The Game Sprite (#Wattys2016)

Chapter 3

It really wasn't at all that uncommon. There were a variety of reasons why he could have passed through the geometry. Some developer might have forgotten to put collision geometry in one obscure spot of the cave. Or his velocity could have been so great that the wall slipped through between one collision check and the next. Or hell it might have been just straight up math. Even in this day and age computers were still pretty bad at approximating floating point numbers. And somewhere between 0.0001 and 0.0002 Eradorn's center could have passed through.

What was surprising was that Eradorn hadn't been immediately disconnected, or teleported away to a known location in the world. Usually the game was pretty good about detecting when a player was in some location he shouldn't be, and the answer to that was just to blink the player to a location the game was happy with. But so far that hadn't happened. And after some period of falling, here Eradorn was, still alive, and standing on a blue and white checkerboard pattern plain.

Devon leaned forward and put his hands back on the mouse and keyboard. He knew he probably didn't have much time before he was blinked away, but he might as well poke around a bit while he did. He stood in the middle of what looked like a Hollywood movie set. There were a handful of houses around him, but they were unfinished. A front or a side, but no interior. Tufts of grass here and there, and a few rocks and trees, but they stood on the same bizarre checkerboard pattern ground. There was no skybox at all - just endless white expanse in all directions. What did catch his attention though was what looked like a thicket of trees off in the distance. Shrugging, Devon set off in that direction.

As he walked, it became clear he was entering a much more finished section of this -- zone -- whatever it was. The checkerboard pattern plain gave way to actual grass and dirt ground. The trees became more numerous, and slowly a skybox faded in. Even more surprising, he began to see forest fauna. Rabbits, squirrels, deer and the like. These were critters, ambient life that populated the game and served no real purpose save to make the game feel alive. They could be killed, but they offered no experience or reward. Soon Devon began to hear ambient forest noises as well - birds chirping, the sound of wind rustling trees. Before long, Eradorn stood within a full-fledged forest in morning time. Birds chirped around him, and sunlight passed through the trees to cast dappled shadows on the ground.

Devon furrowed his brow. Why in the hell would the developers build a fully realized forest down here, away from the rest of the game? Was this some future content, built and finished, planned for release, but then locked away? If not that then what? It didn't make sense.

Then Devon spotted the first creature. That's right, there were actual creatures to kill down here! These appeared to be, well, woodland creatures. They were small and humanoid in appearance, but they had bark skin, and leaves and twigs for hair. There were a half dozen or so, standing in a rough semicircle around him, spread out among the trees. And there were several things unusual about them. First, they didn't have nameplates. Every creature in the world, from the lowliest rabbit to the mightiest demon from hell, had a nameplate floating over its head, telling you the creature's name. The color of the nameplate also clued you in on the creature's disposition. Green nameplates were friendly creatures, yellow were neutral, and red were hostile. Hostile creatures would attack you as soon as you got within a certain range. Without nameplates, Devon couldn't tell if these were hostile or not. But the other unusual thing was that, even though Devon didn't think he was close enough to any of the creatures to attract their attention, they were all looking at him. Well, lacking nameplates, the easiest way to tell the creature's attention was just to attack them. If they were friendly, the game wouldn't let him attack them. And if they were neutral or hostile, they just might have loot. Worst case scenario, the creatures were crazily high leveled, and would kill him in one shot. No biggie, Devon knew he was on borrowed time down here in this other-zone anyway.