Chapter 40: Backgrounds

Cat’s departure from the project changed the feel of the house. Her presence had always had a bit of edginess to it, but it seemed like some of the energy left with her. Raven and Scarlet were the only women living in the house. Scarlet was Andrew’s fiancee and that made her involvement in the project a little different. She was sleeping with him and that made the sexual dynamics orient more on her and him than on Scarlet. Scarlet’s role transitioned into full time housekeeper who slept with her employers on occasion.

Millie’s visits every other weekend were more of a diversion from everyday life than some big sexual event. They weren’t like the visits of guest stars who brought something new and different to the project. She was still taking care of Andrew at the office every work day.

On the other hand, things were heating up at work. They were making progress on the programming aspects of the game. In fact, the game engine was almost done. There is the old 80/20 rule which says that the last twenty percent takes as much time as the first eighty percent. Andrew, Ken, and Kate were hammering on that last twenty percent and making good progress.

Ken and Kate were incredible together. When working as a team, they produced as much as three, maybe even four, programmers. That’s not to say that it wasn’t a loud, boisterous, and grating collaboration. They yelled at each other, they dropped insults, they argued about everything, and, yet at the end of the day, they casually bid each other good night and headed to their individual homes.

In a story book tale, Ken and Kate would have fallen in love. They weren’t in love. It was an odd, but tense relationship – they were friends who shared some medical issues. When one of them grumbled too much, the other would tell him or her to pull his or her head out of his or her respective ass and get over it. They would both turn to their work and start programming.

The artwork for the characters was nearing completion. As a result of some intense collaboration of Raven with Andrew, Kate, and Ken they had solved the problems with wounds and scar tissue. They came up with an elegant solution that didn’t require many changes to the rendering code for the characters. Young ogres looked like young stupid ogres while old ogres looked bigger, experienced, and battle tested. There was a smooth transition from one extreme to the other.

Raven was now creating more types of characters, including several species of wolves, bears, vampires, and other creatures that were mortal enemies of adventurers. An old dungeon masters guide that listed monsters had become her assignment sheet and she was just working through it. The more she used the programs the faster she got in creating a character.

Andrew had designed a means to specify a monster, provide the essential attributes, and associate a set images with it so that new monsters could be added by updating a data base without having to modify any code. Individual monsters were stored in tables, with updated attribute values, ages, and artwork updates that included wounds and scars.

The only thing missing was the artwork for the places in the game world. Andrew was getting frantic trying to find someone who could create landscapes, castles, and dungeons. At the moment they were using a crude computer generated landscape. It was so bad that it had become a joke. The stick figures for trees were actually labeled with the word, tree. The ground was labeled with the type of terrain.

It was on a late Tuesday afternoon when Andrew, Ken, Kate, and Raven were seated around a table not talking. The problem of landscape had been talked to death. Raven had finally convinced them that she couldn’t do the landscape artwork. It just wasn’t the kind of thing she could make.

Andrew had advertised for an artist and the results had not been pretty. Two of the artists showed that they could make a landscape that didn’t totally suck, but not one of the quality that they wanted for the game. The others were best not even mentioned.

Andrew asked, “Any ideas?”

“Nope.”

Sue Ellen stuck her head into the conference room and said, “Andrew, there’s a kid here to see you.”

“What does he want?” Andrew asked.

“He didn’t say,” Sue Ellen said while glancing over her shoulder into the room behind her.

“Well ask him,” Andrew said.

“I did. He didn’t answer. He just stared at his feet,” Sue Ellen said exasperated.

“Send him in,” Andrew said.

A minute later, a pimply faced kid entered the room. It must be understood that the statement that a pimply faced kid entered the room was, at best, an inaccurate description of what occurred. First, saying that the kid was pimply faced was an understatement. His acne was so bad that his face looked diseased. Second, what the kid did could barely be called entering the room. It was more like he crept into the room hoping not to be noticed.

The kid was a little overweight, but not excessively so. He had on a pair of khaki pants and a button down shirt that bordered on business casual. His clothes were a little worn, but nothing too extreme. He had a backpack.

“What do you want?” Andrew asked the kid.

“A job.”

“Doing what?”

“I heard you needed an artist.”

“We need someone to build a graphical 3D model of a game world.”

“I can do that.”

Ken said, “We’ve had a couple people say they could do that and they couldn’t. What makes you think you can?”

The kid rolled his eyes. “Let me see what you have.”

“We don’t have anything.”

“You’ve got to have something,” the kid said.

Andrew said, “Show him what we’ve got, Kate.”

Kate started up the game. The projected screen showed a flat area labeled grass with a several sticks pointing upwards that were labeled with bush. The kid took one look at it and burst out laughing. He couldn’t believe his eyes.

“You’re right, you don’t have anything. Good luck selling this piece of shit,” the kid said.

They might have been offended, but they knew the truth. Without a realistic background it was a piece of shit and they’d have no chance of selling it.

“Ken. Put an ogre there and fight it,” Andrew said.

Ken placed an ogre in the scene.

“Whoa! That’s outstanding,” the kid said.

Ken started fighting the ogre. After a bit, he managed a hit. A wound showed up. The movements of the ogre became less fluid, as if the wound was interfering with his motor control. There were several more hits and more wounds appeared. The ogre staggered and then fled.

“Nice effects,” the kid said obviously impressed with what he was seeing.

“Thank you.”

“Your game world sucks, but the characters are great. Who did them?”

“I did,” Raven answered.

“That’s real art,” the kid said.

Andrew said, “Let’s see what you can do.”

Looking at the scene on the screen, the kid asked, “Do you want a grassy scene with some bushes?”

“Sure.”

The kid pulled off his backpack. He rummaged around in it and pulled out a laptop. He put the laptop on the table and went to work. Since he had the computer in a hibernate state, it didn’t take too long to start up. His modeling program was already open.

He started talking while he worked, “First we need the basic terrain. Even a plain isn’t quite flat. You need to include a little rise and fall for the ground to look realistic. Four inches higher here ... a little dip there ... a bit of roll across this part. Now it looks like an open area rather than a manicured soccer field...

“Now we need to put some grass on it. Interesting thing about wild landscapes ... they don’t have just one kind of plant growing it ... there’s a bit of this and a bit of that mixed together. One plant might dominate the area, but there’s probably forty or fifty different kinds of plants in a typical wild field. So we grab the plants we want ... randomly populate the area with our plants ... I have script for that ... give them slightly different heights ... another script ... render it ... Now we’ve got a field that looks rather natural.”

“Damn,” Ken said looking at the result.

“Now for the bushes ... you know they don’t grow at random on a field. There’s a reason why bushes are where they are ... they provide a transition between woods and meadow ... that means they’ll be together in stretches with open meadow off to the side ... Like so ... The bushes closest to the woods will be larger than those near the meadow. There will still be a mix of sizes...”

The kid sat back and said, “What do you think?”

“Nice.”

Raven said, “I’m impressed. That looks ... real.”

“You’ll notice that I didn’t place the grass and bushes individually. I marked off regions, set up the fill parameters, and let the program generate the result. With a good map, I can mark up major regions with the filler stuff and then set up transitions between major regions. It takes a bit of time to generate the plants, but it only has to be done once. Once it is done, you can save it to be retrieved on need.”

Ken said, “There’s got to be code to support the rendering.”

“Yes. A friend of mine wrote it.”

“That’s a problem,” Andrew said.

“He just got a job with some defense company and can’t work on it any more. He’ll sell the source code to you.”

“Have him give me a call and we’ll arrange a meeting,” Andrew said.

“Will do. Do I have the job?”

“Yes, but it is contingent on us getting the code necessary to use your artwork,” Andrew answered.

“That’s no good. I really need the job.”

“Why?”

“Look at my face. I’ve got to get to a dermatologist.”

There was no arguing the fact that the kid needed a visit to a dermatologist. With just a little more time, he’d stop looking human. It truly was that bad.

“Call one up now and go.”

“I can’t pay.”

“I’ll pay as a sign of good faith on hiring you,” Andrew said.

“How would that work?”

“You go to the dermatologist and give them my number. They call me and we handle the payment,” Andrew said.

“Okay.”

“Now go out and tell Sue Ellen that Dave is to start the paperwork to hire you,” Andrew said.

At that, the kid looked around uneasily. He asked, “You want me to talk to her?”

“Yes.”

“Uh ... I don’t talk ... she’s a woman ... they make me ... nervous,” the kid said.

“You talked to me,” Raven said with a frown.

“That was ... well ... that was talking art.”

“Ah.”

Kate asked, “By the way, what is your name?”

He mumbled something while staring down at the floor.

Ken said, “What did you say?”

“Matt Calhoun.”

Kate said, “Now listen carefully, Matt. I’m a developer. You talk to developers or you don’t work.”