| |
I’VE ALWAYS WANTED to be a game developer, but before the Arcade came along, it was a pretty unrealistic dream. I grew up in the Midwest, born to a lower middle-class family. Both of my parents had college degrees, but Dad was a preacher and Mom taught in the public school system. We were never rich.
I did go to college to become a game dev, but there weren’t any credible game programs in those days (in my region), so I got a pretty generic Computer Science degree, and once I graduated, the only good job I could find was writing PHP for a local shop that farmed out Wordpress websites to small businesses in the area.
That’s a long way from game development. I still tried to work on games whenever I could.
I got Unity and ran through some tutorials. I got the Unreal Engine and ran through some tutorials. I made a couple popular modules in Neverwinter Nights (to show my age) and even took third place in a Game Jam in St. Louis one summer. That was about the highlight of my career.
Nothing came of it. I had bragging rights and a gift card to the Steam store. First-place got PAX badges and some Bitcoin, back when those together were worth about five hundred bucks. These days, those guys are regulars at PAX, and they could buy Houston for the Bitcoin.
They were a good dev team. I never had a team. I had a buddy who could write storyline as easy as breathing, and a guy I met in college would sometimes make me 3D models on the cheap. That’s the best I could cobble together. (And still I took third out of hundreds in St. Louis!)
You can’t build a game without a team. It wasn’t really possible.
So I spent my weekdays building crappy webpages and my evenings drinking and watching YouTube, and that was my whole life. Then the Great Pandemic hit, and my boss used it as an excuse to fire us all. We all could’ve worked remote, but he had no respect for us. He kept the cute graphic designer and a couple bootlick code monkeys and showed the rest of us the door.
Still makes my blood boil.
The government helped out a little. The unemployment checks were good for a while, but I knew from the first they wouldn’t last long.
That left me stuck at home in my one-room apartment, browsing the internet off my neighbor’s wifi and watching day after day after day slip out of my life.
Out of boredom more than anything else, I started designing a new game. I wanted to make something small, something modest enough to match my abilities. But small isn’t what I’m good at. After a week I had sixty pages of game design documents, a couple hundred files in my Bitbucket project, and a completely broken user interface in need of a full rewrite.
That’s how it always goes with me. It was a Saturday morning in April when I woke up with a little inspiration and a bit of motivation—just enough to open my dev software, but not necessarily enough to get anything done. While I was scrolling through the broken code, trying to find somewhere to get started, my door flew open, and a girl dashed inside.
I don’t bring girls to my place. It’s a bad place. For two hundred bucks a month, there’s room for a bed on the floor, a loveseat and a TV stand for a living room, and a tiny kitchenette with no stove and a half-size fridge.
The bathroom has a shower stall, a toilet, and a sink. The closet is the floor—clean clothes on one side of the bed, dirty clothes on the other. It’s livable, but it isn’t girl-worthy.
And, oh, this girl was quite a girl! Her hair went from brown to blue to blond in big bouncy curls. Her eyes were dark and beautiful. Her body was small and slim and muscular, like a runner’s. I could tell, because she was only wearing a towel. But there was a handgun in her right hand and fresh blood-dripping off her left hand.
She bumped the door shut with her hip, making the seafoam towel ripple distractingly, then leaned her ear against the door, listening intently while the drip from her fingers stained my carpet and lost me a hundred-dollar deposit.
It took her half a minute to pull her attention from the door. Then she cast a glance around and noticed me for the first time. I was cross-legged on my bed in my boxers, with a laptop protecting my modesty and last night’s dinner dried to a plate at the foot of my bed.
She didn’t bat an eye. “Please help me,” she whispered, with total confidence that I would. “He’s crazy. He’s going to kill me.”
“Who?” I whispered back.
“My ex. He’s crazy!”
I reached for my phone. “I’ll call the cops.”
“No!” Her hands came up, imploring me, but I felt the muzzle of her handgun track across my torso. I couldn’t stop staring at her blood-drenched arm. It seemed to be drying, caking on.
She saw me flinch and lowered her arms. “I’m sorry. I know what I must look like.”
“What happened?” I asked.
She considered the question for more than a moment. Then she gave up and shook her head. “I can’t explain. It would take too long. But if you call the police, they’ll take me away and leave him free to hurt my sister.”
She was pretty and small and scared, and I’m a good Midwestern boy. I was all the way on her side. I asked, “What can I do?”
She weighed the question for a heartbeat, then handed me her gun. “Guard the door,” she said, “If Derrick comes through, put the whole magazine in him. I need to wash up.”
She glanced at my kitchenette, then nodded toward the bathroom door (the only door in the place). I nodded back, and she seemed relieved. Before she disappeared through the door, she said, “I’m going to need some clothes, too.”
“Sure!’ I called back, but the door was already shut, and I heard the shower pipes scream as she turned it on.
I sat there for a moment in stunned disbelief. Then I put away my laptop and started scrambling in my clean clothes pile, praying there was enough for two whole outfits.
I needn’t have bothered. I never saw her again.