Arnesto Modesto: The World's Most Ineffectual Time Traveler

by Darren Johnson

  This was proving difficult as he had cheated to the final level, not having had time to play the game all the way through, so he lacked the powerups he would have acquired along the way.

  The player’s name was Sand Stone, either Rock Stone’s brother or his cousin, depending on which way the wind was blowing. Even in this late stage, the game’s design changed frequently.

  However, what irked Arnesto most was the fact that each time he fought the boss, he had to reload to the previous save point and watch the same damn, tediously long cutscene again.

  Finally, the cutscene ended, and Sand was teleported to his starting boss fight position. This would have been discombobulating enough, but thanks to another bug where all spawn points defaulted to facing north instead of the direction they were populated in the levels, Sand started off facing a wall.

  Wham!

  Half of Sand’s life was instantly gone as the boss knocked him into the corner. Now Arnesto had to wait while the game played Sand’s standing-up animation.

  Come on, come on, come on, get up, Sand!

  Sand Stone stood up facing left, so Arnesto prepared himself to run that direction. Unfortunately, due to another bug in the animation system, the code thought Sand was still facing right. When control returned to Arnesto, Sand’s character instantly rotated the other way, causing Arnesto to run Sand into the wall for a split-second, which was just enough to—Wham!—allow the boss to hit Sand again, ending his virtual life.

  “Argh!” Arnesto hit the button to reload. He closed his eyes and tried to calm himself, but he couldn’t focus with the idiotic cutscene dialog coming from the console in front of him.

  “Whoa, that feels like something big!” Sand Stone said as the screen shook. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Who the fuck was he talking to? There wasn’t even another character there!

  Cue the big boss smashing through the wall, a couple long, slow camera pans, and one more pearl of wisdom from Sand, “You’re never too big… to be SANDED!”

  Cut to Sand Stone facing the wrong way, and… nothing. The game had frozen. Arnesto swiveled around to his monitor and sighed. One of the other programmers on the team was trying to catch a bug in the graphics code. Even though the bug itself was relatively harmless, the programmer had put in an assert which forcibly stopped the game for anyone who happened to get it, even though the programmer was the only one who could fix it.

  That meant Arnesto had to restart the level.

  From the beginning.

  It was a twenty-minute level.

  Arnesto stopped to think if there was any way he could speed up the process. Sure it was late in the project and everyone was exhausted from crunch mode, but there was one simple change he had always wanted to inquire about…

  He stood up and walked down the hall, turning into Randy’s office. Randy was the project leader on Sand Stone vs. the Plutonians. He was a nice guy with a wonderfully creative mind, but he was terrible about signing off on aspects of the design then changing his mind.

  Randy’s eyes were glued to his television while he fumbled through the second level of the game.

  “Hey, Randy,” Arnesto said. “Can we let the player skip the cutscenes?”

  “Hmm, I don’t know. The player might be confused as to where to go next.”

  “The radar points them toward their next objective.”

  “They might miss out on the story.”

  “It’s a shooter,” Arnesto said.

  “Yeah, I don’t know,” Randy said. “Here, have a seat. Do you think the inventory icons are clear enough?”

  Arnesto sat down. “Yeah, I haven’t heard anyone complain about them.” Except that they’ve already gone through four iterations.

  “I think they’re still confusing. I need to change them again.”

  “What if the player doesn’t want to watch the cutscenes and just wants to get in there and shoot things?” Arnesto asked.

  “He can shoot things when the cutscene is over. Do you hate cutscenes or something?”

  “No, actually, I love cutscenes. I will always watch them. Once. But I have friends who, for whatever reason, don’t care about cutscenes. For them, games are about the interaction, and when you take that away from them...” He watched Randy’s avatar walk back and forth down the same hallway a few times, apparently lost. To be fair, the radar only worked from a top-down perspective; it didn’t indicate that the player needed to climb up. “See, your way forces the player to play the game the way you want them to. By letting those who want to skip cutscenes skip them, we’d be letting them play the game the way they want to.” Arnesto allowed a few seconds for his words to sink in, then pointed to the television. “You need to climb up the filing cabinet there.”

  “Ah, right, I always forget that. See, there would be a good place for a cutscene.” Randy maneuvered Sand Stone up to the next floor where he encountered more deadly Plutonians. “Wouldn’t skipping the cutscenes require extra coding?”

  Aha, maybe Arnesto was actually getting somewhere. He considered Randy’s question. “There would be a hair of scripting in a few of them, but I could handle every case myself.” What Arnesto said was true; the game wasn’t that complicated.

  “I’m still afraid the player would miss something.”

  My god, man. There is nothing to miss. Nothing!

  Perhaps it was time to compromise.

  “Okay, how about if we let the player skip a cutscene after the first time?” A few people felt this way, though Arnesto still felt it was bullshit. Why force it on the player at all? Why make them sit there and watch something they don’t care about? To some players, cutscenes are akin to tampon commercials interrupting their favorite show.

  “I don’t know…” Randy said.

  “Hey, guys!” Jeff said, waltzing into the room and standing inside the doorway. Jeff was the scourge of the project — the producer.

  “Hey, Jeff,” Randy said, “how would you feel about being able to skip cutscenes?”

  “Sure, sounds okay to me.”

  “But the player might miss out on some information,” Randy said.

  “Oh. Right. Nah,” Jeff said.

  Arnesto didn’t know what his cortisol levels were but assumed they were climbing dangerously high. “Okay, last question. Can we at least put the final checkpoint after the cutscene?” Nobody responded. “Have you guys played the final boss? He’s hard. And then you have to watch that boss-intro cutscene over and over—”

  “Are you kidding? I can’t get to that level,” Randy said.

  Jeff shrugged. “Actually, Arnesto, I came in here to ask you something,” he said, changing the topic. “Do you think you can get multiplayer up and running this weekend for the demo Monday?”

  Arnesto waited for the laughter, but to his chagrin, none occurred. Jeff was serious.“You want to add multiplayer? Now? Also, we have a demo Monday?” Communication was not the project’s strong suit.

  “The Rock Stone guys gave me some code,” Jeff said. “They never committed it to the project, but they said it should pop right in. I emailed it to you.”

  Arnesto was in shock, but what could he do, say no? His voice now meek, he said, “Okay, I’ll take a look.”

  “Great, see you guys Monday!” Jeff said, already three steps out the door.

  The next day, Saturday, Arnesto strolled into work around noon. At least the building was quiet. He almost had the whole place to himself. It would help him focus on hooking up multiplayer which had shown up out of nowhere and become his number one priority.

  With any luck, the other team’s code would be incomplete or wouldn’t compile or something. If he couldn’t get it working, then he could focus on all the other tasks he needed to get done.

  No dice. Their code plugged right in, which made sense since it was their engine being used in the game. Still, with all the changes his team had made to the project, Arnesto couldn’t believe the new code worked. They were much more talented than him
.

  However, just because the code was there didn’t mean Arnesto had anything to show for it. For one thing, he needed a test level. The debug room they used for testing and the tutorial level were both much too small, and level three and beyond were all too large, but level two? If he duplicated level two, limited players to the main outpost, and blocked off exits to the Plutonian landscape, it might work.

  He stripped the new multiplayer level of all its single-player content. Then he made new, regenerating versions of weapons and health kits and populated those in several places within the level.

  He threw a few Plutonians in, made them also regenerate after a few seconds, and replaced their models with human ones. Now, he had Sand Stone, Sand Stone (Clothes Torn), Corporal Tide; the man in charge of the whole operation, and Dr. Rebecca Tide, Corporal Tide’s xenobiologist daughter who frequently had to be rescued by Sand Stone. He also changed their behavior so they would attack each other and not just the player.

  Finally, he updated the main menu so that he had a way to actually access multiplayer and voila!

  It was still very rough, but if someone who had never seen the project and who wasn’t too good with video games walked by and watched the screen for only a few seconds, it would have looked like a remotely decent four-player battle.

  It had taken most of the day, but it was a decent start. He left around eight o’clock that night, tired and famished but feeling a little bit better about the situation.

  The next day, he returned and set to work improving it.

  Since the code was already there, it wasn’t too much more work to add different gameplay modes to the existing deathmatch style, such as king-of-the-hill and capture-the-flag.

  He also had to expand the interface to match these expanded options. Fortunately, thanks to Randy’s incessant redesigns, Arnesto had written code to streamline the process as much as possible.

  He hooked up the score and player rankings.

  He added the level timer and countdown.

  He put in player taunts and special sound effects and voices, harvested from the game’s existing assets.

  After another long day, he had done it, and all without any new art or even so much as a design spec!

  It was all temporary work that would have to be redone by the sound department, artists, and level designers, and there would be countless bugs, tweaks, and fine-tuning, but that was nearly all out of his hands now.

  He went home happy and returned the next morning. It was Monday, so the building was bustling with activity. He overheard a couple of the level designers excitedly trying out the new multiplayer option. After a minute, one of them popped his head over his cubicle wall and flashed Arnesto a big thumbs-up. Arnesto smiled wide in return.

  Their enthusiasm almost made up for the seven new bugs assigned to him in the bug database. Maybe it was Jeff who, not having anything better to do, went through and assigned this latest batch. If so, then Arnesto’s bug count was probably artificially inflated since Jeff seemed clueless about who actually worked on what and was a terrible guesser.

  Jeff suddenly appeared in Arnesto’s doorway. “Hey, Arnesto, can you revert your changes?”

  “What changes?”

  “Multiplayer.”

  Arnesto did a double-take. “I just put multiplayer in. You mean you want me to take it out for the demo?”

  “No, we’re not going to ship with multiplayer. It wasn’t quite what we were looking for.”

  “Did you see it? Did you and Randy try it at all?”

  “Yeah, we played it together. We realized there was too much left to do and too little time to do it. So, can you revert your changes?”

  Arnesto stared at him for a moment, dumbfounded. “Yeah, I’ll take it out.”

  “Thanks.” Jeff disappeared down the hallway.

  Arnesto sat motionless, staring at the spot where Jeff had been.

  This. This is how people have aneurysms.

  Fearing they might change their mind again, Arnesto didn’t dare revert his changes. Instead, he commented out the line of code that added multiplayer as an option to the main menu. That was all it took. One change to a single line to undo his entire weekend and remove the most enjoyable feature of the game, rough as it was.

  Something flashed on his monitor. It was an email from Randy, with a whole new slew of interface art that needed to be implemented.

  Arnesto examined them and then replied. “Hey, I did these last week,” he replied. “They’re already in the game.”

  A minute later, he received Randy’s reply: “No, these are brand new as of this morning. You can see they’re a little shinier than the old ones. They’ll make this game pop!”

  Arnesto opened up one of the existing icons in a separate window and compared it to the new one from the email. Only looking at them side-by-side could he see the minute difference: a few pixels representing some sort of glare coming off the object in the upper-left corner.

  He compared another and another. By Zeus, Randy was right; they were all different! He began the onerous task of renaming and replacing each one while composing a list for the artist of which icons were now the wrong size.

  The seventy-hour workweeks continued in this fashion for a couple more months, at which point they finally reached Beta. In theory, this meant only bug fixes, no more feature changes, not even from Lead Design Changer Randy. But Arnesto felt the chances of Randy restraining himself were about as likely as the company sending him a fat royalty check — a practice the company had phased out years earlier.

  In actuality, the changes did come to a halt, but not for the reasons most people would have guessed.

  The night the first beta version was officially burned and passed by QA was followed the next morning by a special project meeting.

  “As you know,” Jeff said once everyone was squeezed into the conference room, “last night we officially reached Beta.” There was some mild hooting and hollering and some quick applause. “However, I regret to inform you the project’s been canceled.”

  Silence. People looked around at each other. Was this some horrible producer joke?

  “Is this… real?” a level designer asked. “What happened?”

  “It’s real,” Randy muttered from his seat in the corner. He usually had such an energetic presence; Arnesto hadn’t even known he was in the room until then.

  “The higher-ups played the game and felt it still needed too much work,” Jeff said.

  “But we just hit Beta,” an artist said. “We could hit Gold Master in a month or two.”

  “The higher-ups felt like even if we shipped it out the door, it wouldn’t be competitive in the current first-person-shooter market, especially without multiplayer.”

  A couple heads turned to see Arnesto’s reaction, but he was too numb to have one. When he had signed on to the project, he had hardly remembered anything about it. He hadn’t worked on it in his first life, nor had he ever played it, and now he knew why. The only thing he felt was a rising anger at Jeff for saying, “higher-ups” every two seconds.

  “So two years’ worth of work, poof!” another level designer said. Seems like everyone felt the same punch to the gut. Funny how even a mediocre project that everyone was sick of can still feel like such a loss to those involved.

  “Sorry,” Jeff said. “But you all get to leave early today.”

  Ooh, we get to leave early, thought Arnesto as he followed the depressed masses back to their desks. We put in hundreds and hundreds of hours of overtime, for free, and now we get five of those hours back. Whoopee.

  A couple days later, Arnesto was playing Nethack at his desk when he got the call to come to the office of Harold, the Technical Director. Since Harold was in charge of all the programmers, Arnesto thought he was going to tell him what project he would be joining next. Instead, the conversation was not so upbeat.

  “We’re putting you on probation,” Harold said.

  “What?! Why?!”


  “We feel your work has been slipping. You’re not putting in the effort that you used to.”

  “Respectfully, I busted my ass on Sand Stone. Could you be more specific?”

  “We know you had some trouble keeping up with the changes to the UI…”

  “How could I not? Randy changed every aspect of the interface every day!” A slight exaggeration, Arnesto admitted.

  “You could have streamlined the process more to make those changes easier to implement. Some more effort up front could have saved you lots of time down the road. Time that could have been spent implementing multiplayer, for example.” Arnesto had about a thousand responses to this, but before he could pick one, Harold continued. “We’re going to have you work with the tools group. They said you could work on an art integration tool, but you will be closely supervised. If we don’t see solid improvement from you in a week or two, then we might have to let you go.”

  Holy crap, had it really come to this? Arnesto had to think. How would one of their better programmers have handled Randy’s constant interface changes? Of course, if he knew that, he would have been one of their better programmers. Still, to be suddenly put on probation and thrown into the Tools group, away from games? Something didn’t add up.

  “I’m not the only one being put on probation, am I... The company’s downsizing. Projects canceled close to the end, people put on probation so the company won’t have to give them severance during all the layoffs... I get it now. Well, there’s no point in me working on a tool for a week or two only to get fired afterward. I hereby resign.” He stood up and held out his hand for a handshake.

  “Now hold on, Arnesto. You’ve been here for years, we don’t want to lose you like that. Let me ask around and see if we have another position for you. Let’s talk again tomorrow.”

  Arnesto didn’t understand Harold’s sudden change-of-heart but also didn’t care. He remembered that soon there would be several external emails, each containing the many names of those laid off and sent to the growing group of ex-employees. He knew no matter what that his time at Smiling Axolotl was over.