Svenja grazed the headphones from her head. She smoothed the long blond hair with the light green colored tips. A sigh of relief escaped from her mouth. Finally she was finished. She had been programming that game for three years. Programmed day and night, sketched out and modelled her world in every detail and finally it was done. Her own little world. The world she created as a little girl with her father in his stories.
She took a piece of pizza out of the box next to her and looked at the code next to the three-dimensional View of her development environment. Her own little world. She had to grin a little, wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her black oversize sweater with the panda motif and closed the program on her laptop with which she had remotely controlled her towercomputer at her desk. Of course, she could have worked directly at her stand PC, but on the bed, with a fresh pizza next to her, she could concentrate much better. A window with advertising flashed. She quickly pushed it away to get full view of her screen.
"Svenja?" her mother shouted, knocked three times and opened without waiting the door. Svenja quickly bit into the piece of pizza again and grumbled an annoyed: "Mhm?". Her mother put her head through the door. "You'll go out when you've finished, yeah?" her mother put one arm in her side and waited a few seconds for Svenja's answer. "Aye!", Svenja called back with a full mouth and concentrated on her work and then sat down at her stand PC. "All right, I'm leaving now. Can I get you anything?", her mother asked. "No, everything's great" Svenja shouted with a stare at the screen. "Well, see you later," Svenja heard her mother closing the door, walking down the hall and turning the key.
Her mother didn't mean any harm, Svenja knew that. But she should know that she didn't like people and had hardly any friends. What should she do outside? She just found people strange. She never wanted anything from them. These people only ever wanted something from her when they really needed something urgent. "Can you fix my PC?", "can you set this and that up?", "I bought a program, can you install it for me?" Svenja often heard something like that. She just found people strange. Every two seconds they flee into their everyday life full of monotony and boredom. Svenja had understood this early on. This was of course one of the many reasons why she learned to program and use computers at the age of 12. She was trying to distract herself. She didn't want anything to do with the people in real life. She wanted to create her own reality. Her own world. She wanted to make the rules. She didn't want anything to do with this reality. Nothing with people. She wanted to immerse herself in her own fantasy world. With the characters her father told her about in his bedtime stories. The characters that seemed so real as if their father had seen them himself.
At the age of fourteen and after two years of programming training, she was ready. Now she could dare to program her own game. She started planning, programming and drawing diagrams. At first it was just a small island with three different computer-controlled Islanders and the code was just completely unstructured. But over time, the software became more structured, and the little island became a country. After some time the country became a continent and the continent now became a small world with its own population. They were programmed in such a way that they could communicate and interact with each other. They were all individually generated individuals with their own personality values and they even had an algorithm with which the NPCs could reproduce themselfs so that they could spread further and further on her little fictional planet.
Every NPC belonged to its own tribe. Even the game quests generated automatically with every decision the player make. And in the middle of
this game: Svenjas own character. Naturally controlled by the new Augmented Reality glasses by ChryTech, which her father gave her for the 16th Birthday. Three weeks before he died in a car accident. "With that you'll show me our world" He winked at her as he handed her the package and pressed her as if he knew he would soon have this car accident. Svenja remembered as if it had been yesterday.
The restructuring to a real three-dimensional game with VR-support was
easy for Svenja. All she had to do was to add a second camera and adjust the sensors to the game. A matter of ten minutes. In advertising, the developers bragged about mind control, but Svenja knew that the VR glasses only evaluated nerve flow and motion capture data. But she had never tried the glasses before. She had only read the data sheet for developers. The smaller tests of the game had only been done on the PC. After all, the test with VR glasses was supposed to be something special for her. For her and her dad.
"Computer stuff," as her mother called it was her passion. She had never cared about anything else since she could think. She loved to read stories about hackers, developers and programmers even as a small child and at the age of 12 she was already a gobbler of biographies of Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds and Bjarne Stroustrup. Now she was 17 years old and sat here, in front of her tower and the finished C++ code and her finished world.
She scrolled through the list of 3D models one last time. Then she looked across the screen and saw the character standing at the starting position. The colorful C++ code next to the 3D view made her smile. "All right. There we go..." She had waited three years for this moment. The moment of the final Tests. If everything worked now, then the game was finished. you pressed the green arrow and her tower started rattling. The LEDs went on and off quickly. The PC happily showed that it was working.
She closed her eyes and enjoyed the humming of her PC. The humming reminded her that she should clean the fans again, or at least shut down her PC to give it a breather. It ran four weeks continuously. All this hard work. Somehow she would miss that time. But finally she could test her game.
I dedicate this book to my best friend.
Thank you for reading this chapter <3
Sorry if there are any mistakes.
I translated it from german to english.
My english is not the veeeery best xD
If you find any mistakes, you can write me on telegram @kurodevs .
I will correct them.
I will update the map to an english version in a few weeks :D
I also want to do a new map for my german readers, so it takes a while :)
