Quest 1: New Game?

Lexa was sitting at her desk surrounded by their fellow developers, deep in the trenches of late cycle crunch when with a single blink of her eyes she was somewhere new. However, there was a strange feeling about this ‘new’ place, like she knew it already. And that’s how Lexa along with her fellow devs ended up inside the pre-beta for our own game, and rather unhelpfully with no dev tools to help guide us. The peaceful silence was broken by our project leader.

“So, Um. How exactly do we get out of our game?”

To answer him the lead designer spoke up.

“That is a very good question. A better question would be if anyone remembers how this part of the game goes?”

And like a primary school circle time the lead coder spoke next.

“Well, I did this part and if I remember correctly… Yeah so what happens is… And so, we should do, something? Wait no, I forgot.”
“You forgot how your own section goes?”
“Yes I did!”

As she watched the comedy sketch between the lead designer and coder occur, her stomach filled with an awful dread the type that you get when you know something super bad is about to happen. As the words caught in her throat a low distant rumble became audible, one that any good gamer would recognise as deep trouble and something to avoid at all costs.

“Oh yeah! The game starts with the player character getting beaten up in a cutscene by the final boss of the game! I knew I remembered what I made, so we just wait for that to finish then we can be on our way.”

The rest of the group turned with horrified looks on their faces towards her very pleased partner, and once he registered the looks that have descended upon him and what he actually said his face turns as sour as ours. Because the realisation dawned on us that we are now the ‘player’ characters, so that rumble is the beginning of the cutscene approaching and with it an experience we don’t particularly want to be experiencing.

“I suggest that we, maybe, not be here when that noise gets here. Because I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t fancy being made into a shish kabab today.”
“I will wholeheartedly second that. Problem is where’s the town again?”
“It’s… This way? Or maybe not? I cannot remember. Normally you wouldn’t be walking to town after all.”
“Screw it let’s go this way and hope that there’s some town or place along the path. Right let’s go because that thing is getting closer.”

The group quickly take the path is the direction the project lead suggested, sadly the low rumbling doesn’t cease even as we walk away from the area that the cutscene is coded to take place in. But nevertheless, they continue walking onwards towards whatever awaits at the end of this path, continuing on through the vast open plain that defines the starting point of what was out game but now seems to be our actual life. Lexa finds herself trying to figure out how this could have happened during the long empty walk, as everyone is probably thinking the same thing in the not quite silent silence. They'd been together since university and once we graduated started our own studio, and began work on our first game, the same one we are now apparently a part of, the process of getting what they see around us to this point has taken up significant time and so maybe they have all been looking at the game for too long and she's just hallucinating everything and all the words that have been spoken. That must me it, there’s no way this is real, to test that theory Lexa gives herself a pinch. The result only further dampens her mood as it hurts to do so, meaning that they have indeed been transported into the world that they'd spent so long creating, but not as long fixing and balancing.

“Guys, I don’t wanna be a downer, but I’d be super careful as this isn’t a dream or hallucination. We really have been taken into the world we’ve been creating for so long, so if you remember where buggy areas are or what enemies or equipment is just busted then tell the group as soon as you remember.”
“Well that on its own is both worrying but good to know.”
“And means we made the right choice escaping the cutscene mound, else I doubt we’d everyone would still be in one piece.”

It's then when the art director spots something poking over the horizon and runs slightly ahead to confirm something that she must have realised, and like a golden retriever she bounds back and exclaims.

“There’s a town just ahead, I can’t remember which one. But it’s one of the important ones as it has unique buildings.”
“Perfect, that’s super lucky for us, hopefully there’ll be some clue in town as to how or why we got here.”
“Maybe but I doubt it as it’ll be full of the NPC’s that we coded, so they probably won’t say anything else than what we coded them to say when we were in our reality.”
“I know, but can’t help but try. Because we have no better leads or clues on what’s happened.”

So, with town and relative safety in sight the newly created party walk picks up the pace slightly as they all just want to be back within the embrase civilisation and in a place where they might not end up as a monster’s shish kabab. As the group approaches the town, seeing the scale of the place it then dawns on them that they didn’t find just any town but what they were approaching was probably planned to be the main town for the entire game. As at it;s core, high above the rest of the buildings stood a grand castle, a typical fantasy castle in which the heroes are given their quest and set forth to slay the evil that plagues the land.