The Man Who Taught The Machine - A Rebirth LitRPG

Chapter 1: New Game

Shane Carther had spent nearly four years developing a brand-new, open-world, online role-playing game. The kind of game he dreamt of playing since he started the hobby in the early 90s. The sort of game he desired to develop while attending university for game development and design in the late 2000s.

He was lucky enough to be a part of a team of developers who shared his passion and skill but was also blessed to be developing for a well-known and well-loved gaming publisher. The kind of publisher whose select few teams of game-makers pumped out genre-defining classics for the latter half of the console generations.

As a part of the team, the benefits were abundant, and the pay was more than respectable, he thought to himself with a satisfied grin.

Four years ago, Shane Carther's life was dedicated to the Endless Veil project, which he felt was his career's magnum opus. He worked as a system designer for the game. His primary task was developing machine-learning systems to reward players in a game world that was both static in places and almost infinitely procedural in others.

It's important to note that with any sizeable modern video game, there are usually dozens, if not hundreds, of people working together on their own little piece of it. Towards the end of development, those pieces come together and are usually polished to a golden shine. This includes pouring through code to fix many bugs and ensuring everything works with everything else the way it was designed.

The deadline for Endless Veil's launch was coming up fast, in fact, it was already here, and everyone at the studio worked around the clock to get it ready. Shane had his work cut out with more than a handful of coding challenges. Luckily they were simple oversights missed by the small team of game-testers they hired. Hence his current good mood.

The launch was set to go live in retail and online in just a few short hours. Shane was strolling home, mocha-flavored coffee in hand while watching the sunset behind the city's taller buildings.

"What a beautiful evening," he said out loud cheerfully.

Shane immensely enjoyed his walks to and from work, it helped him stay mostly fit, and he could avoid spending money on a car, insurance, and gas. Given that his apartment was near the city's center, he could get whatever he needed delivered most of the time.

Now that Endless Veil was finally releasing, he anticipated a very healthy bonus, especially if the public loved it as much as the team's internal testers did.

He smiled, anticipating the near future he'd begun to dream of.

After the game's launch, Shane decided he would start dating again and drive said dates in an excellent, new, used vehicle of his choosing. He would easily be able to afford it, and besides, with only a few scant dates in the past four years, he was getting more and more lonely. Sure he had his family, whom he'd visit on holidays across the state, and his group of both real-life and online friends—but none of it could fill that particular girlfriend-shaped hole aching in his chest.

Shane spent the rest of his walk home thinking about which class he would pick when starting Endless Veil. He whistled one of the game's boss's soundtracks as he considered. The game's setting was high fantasy medieval, with all the swordplay and magic you would expect from that genre and then some.

Chuckling to himself like he knew a huge secret, he knew it was so much more because once you picked your starting class, your character's growth was tied directly to your actions in the game. Even thinking of your character's development in those terms was overly simplified, and he was excited to dive in officially. To experience the depth that lay deep below the surface.