LIGHTNOVELONLINE 37 – iMonsters
I needed another 40 minutes of explanation for the wizards to really understand how the "God of the Internet" was going to create these creatures and make them useful without causing chaos in society.
The biggest benefit this could bring to Arcantor, aside from combat, is that these creatures with magical powers could help normal people with mundane tasks.
Farmers could use Plant iMonsters to help with the care and health of their crops, Water iMonsters could help with irrigation, and Fire iMonsters could help keep people warm on cold nights.
Not to mention that all iMonsters could be used for personal protection against animals, other people, or some of the rare magical creatures one might encounter.
iMonsters was a temporary name I came up with so that we would have something solid to call these creatures for the time being, with "i" standing for Internet and "monsters" obviously standing for monsters, coming up with the name iMonsters that was easily accepted by the mages.
Of course, using iMonsters every day was something that the average person couldn't afford, considering that the Divine Power to bring them into the mortal world would cost a few dozen points, something that ordinary mortals couldn't even replace with a whole day of prayers, especially considering that I wouldn't be doing it for free, so I would still add a few Divine Power points to the cost of summoning the iMonsters so that I could make a profit from it as well.
Because of this, people would have to pray for several days to accumulate enough Premium Internet Coins to feed, evolve, and summon the iMonsters into the real world in times of need, making it far from the daily, practical use that real animals had.
But with all the explanations, the wizards were very pleased with my strategies, both for protecting Arcantor and the kingdom's population, and for the attack strategies we could develop with the iMonsters.
The time to get the points in the school test was very short, so the ideal was to launch the iMonsters as soon as possible, so that people could feed them with Mental Power as soon as possible and develop the army as soon as possible.
Now that I was a Rank 5 Embryonic Divinity, my affinity and efficiency in using Divine Power was 5% higher than when I was Rank 4.
Considering that with each rank, my efficiency in using Divine Power increased by 5% compared to the previous rank, at rank 5, my efficiency was already 27% higher than when I was rank 1.
Considering that I was increasing the things that users could do on the Internet, the cost of keeping the Internet active still remained at the original 0.5 Divine Power Points that it previously cost, but I was increasingly free to develop whatever I wanted.
Both the cost of developing new applications became lower and I could have more freedom to develop them according to my creativity.
After returning to the church with the marble body, I left the body with my conscience and started developing the app for iMonsters.
The first thing I focused on in the development, just like in my previous world of game development, was programming all the functionalities of the game.
It was like creating the skeleton and then filling it with muscles and organs.
The skeleton of the iMonster was the three creatures, the abilities that these creatures could develop, the strength that these creatures could have, the personality that these creatures could have, and even the first evolution of it, so that if some crazy wizard wanted to evolve the creature to the maximum, his iMonster could evolve at the right time.
Just like the role-playing games in my previous world, I developed levels for the iMonsters and Exp for them to evolve.
Each time the user fed the iMonster, it would receive an amount of energy that could be spent playing, training, or fighting.
Each action would use a different amount of energy and give a different reward, so the user would have to think carefully about which actions to focus on.
Sure, I wouldn't let an iMonster become completely useless because the user just played with it for years without training it once, so there would still be a base increase in all stats with each action, but the overall focus would be on only one in each action.
I also developed fatigue and mood for the iMonsters, who would have to be careful and interact at least once every 20 hours, which would possibly make the users use the internet even more and create an even more addictive routine in using it.
The intelligence of the iMonsters was not real. I had to develop it as a kind of program, or an extremely simple AI, to emulate the intelligence of a real creature, because to make a real thinking mind, or an AI that intelligent, would raise the cost of Divine Power to a level I couldn't afford.
With this more technical part developed, I was left with the artistic part.
The design of the iMonsters was finished, with the end result very close to what I had shown the three Archmages and the Sage Mages at the meeting.
I only changed a few minor features to make the iMonsters more aesthetically pleasing, but the basic structure was still there.
[See the visual representation on Pa-treon or on discord.gg/NunuXD]
Now it was time to work on the iMonsters UI.
Since the vast majority of Internet users were illiterate, I had to create something extremely intuitive, so that even if users couldn't read what was written on the screen, they would still understand what to do.
To do this, I made sure that every icon in the app had drawings of the actions it represented.
Food had an icon of a food, energy had an icon of a flame, because people in the medieval world didn't think of electricity as energy, unlike people in the modern world, followed by different icons for each functionality of the app.
Sure, there were still words explaining what each icon was, but I think it was very intuitive.
The only problem I had was how to make it lively and fun without it looking like a PowerPoint presentation.
And the alternative I came up with was the same thing that game developers used to do.
Tamagotchi was a good example of this, with a total of 2 frames per second, an amount of images that I could make my internet present to the user without increasing the Divine Power consumption too much if I lowered the resolution of the images.
To solve this, I simply made a low-resolution pixel art version that clearly showed that these cartoons were the user's iMonster, but which greatly reduced the cost in Divine Power for it to work.
That way, the game still appeared to be animated, so the iMonster would show life, but I wouldn't lose Divine Power to make it work.
The problem I had was in the final process of developing the app... optimizing it.
Even if I lowered the resolution and made various changes to make the app lighter, the cost of Divine Power was still too high.
I wouldn't lose Divine Power if users used it, but my profit would be low...
Even though I tried to adjust a lot of things, I still couldn't get the cost down to the 0.5 Divine Power points I kept on the Internet all the time...
The time it took to develop this application was longer than I had imagined, and it was not finished until the morning of the next day.
The total cost of developing this app was an amount that the other apps didn't even come close to, but considering how much work went into it and how many features it had that were different and more innovative than the other apps, it was understandable that it cost more than 87k Divine Power Points to develop.
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| Character Status
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| Name: Adrian Innovashine
| Titles: God of Creativity, God of the Internet
| Level: Embryonic deity rank 5
| Number of believers: 70,519 -> 91,674
| Average usage per user: 4 hours
|------------------------
| Divine Power: 162,282 / 160,000 -> 203,199 / 160,000 (+183,348 -55,000 Robert's Blessing, -87,431 iMonster Development)
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The amount of Divine Power I was receiving every day was very high, so if I just focused on climbing the ranks, it was possible that I would reach the top of the Embryonic Divinity by the end of the test.
When I looked at my Divine Power and saw that with the Divine Power I had received yesterday, I had already managed to become a Rank 6 Embryonic Divinity, increasing my Divine Power usage efficiency from 127.62% to 134% compared to Rank 1, I realized that I had an alternative to the optimization problem.
Was it risky to be left with only 43k Divine Power? Maybe, but looking at the gold mine of Divine Power I had on hand... it could pay off, I just had to take the risk of being low on Divine Power for a day or two and my Divine Power level would recover nicely.
Considering that I had done this a few times before, there was no problem doing it again, was there?
The thought of how much Divine Power I'd miss out on gaining in those two days just because of this bad app optimization was attacking my OCD.
Gritting my teeth, I decided to use my Divine Power and upgrade to a rank 6 Embryonic Deity.
It's not like anything could go wrong, right?
So when the Internet users woke up, they noticed that there was an update notice on the screen and that a new app had appeared!
///NunuNote///
The Visual Representations are just the way I see these iMonsters, it can be changed in the future, or even drawn in a different art style. I accept suggestions if you guys wanna send it to me on discord too :)
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