The main challenge in developing Yu-Gi-Oh! was never the concept itself; it was the rules behind the cards. The battle system, card balancing, effect interactions, and value design for every individual card created an enormous amount of work.
Even with memories from another life serving as inspiration, expecting John to personally complete every card combination and balancing decision alone was unrealistic, so a dedicated design and planning team was essential.
Inside the conference room at PixelPioneers Games, John stood before several new employees who had recently joined the company. Two had passed the university recruitment process, while the remaining two had transferred internally from PixelPioneers' customer support department.
At first glance, customer support and game planning seemed worlds apart, but that didn't mean the transferred staff lacked talent. If they had no ability, they never would have earned the opportunity.
They might have gaps in certain technical fundamentals, but they possessed something equally valuable: they understood games from a player's perspective. They knew how people played, what frustrated them, and what features players truly cared about.
Ironically, that practical understanding was something many planners lacked. When PixelPioneers was also going through internal restructuring, one new policy required every incoming employee to spend two months rotating through customer support before officially entering their assigned department. It gave employees firsthand experience interacting with players.
Standing beside the projection screen, John continued explaining. "Core cards are different from ordinary cards. You need to distinguish them clearly."
He pointed toward a deck composition chart displayed on screen. "In most decks, a large portion of cards serve repeatable functions. They aren't identical, but their roles overlap. For example, one monster might have four stars and fourteen hundred attack points, while another has six stars and two thousand attack points. Neither has a special effect, only race and attribute differences. That's homogenization."
Everyone listened attentively. In a battle card game, only a handful of cards truly formed the soul of a deck. The rest existed to support the strategy, reinforce consistency, or create tactical flexibility.
John wanted every card to connect meaningfully within larger chains and synergies, but ambition and reality were different things. Even if the development team somehow achieved a perfect interconnected design, maintaining balance would become a nightmare. And if balance failed, players would lose their minds.
"In the early versions," John continued, "normal monsters, spell cards, trap cards, field cards, and equipment cards should establish the foundation for victory and defeat. When players aren't building specialized decks, standard deck compositions should maintain healthy proportions of effect monsters."
Everyone quickly took notes.
"And one more thing." John suddenly remembered something important. "When designing cards, every deck submission needs a three-hundred-word background story."
Several people froze.
"Effect monsters and high-star rare cards especially need proper lore. Coordinate with the writing department."
Card stories mattered. Without lore, how could the manga department expand the universe? How could artists create memorable characters? You couldn't simply hand an illustrator a card image and say,
"Figure something out."
That wasn't game development, that was laziness. Of course, certain flagship cards were exceptions. Cards like Blue-Eyes White Dragon, Dark Magician, The Three Egyptian Gods, and Dark Magician Girl would personally be overseen by John himself. Those cards represented the soul of Yu-Gi-Oh!, so they couldn't be handled casually.
An hour later, after finishing the training session, John returned to his office, and he opened his email inbox. New production files had already arrived. This project wouldn't stop at games. Manga, animation, and merchandise, everything would launch together. The multimedia expansion strategy had already begun, and John had even finalized cooperation with an animation studio in Japan.
Although domestic animation had improved significantly in recent years, there was still a gap compared to Japan's mature industrial pipeline. The Japanese studio only needed to handle original artwork, coloring, scene composition, animation production, and post-processing, while the story scripts and character settings would remain under PixelPioneers' control. That reduced costs substantially, but even so, the quotation still made John's expression tighten slightly.
"This really isn't cheap..." Looking at the signed electronic contract, John couldn't help sighing.
In his memories, many adaptations suffered from budget limitations. Static frames, off-model animation, production shortcuts, etc. He had no intention of repeating those mistakes. If Yu-Gi-Oh! was going to become a giant franchise, then quality couldn't be compromised, so there was no need to save money.
If the project succeeded, the money would return many times over. The online platform revenue, merchandise income, physical card sales, and licensing profits.
After organizing his thoughts, John shifted his attention toward the submitted artwork. Like previous projects such as Resident Evil and Metal Gear, as long as quality standards were met, PixelPioneers would prioritize artists signed directly under its own studio. Internal talent should always receive opportunities first. After all, why let opportunities flow elsewhere?
While John and his team focused on Yu-Gi-Oh!, Ansoft's Interstellar officially launched, but the road leading up to release hadn't been smooth. The hidden ending in Metal Gear Solid: Phantom Pain, alongside the new DLC content Snake Eater, had disrupted momentum significantly.
But eventually, attention moved on. No matter how explosive a phenomenon became, players would always chase something new. Interstellar wasn't some ordinary release; it was a true AAA production, so ignoring it entirely was impossible.
Even with competitors creating pressure and major publishers competing for attention, the game's quality spoke for itself. For science-fiction games released in recent years, Interstellar unquestionably stood among the best. Otherwise, Ansoft wouldn't have chosen it as its flagship release.
One week after launch, sales surpassed two million copies, and worldwide sales crossed five million. The performance hadn't reached legendary levels like Epic Continent or The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, but comparisons like those bordered on unfair. No matter how you viewed it, Interstellar was a success.
"An alien civilization... biological swarm invaders... and humanity caught between them..." Inside PixelPioneers headquarters, John quietly studied Ansoft's latest release, and surprise slowly appeared in his eyes.
He hadn't progressed far into the story, but from promotional material and early chapters, he already understood the setting.
An advanced civilization worshiped like gods.
A ravenous species consuming worlds.
Human civilization struggles to survive between overwhelming powers.
Massive galactic empires.
Alien cultures.
Space warfare.
Everything pointed toward one conclusion: a classic galactic warfare.
John stared silently at the setting documents, and something felt familiar. Very familiar. A game from distant memories surfaced in his mind, a legendary title, a game endlessly joked about because its players supposedly couldn't see properly. A game called StarCraft.