumped the line on that...

'Won't the future be filled with ridiculously cool stuff then?'