Chapter 21 (1/2)

Translator: Exodus Tales  Editor: Exodus Tales

Translated by Coldtaco

Edited by Aelryinth

After a good night’s rest, Chen Mo grabbed some breakfast and performed the usual brushing and washing while waiting for his mental peak. When he was at his most awake, he used the Memory Playback Potion and started looking through his forgotten memories.

His memory of the game was murky, as Plants vs Zombies was released a while ago. Chen Mo was diligent when going through his memory, as any of it could contain important details about the game, which could affect the quality of his clone.

The effects of the Potion settled in quickly, and Chen Mo returned to his memories from many years ago.

The first memories were the shapes of the plants: dragon-like peashooter[1], a certain-singer-whose-last-name-is-Gao-looking squash, the potato mine with the joystick on its head, the sunflower with the mysterious smile, the walnut with its eyes open like light bulbs…

1After that were the various types of zombies: normal zombie, conehead zombie, pole-vaulting zombie, buckethead zombie, football zombie, dancing zombie…

1There were also the different zones, such as the front lawn, night, pool, and so on.

1As his memories cleared up, Chen Mo grabbed his drawing tablet and started making some sketches of the plants and zombies, paying particular attention to details and features in order to best recreate them.

Afterwards, Chen Mo started to recall the flow of the game.

When the game was started, the words that Crazy Dave said, from planting the first plants, beating the first zombie, to unlocking levels, unlocking new plants, beating the boss…

Chen Mo was making notes as he remembered, taking notes of everything noteworthy in detail for every level, such as the levels where plants were unlocked, and the levels where special modes were unlocked.

After that was the numbers.

The time between shots of a peashooter, the damage increase that torchwood provided, the movement speed reduction of the wintermelon, the health amounts of the various zombies…

1These numbers might seem insignificant, but they could affect the entire structure of the game. As Chen Mo’s coding abilities were limited, he could only resort to silly methods like this.

2——

Four hours passed in a blink of an eye.

Chen Mo let out a sign of relief, as the past four hours he had been extremely focused. As he relaxed, he could feel his body catching up.

1However, it wasn’t time to rest. He used whatever still remained in his memory to fill out numbers he might’ve missed, as he was afraid to miss out on any detail.

Memories of humans faded over time. The Memory Playback Potion could only guarantee free access to memories for four hours. Once it was over, the memories would slowly fade away.

——

After working two more hours, Chen Mo let out a deep breath, taking a sip of water while slouching in the chair.

The desktop had a design document filled with thousands of lines of the details for the game. There was also a sketches folder filled with everything: sketches of plants, zombies, scenes, even the layout of the UI.

The Memory Playback Potion was used by Chen Mo, right down to the last drop!

“Man, that was exhausting.” Chen Mo wiped the sweat off his forehead. He was about to break after staying highly focused for six hours.

But why did he put himself in such a difficult place? Because there was only one Potion! If there were two bottles, he could’ve done it with ease, one today and one tomorrow. He wouldn’t have to worry so much if he had eight whole hours to write down every single detail of the game.

But Chen Mo knew that he had to make money and pay bills!

——