Bug Fixing!

Tensei was our mascot character. The art team made her to be friendly and cute, but more than anything a bit mystical. After a ton of trial and error, they settled on the young winged angel fairy that was now before me.

The chair she was sitting in looked like it was for giants, but in reality she was only about two feet tall. With her small size, she was meant to fly around and follow the player wherever they went without getting in their way. Her clothing could be customised as much as the player wanted, but she preferred to use her drape-like robes held in place by a plastic pauldron.

Everyone in the office had some sort of merch with her face on it. No matter how bad things got, she was a sort of guiding light in the dark that we all clung to. That was how we knew she was perfect for her role.

“Tensei, is it really you?” I asked in bewilderment.

“It sure is, Mr. Roberts,” she replied in a spritly tone. “Firstly, I wanted to thank you for all the work you’ve done designing the mechanics of this game. They’re so good!”

She knew me personally then. It caught me off guard, but I was a little flattered.

“Thank you,” I responded. “But, how exactly do you know me so well?”

“Oh…” she sipped at her teacup with a smug smile. “You guys keep your webcams plugged in, so I like to peek in from time to time.”

Oh goodness… That wasn’t going to be an invasion of privacy lawsuit waiting to happen, was it?

-Wait, she was the girl I saw at the start of the game! Does she actually know who I am too?-

Before I could ask in place of Rose, Tensei gave an answer.

“That’s right, Rose,” she nodded. “I know a little about you too because I saw all your emails and chats with Ray over the years.”

Once again, quite the invasion of privacy. However, I didn’t get the impression she was going to use that info for something malicious.

-Woah… Uh… You didn’t see anything…risky did you?( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )-

“N-no!” Tensei denied with a shout, but then cleared her throat to recompose. “I wasn’t trying to dig up dirt for blackmail or anything. I just wanted to know who was the most capable person in your studio.” She smiled brightly and cutely kicked her feet a few times. “I like you two, and I think you’re the most qualified to save my world.”

Out of everyone in that office, was I really the best choice here? There were programmers who’d been there since the 90s, and I only got on in the last ten years.

“So, you picked us because you liked us?” I asked.

“Well, I said ‘qualified’ too,” she replied. “There were a few people there who I think were more skilled, but they didn’t have anyone at home who could properly control them in this world, like Rose can for you.”

So it had less to do with my skill at coding, and more to do with how I also had Rose as a partner.

-Can you tell us what’s up with this place, Teny-chan?-

“Sure!” Tensei nodded. “As you know, this MMORPG is about to be released to the public. But the big problem is that it's not finished…right?” her brow furrowed. “Wrong!”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“By all accounts, you guys have been working super duper hard on this game over the last few years. I’ve been watching it come to life. It shouldn’t be this bad, even if you guys have so little experience creating an MMO.”

She had a point. Between us and the Japanese team, this game should have been nearly complete and mostly bug free… Bug free enough to ship… It didn’t make sense that we were struggling this much.

“So, what’s going on?” I asked.

“The random bugs and glitches through the game aren’t a mistake on your end. They’re all intentional. And every day there’s more and more being spread across the land. The further you get from Spawn Town, the worse things become. I can’t even go to the edge of the playable space, because it's like Heck times ten.”

That fit what some of the playtesters mentioned. They said that the game's physics broke down the further out they traveled. Some of them said they got stuck in some kind of void and had to restart their character.

“Do you know what’s causing this?” I asked.

“An evil entity that I’ve been calling the ‘The Virus’ has been behind it. I don’t know a whole lot more yet though.”

Nobody in the team said anything about a virus, and I didn’t see anything from where I was working on the game. For all I knew, this could have been a feature someone made gone wrong.

-Ayo! You called that talking lady before a ‘Glitched.’ Is she infected or something?-

“Yeah.” Tensei nodded. “Spawn Town hasn’t been hit too bad by The Virus, but a few NPC’s here have been feeling the effects. I call them the Glitched.”

I had no idea Tensei was so on top of things here. She really was watching over this world. It’s a shame she didn’t have the power to save it herself, but that was never part of her character. She needed a player, and apparently that player needed a player too…

-Okay, Teny-chan! Do we have to download anti-virus software or something? How can we help?-

Tensei took us outside and said she’d give us a tutorial on what we were expected to do. She brought us all the way to these pig pens where she claimed to have rounded up all the Glitched in town.

Needless to say, there was no mistaking the fact that they had some real issues…

“Fancy meeting you here, stranger,” said one T-posing NPC man.

“Is that supposed to be an insult to my mother?” said another T-poser back to him.

“My day has been just fine, thank you for asking.”

“You never should have come here!”

Then they both just T-posed away…

-LOL They're all asserting their dominance! XD-

These NPC's were T-posing because their animations were missing. They also had some serious issues with their dialog tags too, which explained why everyone was talking so weird up to now.

“Tensei, how common is this issue across the world?” I asked. “Both the T-posing and the weird talk specifically.”

“At least half of every NPC is T-posing. And almost all of them but me talk like that, some worse than others. I've gathered up all the ones in this village, which is about fifteen people.”

It was hilarious that she was quarantining them here like they were sick. If I had my computer, the T-posing issue would have been an easy fix. The dialogue might have been a little tricky, but not impossible either, since those just needed to be labeled as the proper response types… All the tens of thousands of voice lines in the game…

“I don’t think I can perform magic here, so how can I fix this?” I asked.

Tensei snapped her fingers and a little spark jumped out of her hand. The spark landed on the ground and brightened until the light formed into a terminal that looked similar to an old style computer.

Come to think of it, this looked like the in-game computer console used in one of our older sci fi shooter games.

“This is an access point,” Tensei said. “There’s one in every region in the game. You can use it to fix things there…”

She continued by explaining that only devs, like me, had access to them. She could spawn them in, but not interact with one.

Once Rose linked me up to it, I was able to log in with my company info and dig into the files of the game for this area. Thank God I could finally move my fingers.

“Okay, so I think I found the first issue…”

-What is it, Ray?-

“All of the animation info for these particular NPC’s had been deleted from the games directory." I said. “These guys had a set that was made for characters in baggy pants and robes.”

-So they shared the same files?-

“Exactly.”

Now, thankfully I had the ability to access the companies database and get all the animation info imported back in. It took some time, but it was worth seeing all the NPC’s get back to walking normally.

“Wow, you did it!” Tensei cheered.

-That’s my man! He can fix anything because he’s just that good at everything!ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ -

Their praises would have been music to my ears if I wasn’t going to have to do this for each region in the game. It would take forever, and that was just fixing one bug.

“Do I have to do this same thing in each area of the game?” I asked her.

“For small bugs like this, no.” She shook her head. “You just fixed everyone in the world who was T-posing. So unless the info gets corrupted or deleted again, that problem is solved.”

Then that was one fear out of my mind.

-So, what’s stopping Ray from just fixing the whole world right now?-

“Each region has its own personal issues, and you’ll need to get to its access point in order to fix them. Plus, once you take control of the access points in majorly corrupted areas, any bug fixes you did previously should apply there too.”

So if there was a universal glitch across the world, fixing it in one place meant it would be applied all over. At least, if there wasn’t some other corruption blocking that from taking place.

“So, what about The Virus?” I asked.

“That’s a tricky thing…” Tensei frowned and held a fist to her chin. “The Virus is only getting stronger the more it corrupts. So if we fix things, I think it’ll lose enough power for us to defeat it.”

I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. Not only did I need to fix the game, but there was a final boss waiting for me at the very end.

“How long do you think this will take?” I asked.

“If we get to work right away, probably the whole weekend,” Tensei claimed. “This really is the fastest way to fix everything.”

That meant we had a whole three days, which actually would be perfect. The game was launching in a little less than a week, and this gave us a grace period to work with.

Maybe there was hope that this would be a good game after all…

-O M G!!!! WORK!?! Did she say GET 2 WORK!?!! AFJAHGAGANVEA~!!!! GGGGGGAAAGGGGG!-

“Rose, what the heck is going on?”

Was she slamming her head against the keyboard?

-OH MY GOOOOOOD! Teny-chan reminded me that I have work today and I’m going to be late!-

Oh crap! Rose did work on Fridays. I didn’t even think about that being an issue, but it really was going to cause problems.

-Shoot I’m so late like bro you have no idea what do I do they’ll fire me and then I’ll be out of a job like help what am I going to do Im dead Mom will kill me-

She was freaking out bad. So bad that she forgot to put any punctuation in that panic text.

“R-rose, calm down…” I said in a slightly nervous tone.

-Never mind. I’m good. I’ll just call in sick and get the day off. Then I can play the whole weekend with you! \(◐ω◑ )/-

The thought of her lying to take a sick day didn’t exactly sit well with me, but there wasn’t much of a choice, since I needed her help to do anything, let alone sit at all.

“Alright. If they’ll let you do that…”

-Sure they will! They’d never let their best and most beautiful teller come to work with the flu, now would they? She needs time to rest and get better ;P-

I gave her the okay to AFK and make that call to work. Fixing the dialogue stuff was going to take some time anyways, and I had Tensei watching over me if there were any issues.