Writing Challenges
This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends was from Becky Jones: The river wound through the city, directing the traveler to its hidden gems.
It sounded like fantasy, and given that I've been working on "NPC's" a lot, it immediately made me think of something Toni might be involved in -- and then I realized it could also fit in with a story I was trying to write for my latest special submission opportunity (although I didn't want to actually put the text for it here).
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Down the Shining River
Toni looked out at the delicate buildings lining the banks of the river. “This was my very first job when I started working for Digital Dreams.”
Roger considered that comment. “Piloting a boat on the river?”
“No, writing the code for the river.” Her gaze went far away. “This was back in the days of goggles and haptic-feedback gloves, when implants were still strictly adaptive devices for disability, or something veterans of the War had because there was no way to remove it when they were discharged. Back then the game was called Dragon Rangers, and it was a general fantasy adventure game.” She laughed. “But that's mostly important to the suits in marketing. For us devs, the biggest thing was coming up with cool new fun things, and I got put on the dev team that was building Tinamaki City. It was supposed to be a simple job for the new dev: write the code for the magic river at the heart of it that would direct travelers to the various wonders of the city.”
“And I gather it didn't go quite as planned.”
Toni laughed, but there was a bitter tone to it. “When it blew up on me, I thought one of the senior devs had pulled some kind of gotcha, a 'running the new guy' sort of prank. I was just twenty-one, fresh out of Stanford's electrical engineering program with the ink on my diploma hardly dried. Sure, I'd done some co-op stuff during summers, but that was with a company that was working on upgrading business inventory control systems that had originally been designed back in the punchcard days. I got to do a little coding there, but it was mostly rewriting processes in a modern coding language, and believe me, I had a full-timer going over every line I wrote.”
“And this time they were letting you run your code and see how it worked.”
“At least it was in the dev sandbox, not the actual playable storyscape - although we didn't use that term yet, since the VR was so limited back then. Even a full haptic-feedback suit is nothing like playing a game through an implant. So when the river started erupting like a bunch of geysers where all the magic points were supposed to be, the players weren't going to feel drenched like you would if that happened now.”
Roger looked out at the otherwise placid river, trying to imagine it with water bursting upward to shower all and sundry.
“I gather you did finally get it under control.”
“Obviously, considering I'm now a senior dev. But it's a long story, and right now we've got a hacker to find.”
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I would've liked to develop it more, but most of the past week was eaten by a convention that didn't do as well as we'd hoped (but well enough we can give it another chance). Now that we don't have another show until the end of May, I need to get back into the habits I had built so well during the winter when we had no shows. I have too much I need to turn out in the next five weeks.
As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.
In the meantime, keep writing.
It sounded like fantasy, and given that I've been working on "NPC's" a lot, it immediately made me think of something Toni might be involved in -- and then I realized it could also fit in with a story I was trying to write for my latest special submission opportunity (although I didn't want to actually put the text for it here).
===========================================================================================
Down the Shining River
Toni looked out at the delicate buildings lining the banks of the river. “This was my very first job when I started working for Digital Dreams.”
Roger considered that comment. “Piloting a boat on the river?”
“No, writing the code for the river.” Her gaze went far away. “This was back in the days of goggles and haptic-feedback gloves, when implants were still strictly adaptive devices for disability, or something veterans of the War had because there was no way to remove it when they were discharged. Back then the game was called Dragon Rangers, and it was a general fantasy adventure game.” She laughed. “But that's mostly important to the suits in marketing. For us devs, the biggest thing was coming up with cool new fun things, and I got put on the dev team that was building Tinamaki City. It was supposed to be a simple job for the new dev: write the code for the magic river at the heart of it that would direct travelers to the various wonders of the city.”
“And I gather it didn't go quite as planned.”
Toni laughed, but there was a bitter tone to it. “When it blew up on me, I thought one of the senior devs had pulled some kind of gotcha, a 'running the new guy' sort of prank. I was just twenty-one, fresh out of Stanford's electrical engineering program with the ink on my diploma hardly dried. Sure, I'd done some co-op stuff during summers, but that was with a company that was working on upgrading business inventory control systems that had originally been designed back in the punchcard days. I got to do a little coding there, but it was mostly rewriting processes in a modern coding language, and believe me, I had a full-timer going over every line I wrote.”
“And this time they were letting you run your code and see how it worked.”
“At least it was in the dev sandbox, not the actual playable storyscape - although we didn't use that term yet, since the VR was so limited back then. Even a full haptic-feedback suit is nothing like playing a game through an implant. So when the river started erupting like a bunch of geysers where all the magic points were supposed to be, the players weren't going to feel drenched like you would if that happened now.”
Roger looked out at the otherwise placid river, trying to imagine it with water bursting upward to shower all and sundry.
“I gather you did finally get it under control.”
“Obviously, considering I'm now a senior dev. But it's a long story, and right now we've got a hacker to find.”
==========================================================================================
I would've liked to develop it more, but most of the past week was eaten by a convention that didn't do as well as we'd hoped (but well enough we can give it another chance). Now that we don't have another show until the end of May, I need to get back into the habits I had built so well during the winter when we had no shows. I have too much I need to turn out in the next five weeks.
As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.
In the meantime, keep writing.