"So it’s actually an indie ga made by Mr. Takayuki himself. I never thought soone of his stature would personally develop an indie ga."
Half a month after the Ga Developers Competition ended, at a workstation inside Mikeford Company in the United States, the young man with the afro browsed the crowdfunding section of the BattleNet platform with great interest.
Lately, he had been visiting this section more and more often.
Perhaps because of Takayuki’s strong traffic-pulling effect, many players had indeed begun actively checking out indie gas.
So indie titles that previously sold poorly started receiving noticeably more exposure on BattleNet.
As a result, their once-dismal sales suddenly jumped by a large margin.
Indie developers who had been struggling financially were overjoyed.
Their gas finally seed to be gradually discovered by players.
So indie gas were genuinely high quality, and their ratings began to slowly rise as well.
This was especially true for extrely niche indie gas, whose reviews were now rebounding.
Previously, players who tried these niche gas often didn’t enjoy them, and after playing, would imdiately leave negative reviews.
But as more players started paying attention to niche gas, there were always so who genuinely liked that genre—and among them, so were willing to write long, thoughtful reviews.
These detailed, high-value reviews naturally carried more weight than short, perfunctory comnts, allowing overall ratings to gradually recover.
Indie developers’ confidence rose accordingly.
As a result, more and more indie ga concepts began appearing in the crowdfunding section.
Several gas that had won awards at the Ga Developers Competition also chose to launch crowdfunding campaigns here.
Within just the first half month, so of them raised close to—or even over—one million dollars.
With that kind of funding, indie developers beca even more excited. Ga developnt no longer felt constrained, and progress beca much smoother.
From ti to ti, the young man with the afro would browse this section for inspiration and incorporate ideas into the Infinite World ga he was developing.
His ambitions were enormous—he wanted to create a completely vivid, living universe.
The side-scrolling infinite sky-island ga he made at the competition was rely a prototype. What he was working on now was his ultimate dream.
Eventually, the young man moved his mouse to Takayuki’s crowdfunding page.
The Binding of Isaac.
Even now, the na still sounded rather strange.
Strange or not, this was a ga made by a godfather-level figure in the gaming world.
And it was the first ti in decades that Takayuki had publicly released a ga created entirely by himself.
The crowdfunding page directly featured a playable demo. The demo contained a complete gaplay loop, though the random elents were still relatively limited.
The page promised that future developnt would heavily expand random events and procedurally generated dungeon content, ensuring the ga would live up to players’ expectations.
In the demo’s comnt section, the young man noticed there were already over seven thousand comnts.
Seven thousand comnts—from unique users.
"This ga has a strange kind of magic. The actual main progression only takes about two hours, but I’ve already logged at least a hundred hours. You can check my playti record in the comnts to see how much I love this ga."
"The God of Gas really is the God of Gas. Even without grand visuals or flashy effects, a solo-developed ga can still be incredibly fun. Though it does feel like the content is still a bit lacking."
"Isn’t that obvious? The ga already said it’s just a demo. They promised to deliver the full version within six months. All we need to do is wait patiently."
"By the way, when I play this, I keep getting this sense of déjà vu. It feels like I’ve played similar indie gas before—or at least gas like this..."
"Now that you ntion it, I feel the sa."
"I rember—like that guy who always said ’Nintendo is basically the ruler of the world.’ He was also a top-tier ga developer. But I haven’t seen him release anything new in a long ti."
"Probably made enough money, or maybe ran out of ideas. After all, there’s only one true ga god. Others having occasional monts of brilliance is already impressive."
"True, but it’s still a sha that such a talented indie developer disappeared."
Players chatted casually in the comnts, treating it like a live chat room—and incredibly, more than seven thousand users were participating.
By now, The Binding of Isaac had raised an astonishing three million dollars, the highest amount among all crowdfunding projects.
The young man with the afro believed a large part of this was due to Takayuki’s fa.
Even if Takayuki made a terrible ga, a huge number of fans would still be willing to fund it—just to support their idol.
After all, isn’t that what people do with film and entertainnt stars?
Still, raising over three million dollars also proved that the ga itself must have sothing special.
What attracted him most was the word random.
This ga revolved around randomness—just like his Infinite World project.
He felt he should play it himself, to see how a top-tier developer handled randomness.
The demo was tiny—only 10 MB.
Nowadays, even a single song could easily take up 20–30 MB, and just one or two high-resolution images could exceed 10 MB.
Yet this demo of The Binding of Isaac was only 10 MB. The young man was genuinely stunned.
How could a ga be this small?
Even if it really only had two hours of content, that was still incredible.
Most modern gas started at several gigabytes.
He couldn’t even rember the last ti he’d played a ga this small.
Because of its size, the download finished almost instantly—he barely had ti to react before it was done.
He launched the ga and prepared to try it out.
Perhaps because of the small file size, many assets were extrely minimal.
On the start screen, there was only a strange little figure curled up on the ground in pain, a beam of white light shining down from above.
The background was simple, yet it conveyed a deep sense of sorrow and suffering.
"...What a strange art style."
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