Chapter 7 - Management and Development

“Is the next routine competition in management?” Kai asked. “Or is it in development?”

“I think it was management,” Nanaka told him hesitantly.

“In that case, we still...” have a chance, he trailed off into his own thoughts. Had it been a development competition, there wouldn’t have been anything they could have done.

Every social game club in the country with an application registered in the BOX participated in routine competitions with the goal of improving the development capabilities of all parties involved. Clubs were pitted against other clubs of roughly equal skill, using their BOX rankings as a matchmaking metric. There were two types of competitions: management and development.

The development side required each team to create a new application from scratch in a short period of time. It was similar to a hackathon, where programmers and graphic designers would gather into small teams to develop software. Both teams would receive the same basic prompt and development deadline, and would have to develop a new game based on those guidelines. Of course, creating a new app from scratch would be both physically and mentally exhausting. For the Meikun High Social Game Club, in its current state, this would have been akin to being sent off on a death march before they’d even started.

However, that didn’t mean that the management competition was going to be easy; it absolutely wouldn’t be. In the case of a console game, if you lived up to all the promises on the box and finished developing all necessary features for it, that was generally the end. Nowadays, there were often patches to fix critical bugs or additional downloadable content that still needed to be developed. But, at the very least, the latter case was often planned for from the time development started.

In that regard, social games were crucially different. There was no end to development; there was a perpetual stream of new content to create. Every month—in some cases, every week—there was a new time-limited event to run, or a new main story chapter to add, all while continuing to fix issues reported through user feedback. If a game continued to run for a long period of time, you could even expect a massive update at some point that overhauled core game mechanics in order to prevent things from getting stale. All of the work that went into keeping a social game alive was neatly wrapped up under the term “management.”

As such, a management competition was based off of a pre-existing application registered in the BOX. While there was still a development deadline, there was no prompt to dictate what had to be done, since the users of each title would want something different from that game’s management. Some schools might choose to implement a new gacha banner, while others might opt for an event. If a game had balance issues, then overhauling the level design of the game would count toward the competition.

In the end, the two teams would be judged by professionals working in the industry. Whichever school was judged to have managed their game best would win.

“Aoi-san,” said Kai, “what do our most recent management plans look like?” Typically, it would be considered bad practice to alter management plans just because a routine competition was coming up. However, this time, the circumstances were different: losing in the competition had been tied directly to the continuation of the club. The club disappearing, in essence, was the end of the game as a service. With stakes that high, it was necessary to revise any previously made plans.

In order to do so, Kai needed to know what plans had already been set. “...Aoi-san?” he asked again.

Ever since Aya and Eru had left the room, Kai and Nanaka had been sitting face to face, across the table from one another. But since he’d asked this question, Nanaka refused to look him in the eye. She looked like a sad puppy being scolded.

Kai felt a sense of deja vu, as if he’d seen this scene before. Around the time he’d first joined the Tsukigase social game club, Akane told him to come up with ten different plans for an event, but he was only able to come up with half that number. He only realized he was seeing himself in Nanaka when she raised her head and said, “Sorry... We don’t have anything.”

“...What?” he asked.

“We don’t... have any plans,” she admitted, somehow managing to shrink even smaller as she went from ‘scolded puppy’ to ‘salted slug’ before his eyes.

“I-I’m not trying to criticize you!” Kai said, hurriedly reassuring her before she could melt away and disappear entirely. Then he asked for details and found that the Meikun High Social Game Club had absolutely no management plans, just as she’d said.

To begin with, their game had been released only a few months prior; they’d barely squeezed it out before winter break. Apparently, talks of disbandment had started around then and they somehow forced a release before the break in order to keep it from happening.

But there was no way anyone could make a good game with such a brutally forced release window. Deadlines were important, and it wasn’t uncommon for a stroke of genius to appear with the stress of a close deadline, but that was a separate issue from forcibly terminating development. And as a result, Meikun High’s social game, Miracle Stage, was close to being rock bottom in the ranking list.

“...The truth is, I don’t really play social games,” Nanaka admitted. “I mean, I’ve played RPGs on the TV and stuff, but...”

“Um... Then why did you join the social game club?” Kai asked, and then instantly regretted the way he’d worded his question. He thought Nanaka would find a way to make herself even smaller than before.

But contrary to his expectations, she didn’t seem down at all. In fact, she looked the slightest bit happier as she got up from her chair and turned on one of the computers at the back of the room. It was the one Eru had been using before, so apparently the passwords were communal knowledge.

The desktop booted up to reveal a wallpaper that was a drawing of two extremely cute girls. Even the background had a lot of love poured into the details, and the image’s quality was so high that it wouldn’t have been a stretch to use it as a game’s key visual.

“Isn’t it cute?” Nanaka asked.

“...Yes, I think it’s cute,” Kai agreed. He’d never seen these characters before, so he surmised that they were originals.

“Eru drew this, you know,” she told him. “I’ve been friends with her since we were little kids. We used to play games and draw, and we were just always together. Back then, we made a promise to make a game together.”

“And that’s why you two joined the social game club?” Kai guessed.

“Yep. But... Even though Eru’s trying her best, I can’t do anything...” Nanaka said sadly. “That’s why...”

“That’s all the more reason to give it our all,” he said, thinking back to the words Eru had spat out as she’d left the room. She had called Kai a big liar, but added that Nanaka was a liar, too, because she hadn’t done her job as a planner despite promising to make a game together. Thus, he figured, it really wasn’t just him—Nanaka was also a liar.

“Yep! I’ll do my best!” Nanaka agreed, earnestly responding to him like a young child.

Kai almost felt embarrassed when he saw her unshackled gaze. That won’t do, he decided. Nope, that won’t do at all. Here Nanaka was, opening up her heart to face the club’s problems head on, so as her partner, Kai thought it was wrong to look away. He took a deep breath to restore his peace of mind, and decided that he’d keep the conversation as professional as possible in order to keep himself straight. “...Alright,” he finally said. “First, I’d like to get a handle on our current situation.”

“What do you mean?” Nanaka asked.

“The key to a management competition is implementing appropriate improvements and repairs,” Kai explained. “To that end, I’d like to first get a grasp of our current DAU and other such quantitative metrics.”

Kai didn’t think he’d said anything too out there, but there was a giant question mark popping out of Nanaka’s head. At least, that’s what her expression seemed to suggest.

“Um... Do you have an admin view page?” he suggested.

“Admin view?”

His intuition let him know that oh, this is bad. But it was too late to run away now, and he had to push forward. “...Aoi-san, I’m going to give you a few acronyms here,” he told her. “Would you mind telling me what they stand for?”

“Huh?” said Nanaka. “A pop quiz?”

“First: KPI.”

“Hmm, maybe... Kappa Power Island?” said Nanaka, hazarding a guess.

Kai felt dizzy. He’d never expected her to name a Japanese mythical being. What would Kappa even mean in English, he wondered. “...Next is DAU,” he said out loud.

“Oh, you said that one earlier... Uhhh, Dragon!” Nanaka said brightly. “And... Uncle?” Maybe it was because she had confidence in her answer, but there was a good oomph behind the word ‘dragon.’ Of course, that wasn’t correct, but still.

‘Dragon and uncle,’ Kai thought wryly. It sounds like some sort of fairy tale. Then, he pushed on with the quiz, saying, “ARPU.”

“‘Ay-arr-pee-you?’” Nanaka repeated back at him. “I think the ‘R’ and ‘P’ are probably role-playing, but...”

“...Thank you very much,” he said. “That’ll be fine.”

“You don’t look very fine to me, Shiraseki-kun! D-Did I really say something that weird?”

There wasn’t any helping it, Kai decided. After all, Nanaka had said as much herself: she really didn’t know anything about social games. In that case, it would have been weirder if she’d understood the management jargon. So this wasn’t strange at all. It wasn’t strange by any means, but—

“This... might be tough,” he mumbled under his breath, so that the worried Nanaka wouldn’t hear him.

◇

They decided to do some research on their opponents before getting into their own prep work... Or, that had been the plan, but it didn’t amount to much in the end.

The opposing club was from a school in the Aomori prefecture, and their social game was clinging to the bottom of the rankings. The details of rank calculation weren’t made public, but the data analysis team at Tsukigase estimated that it looked at net revenue as a base and then included active users and new unique users, as well.

Kai was a bit worried that they might run into some sort of clerical error and be put against a team that was way above their league, but seeing this brought him some small reprieve. If their teams were both around the same rank, that meant the starting line was the same. Now, they just needed to do whatever they could.

“The DAU and ARPU things I was talking about earlier have to do with KPI analysis in social games,” Kai explained.

“...Professor, what’s ‘kay-pee-eye analysis?’” Nanaka asked in a pitiable voice.

“KPI analysis is... This is a bit of an oversimplification, but let’s say your goal is to bring in 1 million yen worth of revenue,” said Kai, trying to explain. “In order to reach that goal, we collect data on the people who play our game and analyze it to figure out what we need to do.”

“So that’s what KPI analysis is,” she mused. At some point, Nanaka had pulled out a notebook and begun taking notes on what he was saying. Kai didn’t think he was saying anything all that special, so it was a little embarrassing for her to take notes and call him ‘Professor.’

He waited for her to finish writing before he moved on. “I’ll try and make my analogies as easy to understand as possible,” he promised. “They’re just analogies, though, so the nuance is a bit off from the actual thing. Aoi-san,” he said next, “how many points did you get on our most recent mock exam in Japanese?”

“Uh, well, um...” Nanaka’s eyes swam around as she stammered. Come to think of it, she was in the same class as Kai, and the smart students were generally placed in the honors classes at this school. Basically, since she wasn’t in one of those honors classes... well, it went without saying.

“...Um, if you don’t want to tell me,” Kai said gently, “it doesn’t have to be Japanese.”

“My other subjects weren’t any bett— 62 points,” she finally blurted out. When she realized, mid-sentence, that she’d said more than was necessary, Nanaka buried her face in her hands.

Knowing that they were in the same class, Kai didn’t stop to laugh as he continued on. It wasn’t as if he was in a position to mock her. “This is just an example, but pretend for a second that your goal is to get 80 points on the next mock exam,” he said. “This final goal is what we’d call ‘KGI’ in social game management. It stands for ‘Key Goal Indicator.’ It’s simply a measure of what we have to accomplish.”

“...Is it like the KPI from earlier?” Nanaka questioned.

“Let’s see... The KPI follows from here,” he said. “The mock exam for Japanese is always composed in the same way: the first section is critical essay interpretation, the second is prose interpretation, and the third and fourth sections are for classics and Chinese classics, respectively. Does all that sound correct?”

“Yep.” Nanaka agreed.

“In order to achieve the 80 point KGI we set, this hypothetical Aoi-san would need to break it down into concrete steps.”

“Concrete... steps?”

“Um... well...” said Kai, who was beginning to flounder. Nanaka clearly didn’t quite get what he meant, as she had a confused expression on her face, which was slightly tilted to one side. He knew that leaving her confused at this point would mean she’d never become a proper planner.

Kai figured she just didn’t have the image in her mind yet, so he racked his brain to make it easier to understand. “To put it simply, you’d make smaller goals for yourself,” he said. “For example, maybe you’d say that you’ll 100% get every question that has to do with vocabulary on the classics portion; something like that. It’s like building up to the big goal one step at a time.”

“Oh, so that’s what that means!” Nanaka exclaimed. “Like to diet before summer, you could cut out any snacking between meals.”

“Exactly,” he agreed. “That’s how we take the big goal—our KGI—and break it down into smaller, more readily completable goals known as ‘KPI.’ This one stands for ‘Key Performance Indicator,’ and is a parameter for measuring achievement.”

“Um...” said Nanaka, trailing off uncertainly.

“We can think of the KGI as the goal and the KPI as signposts leading us on the road toward the goal.”

“...So if we manage to do all of the KPI, then does that mean we finish the KGI?” asked Nanaka.

“That’s correct. But if we could easily complete all the goals we set, we wouldn’t have any difficulties at all,” Kai told her. “So, for all our goals—our KPI—we perform analysis on how best to complete them.”

“Ah! That’s how it connects back to KPI analysis.” Nanaka beamed, clapping her hands in epiphany, and Kai nodded in response.

“Let’s return to social games,” he suggested. “Management competitions are a contest to see who can improve their game more, so it goes without saying that we need to improve MiSt. This may be sudden, but Aoi-san, what do you think MiSt needs to become a better game?”

“Hmm,” Nanaka let out a contemplative hum and began to think. Kai thought she’d never reach an answer at that rate, but then she reached out to a tablet on the table and began tapping away at it as she played MiSt. She was lost in thought for a bit as she played, and then suddenly stopped her fingers.

“I can’t... I don’t know how to explain it, but I feel like MiSt is harder to play than other games,” Nanaka said.

“.........I see,” said Kai, so surprised that his reaction to her statement was more delayed than he’d meant it to be.

Nanaka took his pause to mean that she was wrong, or that he was sick of her answers, and panicked to try and save face.

But when Kai followed up with “I think so too,” she looked incredibly relieved. “It’s just,” he continued, “I’d like to make it a little more concrete. Thinking backwards here, what parts of other games do you find easy to play?”

“I play LW, too, and... even though this game has a ton of different things going on, I don’t feel like it’s hard at all,” Nanaka admitted. “It’s like I can easily tell what’s where... Hmm, maybe it’s like they’re making it so you can play even if you don’t know what you’re doing? Or... something?”

“That essentially means the UI and leading lines are well made,” Kai told her.

“Oh, oh! I know ‘UI’!” Nanaka said. “That’s ‘User Interface’! In MiSt, that’d be like this button that says gacha... But I don’t think I’ve heard of a ‘leading line’ before.”

“In LW, there’s a Leveling menu and an Evolution menu, right? You can’t evolve a character until they’re max level, but have you ever noticed that a button appears to take you from the Leveling menu to the Evolution menu if you max out a character’s level on the Leveling screen?”

“I have!”

“That’s what we call a leading line,” Kai explained. “LW has many mechanics, so if the UI wasn’t good, it’d be impossible to tell what’s what. On top of that, they lay out a path to make it easier for the user to do what they want to—wanting to evolve after maxing out a character is an obvious one—and all of that makes it easier to play.”

“Wow!” said Nanaka, and she began clapping her hands as if she’d seen an amazing magical illusion.

This would have been common knowledge for anyone at Tsukigase, so being showered with admiration for explaining it made Kai feel like he really was using some kind of an illusion to trick Nanaka.

“...And in the case of MiSt...” said Kai, moving on as he picked the tablet up from the table. Nanaka had said that she didn’t play social games much, but he figured that she must have played a lot of console games. Otherwise, it’d be very strange for her to say that MiSt was ‘difficult to play.’

What’s more, she was exactly right. When Kai pulled an all-nighter playing the game yesterday, he’d been surprised with every fiber of his being. The leading lines of this game couldn’t be described with words like ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ it was—holy shit, it just was. Oh, and the UI was weird, too.

“First,” he said, “you tap on the title screen and get sent to the home menu... but no matter how you look at it, the button to move to the gacha menu is way too big, don’t you think?”

MiSt was made to fit a landscape format, and on its home screen, the left side was reserved for character splash arts. There were also buttons for the main menu, lined up across the bottom of the screen. This could be considered a standard template, if it weren’t for the weird gacha button.

The menu list at the bottom had things like Concert, Lessons, Member List, and Shop. This was only proper, since those things were parts of the game. But among them, there was one button—labeled ‘Gacha’—that was larger than the rest. It wasn’t just one size larger, either. It was at least three sizes bigger than any of the other buttons.

“Let’s move onto character leveling...” said Kai, pressing forward. “Here, let me try leveling someone. MiSt has the same concept as LW, where a leading line guides the player after they level a unit.”

He tapped the Lessons button and moved to a different screen. After he leveled up a unit—oh, what might this be?—a button to take the user to the gacha appeared.

Nanaka put two and two together and buried her head in her arms, knowing that if you’d seen one menu in MiSt, you’d seen them all. And it wasn’t limited to the leveling screen: after completing a story chapter; after evolving a unit; after playing a concert... no matter what, the gacha button was inevitably there, waiting at the end. In essence, the gacha was being pushed too hard. So hard, in fact, that you’d think the people who’d made MiSt had a screw or two loose.

“Aoi-san,” Kai agreed, “like you said, it makes perfect sense why this game is hard to play.”

“...Yeah, it does.” Nanaka looked so dejected, Kai could see her spirit leave her body. The root of the issue was probably that gacha-crazed programmer, but the fact that the planner couldn’t rein her in meant some responsibility fell on Nanaka, too.

“But now that we have such a glaring issue, that means our goal is all the more simple to set up,” he suggested. “Aoi-san, do you think you could define our KGI and KPI now?”

“Oh, right! Umm... the KGI would be ‘Make the game easier to play,’ and the KPI would be ‘Improve the UI’ and ‘Reorganize the leading lines’... I think.”

Ideally, the KGI and KPI would be set more concretely, as more quantitative goals, such that they could be broken down into numbers and digits. For example, “Increase sales by 20% compared to last month” would be a perfect goal. Analysis was impossible without those kinds of numbers, and it wouldn’t be certain whether or not the goal had been reached.

In the case of Nanaka’s idea to “reorganize the leading lines,” there necessarily should have been research to see how many times users accessed each page to then see if their goal had any significant effects. From there, the number of things to look into would cascade out like a set of dominoes. In order to understand user access count, they’d need to know how many people played their game every day—their Daily Active Users (DAU)—and so on. From there, they’d continue to find more detailed things to analyze.

Generally speaking, the KPI analysis conducted in the development and management of social games was founded on statistical metrics, such as the DAU, in order to analyze performance. In fact, those metrics were the only thing that could be considered a signpost, calling back to the way Kai explained things to Nanaka earlier.

At the most basic level, numbers do not lie. Even if there were to be a huge positive response to some improvement or fix on social media, if that fix was actually ineffective, then the numbers behind the KPI would be less than flattering. There were cases where people would interpret the numbers incorrectly and implement misguided changes, or put too much confidence in the numbers and get burned for it. But as a general rule, the numbers do not lie, which was why there was such a need to break the KPI down into numbers wherever possible.

However, there was no reason to point that out to Nanaka just now, Kai decided. After all, it wasn’t as if her answer had been wrong. It was merely that there was more to it that could be expanded on, and that could always be learned as they went along.

So instead, Kai gave a deep nod to Nanaka’s answer, and she gave him a happy smile in return.

◇

The two of them continued their conversation in the clubroom until half past six, and then headed home together.

To get to Niigata Station from Meikun High, the only real option was to ride the train. There was technically a bus that ran that way, as well, but the nearest bus stop was further away than the nearest train station.

Yet even then, that very same train station had its own issue, which was that the number of trains coming and going were shockingly low. To top it all off, the train only had a few cars, so it was always tightly packed with students.

Had this been the Yamanote Line in Tokyo, they could have simply waited a few minutes for the next train to come, but in Niigata, that wasn’t an option. If they missed the 7 P.M. train to Niigata Station, they’d be stuck waiting nearly thirty minutes for another train. That’s why their route was always packed with students, who were on their way home from club activities around this time.

“Thanks, Shiraseki-kun,” said Nanaka, who caught Kai off guard when she suddenly thanked him as the pair walked home.

He turned to his left to look at her and caught an eyeful of setting sunlight. The sun was caught on the ridgeline of the mountains, and illuminated the rural landscape that encircled the school. Around him, the shadows of students on their way to the station stretched out, swaying back and forth on the path.

“Um... What are you talking about?” asked Kai.

“All the stuff you taught me today!” Nanaka exclaimed. “I realized... I really don’t know anything after all.”

“It wasn’t anything to be thanked for,” he grumbled in embarrassment.

“No, that’s not true! Shiraseki-kun, whenever I got the tiniest bit stuck, you made up an analogy right away so I’d understand, right? I think that’s amazing!” she declared earnestly. “It’s like you were saying, ‘This is what it means to be a planner!’ It’s more than just making up the plans!”

“It’s true that that’s a common misconception,” Kai agreed. Coming up with plans was an important part of being a planner, but having a plan sit there wouldn’t do anything for anyone. It could be numbers, or words, or anything, but only by fleshing the concept out logically could the vague image of a plan be turned into a functional blueprint. Only then could other team members come to understand the meaning behind a plan. Then, and only then, would the planner be able to proceed with their first task. It was unthinkable to end the planner’s responsibilities at just coming up with a plan.

After they’d decided to focus on UI and leading line fixes—in other words, Usability Improvements—for the competition, Kai had explained some important jargon words Nanaka would need to know while developing social games. She’d had no working knowledge, as Nanaka had said herself, and Kai found teaching her to be a rewarding task.

He regretted the fact that he couldn’t explain things like DAU and other KPI-adjacent terms with real numbers to show, but unfortunately, Meikun High’s social game club didn’t have so much as an admin view page. The features available on an admin page differed from development team to development team. But generally speaking, there would be some means of monitoring and updating in-game notifications, as well as an easy means of checking the stats necessary to measure KPI, like DAU.

Admin view aside, they didn’t even have a separate testing environment in which to test new patches before release. The club was full of missing things. And then there the cherry on top: thinking ahead, the biggest issue was that the sole illustrator of the club, Eru, was too upset to work.

“Do you think Kuroba-san will come to our club properly?” Kai pondered.

“Hmm... I think she’ll be fine after a while,” Nanaka said. “But if worst comes to worst, I’ll do something and convince her!” Perhaps she herself was uncertain if this plan would pan out, because Nanaka’s lower-than-usual energy betrayed the positive implications of her statement.

If they had time to spare, then the hope was that Eru’s wrath would ebb with the flow of time. With the competition right in front of them, though, they didn’t have the time with which to leisurely wait her out.

“If we’re going to improve the UI and leading lines, we absolutely need new graphical elements,” Kai warned. “If our illustrator doesn’t show up, we might not be able to do anything.”

“Oh, in that case, we’ll be fine!” Nanaka responded casually. “I was the one who drew all the UI and stuff, so I can do it.” Then she added proudly, “That’s why I knew what UI meant!”

Kai paused for a moment in shock. “...Aoi-san,” he finally asked, “you can draw?”

“Not as well as Eru,” she told him. “But... I can manage the UI and that kind of thing if I try.”

Kai thought back on how she’d told him the two used to play and draw together as children. MiSt’s UI was by no means of poor quality; it took a floral motif from its magical girl theme and mixed it well with the realism of its idol theme to blend in well with the game’s worldbuilding. It was beyond the level of someone who only sketched every now and again, so maybe Nanaka had drawn a lot when she was little. Maybe she drew every day, even, just like Eru.

Since there were so many students on the path to the station, they were forced to walk slowly and had only just arrived when the train rolled in. Luckily, they found two persons’ worth of sitting space and sat down together in the train car.

The car was packed from end to end with high school students, so there wasn’t much leeway when they sat down. The outer edge of their thighs were stuck to each other, and Kai could feel the faint warmth of Nanaka’s body temperature past the fabric of his trousers.

Bad, he thought uneasily. This is bad. The more he noticed it, the more that sensation of warmth engulfed his thoughts, so he decided to talk about something else in order to get his mind off it.

Of course, there was no way that he could say anything meaningful with that kind of energy. “Aoi-san, you’re amazing,” was the best he could manage.

“Huh?” she said. “What’s this, out of the blue?”

Somewhere inside him, the word “amazing” had run off and managed to escape his mouth, where Nanaka could now pick it apart for being devoid of meaning. But rather than picking his words apart, Nanaka looked to be curious as she peered into his face. She was slightly shorter than Kai, and so naturally looked up toward him.

Cute, Kai thought. That was the only way to describe her. Unable to meet her gaze, he intentionally stared straight ahead as he explained, “The fact that you can draw, I mean.”

“...That’s not true,” Nanaka protested. “Eru’s so much better than me. I don’t match up at—”

“You’re wrong,” said Kai, cutting her off, and Nanaka seemed somewhat surprised by his refutation. “For a planner like you to draw up graphics of that quality really is amazing,” he told her earnestly. “All the high level planners I knew had some kind of secret weapon: some had overwhelmingly convincing presentations; others had the ability to build rich and exciting worlds... The specifics were different for each person, but... Aoi-san, you have a weapon. That’s why, you’re, well, amazing.”

The responsibilities of a planner were diverse, and there were even people who went so far as to say that everything that wasn’t art or programming fell under that category. Kai could understand where these people were coming from. Rather, it’d be more fitting to say that anyone would come to understand if they’d worked as a planner for a social game. Thinking up plans, ironing out specifications, presenting materials, communicating with outside teams, and responding to users were all to be expected from a planner, along with level design and master data management.

Some people viewed this pessimistically and simply referred to planners as ‘handymen,’ which wasn’t wrong in any way; there was an element of being a handyman to the role of a planner.

But when he was at Tsukigase, each planner who’d made him think this person is amazing had a weapon that pushed them to a level beyond that of being a mere handyman. It was a given that they could do anything, because they’d each had a unique weapon that let them stand out from their peers.

The UI that Nanaka had created was high quality, and only possible with a deep understanding of the game it was tailored for. She bemoaned her lack of skills as a planner, but that was only because she’d never had a chance to learn the basics, and it was a problem that would sort itself out with more experience and study.

But Nanaka already possessed a skill that other planners didn’t—the skill of drawing. She already had a weapon to defend herself from those that would reduce her to a mere handyman, and that was unmistakably amazing.

“It’s really embarrassing when you praise me so suddenly...” she mumbled.

“I-I’m sorry,” Kai apologized unwittingly. As he watched Nanaka’s cheeks go red with embarrassment, he found it mysterious that he, himself, was growing even more embarrassed than she was.

“Ah—” Nanaka tapped her fist into her palm like she had an epiphany. “Then, Shiraseki-kun, what’s your weapon?”

“I...” he said, trailing off.

There was no ill will behind Nanaka’s question. She had a purehearted belief that he, too, had an amazing weapon. After all, he’d previously been a planner at the best social game high school in the country.

“I... can’t draw,” Kai brought himself to admit, thinking back to his first day after transferring, when Nanaka had taken him around to see all the different clubs. There wasn’t a single club he’d wanted to join, nor anything he could do: that was the person known as Shiraseki Kai.

“I can’t write a story that will hook users,” he continued. “I don’t have an analytical mind that can predict the success of a game based off a slight shift in KPI, and I don’t have the feel of how to design a level that everyone would enjoy.” Then he pulled out a laptop and four smartphones from the bag on top of his lap. This was Shiraseki Kai’s everything.

“—Listen up, Shiraseki,” she’d lectured him. “You ought to enjoy social games more than anyone else. Every day, countless apps repeat a process of trial and error. Let your heart be moved by each and every one. The most important point is to be moved, and to not forget that you were moved. I cannot promise you it will become a weapon, but it will become a path that is yours, and yours alone—”

Kai still remembered Akane’s words.

“I decided to be with social games more than anyone else,” he told Nanaka. “To play them more, to be moved by them more, to admire them more, to be envious more, and to enjoy them more than anyone. This laptop has the records of my daily reports of every social game I play. It’s not all that grand, but... this is my weapon.”

For a planner on Akane’s level, Kai’s weapon probably wouldn’t even be worth the effort to steal. If their weapons were missiles and firearms, then his was a knife at best. And even then, it’d be a tiny, dull, chipped little knife that couldn’t be used for much at all. Still, Kai held onto it as tightly as he could, and rose up. Through all the time he’d spent around the talented geniuses at Tsukigase, his will and his pride had never changed.

“Shiraseki-kun...” Nanaka began to ask, resting her hand on the laptop. “Hey, can I see?”

“Huh? But this is something I wrote for myself,” he protested, “so I don’t think it’d be fun to rea—”

“I want to see it! Oh, but if you don’t want to show me, that’s okay. It’s your precious weapon, after all.” All Nanaka had done was to say something she’d found obvious, and to her, it had been an ordinary statement.

—But Kai was moved beyond belief. He had something that wasn’t worth the effort to steal, and yet, she’d recognized it as being a weapon of its own. That realization soaked down somewhere deep in his chest.

In response, Kai put up the smartphones and opened his laptop. The tiny sound of the computer starting up quietly was drowned out by the clacks of the swaying train. “Um... For example,” he said, “this is a report on D&P events.”

“How much is there?” Nanaka wanted to know.

“I have everything, from the first event to the latest one,” Kai told her. “I make it a point to log everything I can. For events, I analyze them holistically, and then continue with the design of ranking rewards and how menu screens flow into each other... If there’s something I can log, I make sure to leave a record of it.”

“W-Wait, you’re this detailed about it?!” she squeaked.

The spreadsheet he had on screen contained numbers, graphs, and screenshots, all with subtext attached and crammed together. He’d designed it to be readable for himself, so it wasn’t exactly a well-made document, but Nanaka stared intently at the screen.

“What about this file?” she asked.

“That’s data on StrikeMon’s gacha.”

“... Does this one have everything from release, too?” she questioned.

“Yes. This is all that I could do, so...”

“...A-And all these other files, they’re all as long as these?”

“Yes, they are,” Kai admitted.

“That’s amazing!” she burst out, loud enough to cause the other students around them to look over, but Nanaka herself was too hyped up to notice. “You said I was amazing,” she gushed. “But Shiraseki-kun, you’re way more amazing than I am!”