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THIS IS WHEN IT GETS fun.
Ben settled on the sofa to drink his beer and play his game. I pretty much forgot he was there as I poured myself into this new website.
Signing up was as easy as getting a new GMail account. I didn’t read all the sales pages. I went straight to the registration page and had a user account in under five minutes. Then I clicked through to the Creators area, and a big message in the middle of the screen said, “You don’t have any projects yet. Start one?”
All it needed was a name. I frowned for a moment, thinking, then typed, “The Girl with the Gun.” Just something to start with.
“What kind of game is this?” it asked. My options were Text-based Adventure, 8-bit RPG, Side-scroller, Casino, or Bare Metal. I chose the RPG, because that was what Ben was doing. He could help me if I got stuck.
The webpage showed me six tilesets to choose from, along with the option to upload my own spritesheets. I almost picked the gritty Cyberpunk tiles, but in the end I picked Modern Cute, same as Ben.
And already my heart was pounding. If you’ve never tried to make a game, you can’t imagine how exciting these options seemed to me. Even knowing it would produce cookie-cutter games, this website was promising to do all the heavy lifting.
The website showed me my game—my game!—with the title and template and tileset at the top of the page, and sections below for Characters, Locations, Items, Actions, and (as I scrolled) a dozen other kinds of game assets. They were all empty except the first, Characters, which had a prompt like the one on the front page. “Make your first character.” Again, it only needed a name.
This was just a test project, so I didn’t think very hard. I typed “The Girl” and hit enter. Again, that prompted a handful of questions: player character, NPC, or enemy? I made her the PC. Starting class? It offered several built-in options that looked like they’d been chosen based on the tileset I had picked: Soldier, Engineer, Medic, Assassin, Professor, Student, and so on. Given the game title I was using, “Assassin” seemed most appropriate.
There was also an easy way to add my own custom class (or, as I’d learn later, to browse other users’ assets on the marketplace), but I didn’t want to go down a rabbit hole. I stuck with the stock Assassin.
That did even more than I expected it to. When the selection box cleared, I was looking at the Edit Character page for “The Girl,” and it was full.
The page looked a lot like the Edit Game one, with a bunch of sections for all the kinds of game assets you might need on a character. The Vitals section showed “Health” and “Energy.” The Currencies section showed “Dollars,” “Euros,” and “Reputation.” The Inventory section showed “Street clothes,” “Stun gun,” and “Fake ID.”
I clicked on “Street clothes” and it took me to a new page, “Edit Item,” which was pre-filled with a bunch of settings like weight, resale value, damage reduction—everything you’d need. I tried to change the name, and the website reminded me this was a built-in asset, but I could make a copy to modify.
I clicked “Yes” on that and changed the name to “Towel.” I tweaked a few of the other stats, but before I could get lost in that rabbit hole, I spotted a place on the page that showed all the characters using this item in my game. “The Girl” was the only one, of course. I clicked her name, and I was back to editing her.
“Is this all it is?” I asked. “Just forms and forms and forms?”
Ben glanced up. Then he said, “Oh! Top right. Click where it says, ‘Play.’ As long as you have a character started.”
I did, so I clicked Play and the website showed me a game canvas with a pixelated character in street clothes walking around in a nondescript five-by-five room. No exits. No other characters. Nothing to do.
But I was stunned. I used the keyboard to walk around the room, and stealthy footstep sounds went pit pit pit until I stopped. A menu button showed me a Character panel with tabs for her stats, her quests, and her inventory. Instead of clicking the tab, I hit escape and the menu closed. I tapped “I” on my keyboard, and the character panel opened straight to the Inventory tab. She had a fake ID in inventory, and a towel and handgun equipped.
My jaw dropped. For a long time I was speechless. At last, I croaked out, “How?”
Ben shrugged. “No idea. Couple of geniuses on Twitter got bored with the Pandemic and built this for us.”
“For us?”
He finally tore his attention from his own game and met my eyes. “You didn’t read the docs, did you?”
“I didn’t have to. I dove right in, and it worked.”
Ben rolled his eyes. He was a tech writer. He had strong opinions about people who refused to read the manual.
But then he grinned. “You’re gonna love it. It’s so easy, but you can make anything. You can even build your own game client in Unity or whatever and connect it to your Exelichai project for the database.”
“How much will that cost to manage?” I felt a little panic, but it had never asked me for payment information.
“Nothing. Nothing until you’ve got a lot of active users, anyway. These guys wanted to make it easy for everyone stuck at home in the Pandemic to start making games. That’s why I said ‘for us.’”
“Is it all this easy?” I asked.
“If you’re happy with lots of defaults, yes. I bet you will want to customize everything. That can be complicated to keep track of—”
“I saw lots of rabbit holes.”
“But it’s no harder than any game with all that stuff. And the website makes it easy to change everything, too! While you were setting up yours, I added a new Tech Writer class to my game with a combat ability called ‘Read the Manual’ that makes everyone in your party smarter.”
Like I said.
I couldn’t believe it, though. This felt like Aladdin’s lamp. This was too good to be true.
And Ben went right on. “They don’t have the coins working yet, but as soon as that’s live, you’ll be able to list your games for sale to players, and list your game assets for sale to other game developers. That’s the part I thought you would like.”
I took a long pull on my long-forgotten beer and tried to process everything he was telling me. “I can sell parts of games?” I asked.
He grinned. “No. You’re always going to want to sell games. I know you.”
“Then why—” but I hesitated. I could see it now.
“You’ll be able to buy parts of games,” Ben said. “I’m happy to help you with story and stuff, but you’ll be able to get your models and sound effects and spell animations and all that. They’re hoping to build a whole ecosystem for every kind of artist.”
“They’re building a universal dev team,” I said. I’d always dreamed of having a team.
Ben nodded. His eyes shone with excitement for me. I could barely breathe.
“How soon?” I asked.
He shrugged. “No clue. But they are working hard on it. And in the meantime, we can get started on the easy stuff.”
We worked all night. I’ll never forget that first night.
After his second beer, Ben headed to the bathroom. I was busy building an exchange table to award a custom currency on quest completion when Ben called out, “Hey, Dave? What the heck happened to your bathroom?”