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THE LIBRARY WAS CLOSED to the public. I tried to find a parking spot close enough to connect to wifi, but it was either too weak or turned off. I didn’t trust my phone’s battery to last long, so after thinking it over, I headed up the road to Starbucks. That’s the place for cool Internet creators to work through the workday, right?
Not anymore. I stepped inside, and all the tables had chairs on them. Even the patio tables were taped off like a crime scene. A sign at the end of the line explained that everything fun was canceled due to COVID.
I turned around and left. This Pandemic was the worst.
After a little thinking, I drove back past the library to my Tex Mex place. I could order a Pepsi and work for hours with free chips and salsa, not to mention drink refills. Felt like a really good plan.
But one step inside the door, an angry hostess raised a hand to stop me. “Mask!” she shouted.
“Mask? Oh, shoot!” I patted my pockets with my free hand, but I knew exactly where my mask was. I’d left it on the counter in my kitchenette.
Her eyebrows came down in a ferocious V. “You don’t have one?”
I shook my head, trying to look pitiful. “I don’t. But I’m just going there.” I waved to the table ten feet away. As soon as I was seated it wouldn’t matter.
“No!” she snapped. “I can’t let you in the door without one.”
“Do you have a disposable one?”
“We don’t sell masks. We are a Mexican restaurant.”
“But...” I sighed. “You really want me to leave?”
“I’m sorry, sir. It’s a pandemic.”
“I’m a regular. Is Maria working? She’ll vouch for me.”
“You have to go!’
I turned around and left.
It really was the absolute worst.
I didn’t want to face Mr. Hauser just to pick up my mask. Walmart had them for sale at 98 cents, but I didn’t really want a new facemask. I wanted to work! But I’d have the same problem anywhere I went.
Ben might have an idea for me. I pulled out my phone to message him, and I could almost hear him saying, “Just do it on your phone.”
I looked up Exelichai on the app store. It wasn’t a big download. I sighed and started installing it. I still had a full battery, but I could feel it draining away as the progress bar filled up.
While I waited, I switched over to WhatsApp to text Ben. “You busy? I’m locked out of my apartment. Can I come over?”
Before he answered, the app finished installing, and I logged in. A tutorial popup offered to introduce me to the service, but I dismissed it right away. The initial screen was the Players screen (not the Creators page), but now that my game was live, it was listed right there!
Just then I got a notification from Ben saying, “Aww! Bummer! No, I’m at the office today.”
And immediately behind it one that said, “Oh, yeah? Awesome. Yeah, I’ll be free later.” It took me a minute to realize the second was a chat message in the Exelichai app.
I knew he kept that on his phone, too, so I replied in-game. “What time are you free? I need to find somewhere I can camp out for the rest of the day.”
He wrote back right away. “Your parents’ house?”
I said, “No. :-( ”
“School?”
He meant the college we’d both attended. It wasn’t a bad idea. I’d probably still need a mask, though.
“Can I come to your office?” I asked.
He sent me back a sadface emoji. “Meetings all day. I won’t be free until five.”
School it was, then. I hit Walmart on my way across town, and the security guard at the front door gave me the same runaround I’d gotten at the Tex Mex place! I could see the huge display of disposable masks begging to be bought, but the new hire on a power trip wouldn’t let me through the door.
I gave up and drove to the school. It’s not like they had security posted anywhere. I found an empty classroom in the Computer Science building and settled down for an afternoon of focused work.
I had my character motivation now, and it overlapped nicely with the game locations I’d already created. I’d made the apartment manager a jerk, just following that rule “write what you know,” but now I could build on that.
I needed to integrate the drug dealers and human trafficking into his story, though. It would be easy enough to suggest that the guys robbing the gas station were low-level thugs trying to impress the boss and join the gang.
But why was my hero—The Girl with the Gun—trying to interfere? What was her motivation?
I thought of something the real girl with the real gun had said. She was worried for her sister. She had just been worried about a crazy ex-boyfriend, but my character was an assassin. I decided her sister had been kidnapped as part of the human trafficking operation, and The Girl with the Gun was out to rescue her and put an end to this Apartment Manager’s crimes once and for all.
A thought crossed my mind: “Gosh, I hope Mr. Hauser never hears about this!”
The story already had me in its grips, though. I started strolling through the apartment locations in-game, scouting for good places to add secret tunnels and makeshift prison cells and anything else you would need to run a human trafficking operation.
A Google search found a Reddit thread where other Exelichai devs talked through the best ways to do locked doors that could be opened with keys or a lockpicking skill. I added lockpicking and pickpocketing as skills the character could learn and improve.
I already had doors locking automatically on my day/night cycle, but now I needed to leave some doors permanently locked, and make them accept a key or some amount of lockpicking skill to open. Then I used the same approach on interior doors to make my prison cells.
Some kid popped his head through the door of the classroom I was using. He started to withdraw, then spotted me, and came all the way in. “Is this Database Architecture?”
“I hope not,” I said. “I’m just using the empty room.”
“For what?”
Most places, I’d have felt embarrassed to answer that honestly. But I’d spent four years in this building, and almost everyone I met was a gamer. Most of them had dreamed of making one someday, same as me.
“I’m working on a game.” It sounded awfully cool. And, as expected, the kid’s eyes lit up.
“Whoa! Cool! What kind? Platformer? FPS? You using Unity?”
“I’m using a new service called the Exelichai Game Arcade. Role-playing game. It’s called ‘The Girl with the Gun,’ and it’s available in Early Access.”
“No way! It’s available? Mobile?”
“Yeah. Mobile, web, installed application. Just visit Exelichai Game Arcade and look for ‘The Girl with the Gun.’”
“Exelichai. How do you even spell that?”
I helped him get it installed, and ten minutes later he was sneaking through my upstairs neighbor’s apartment, chattering all the while. “Her only armor is a towel? Whoa. Oh! I can get a dress or a business suit out of this closet. Doesn’t change her character art, though. Too bad, huh?”
“It could. You can make spritesheets that do all that, but I’m not an artist.”
“You could hire one,” the kid said. “But I guess that’s why it’s Early Access. Find your audience first, then invest in the art and stuff.” He sat back in his chair, suddenly stunned. “Hey, I’m gonna tell my professors about this. I’m gonna tell everyone about this. I hope you don’t mind a little competition.”
“Just tell them to try my game,” I said. “That’s enough for me.”
“You should be getting a commission from this site or something. Affiliate money. Something. You’re a great salesman.”
I wasn’t. The product sold itself. But it felt awful nice hearing how excited he was.
My phone buzzed and the chat message showed up in-game on my laptop at the same time. It was Ben. “Meeting’s finished. I’m free. You at the school or what?”
I checked the clock, then looked at the kid in surprise. “It’s after five. Did you know it’s after five?”
He checked his phone to confirm, then his shoulders fell. “I missed Database Architecture again!? Oh, I’m so toast.” He gathered up his things and headed for the door, but he stopped halfway there. “Maybe I’ll just drop out and make Arcade games. That’d be fun, huh?”
“That’s the hard part,” I said, echoing Ben, but it felt a little less true today. “But maybe. Yeah. It’d be a lot of fun.”