A Raid Boss Appears!

Damage in Angel Sword Online was calculated based on a few factors. First was the base stats of the weapon, then whatever type of weapon it was, then the stats of who was holding it and finally that was all checked against the stats of whatever was being hit.

Let's say someone has a sword that does a base of 100 damage.

That sword is a bladed melee weapon, so it draws from the ‘blade’ aspect for its properties. The ‘blade’ aspect is strong against flesh and weak against armor, which means it adjusts that initial 100 damage to be more or less depending on what surface is being hit.

Then once the type of weapon is established, there's a check for the player's stats, as well as the stats of whoever the attack is against to see how much more that 100 is going to change. If the player has a strong strength and the one being attacked has a low defense, that damage is going to be even more.

-Ray, your boring me! >_< Can you speed up the lecture and explain why you did a billion damage already?-

“Rose, you asked me to explain this…” I grumbled. “Anyways, if one of those four steps were missing or messed up, the game directory would have to default to some number in order to compensate for the lack of info.”

“Is something missing?” Tensei asked as she skimmed over the access point screen in front of me.

“Not missing, but changed…”

It turns out that somebody spelled each of the weapon aspect types wrong. Blade was Dlade. Physical was Fisical. Ranged was Reigned. Magic was my favorite, because it was Wagic.

Since the directory couldn't find the value for those aspects, all our attacks were defaulting to maximum damage against all types of surfaces.

-Wow. So, can you fix it?-

“Yeah. I just need to spell everything correctly. It'll take about a few seconds or so.”

Thankfully we didn’t have many different types of aspects implemented just yet, so this one was even easier than the others.

“Yay!” Tensei cheered with her fist held high. “You’re doing awesome!”

-Raise your dongers for Rayヽ༼ ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉ ༽ﾉ-

They flattered me, truly. It helped raise my spirits a little bit, which I needed if I wanted to keep trucking along through this mess of a game.

While I had the AC open, I decided to pick away at a few of the other minor bugs in the area. We had to start chipping away at that long list Tensei was carrying around. No shot I was going to fix everything given our time constraint, but things were already looking acceptable from a coding perspective.

“Alright Tensei. I think I got most of everything around here.”

“Looks like it!” Tensei read down her list. “I think that you did enough to allow players to start loading into the spawn area properly. We might see some playtesters soon.”

Most of those playtesters were college kids, so they were either at school or not even awake at this point. If they were anything like me at that age, we’d probably see them anytime after 3 PM.

Heck, maybe I could enlist some of their help. I didn’t need to tell them all the details of why I was here, just that we needed a party to get through the game. Some of them were bound to be kind enough to lend us a hand, hopefully.

-Should we finish grinding out to level 5 then?-

That was always an option, especially since I needed to get the hang of the proper damage tables.

The problem was that my strength being so low meant that any damage coming from me was going to be pathetic. If I wanted to be effective, I was going to have to learn some kind of magic skill, since my wisdom was so high.

“Tensei, how can I learn to use magic?”

“You already have some mana power thanks to your high wisdom, we just need you to find a bunch of spell books to read,” Tensei said.

-Can Ray spawn those in on the AC?-

That wasn’t a bad idea, since the access point was pretty much a debug console. But I didn’t know the command to spawn items in. Tensei wasn’t sure either. Maybe someone in the office knew what the command was?

“Rose, can you do me a favor?” I asked.

-Another one? Uhhh I don’t think so, dude…-

“Wait, seriously?” I grimaced.

-Nah, I’m just kidding! Geez, Ray! Don’t be so gullible. How can I help?-

“Sarcasm doesn't come through well in text, Rose.” I commented. “Can you call the office when you get the chance and ask for Paul Dunhan? He might know some of the cheat codes to help us out.”

Paul was in charge of stress testing the games engine, so he used the debug console all the time to spawn in unfathomable amounts of items until the game crashed. Legend says it took ten thousand chairs spawning all at once for the game to implode on itself.

-You can count on me! Oh, I’ve also been working on making that bug list from all the player emails! BTW, what kind of a gamertag is S3xy_K@T_F1sher ( ؕؔʘ̥̥̥̥ ه ؔؕʘ̥̥̥̥ )??-

My god, these players had such ridiculous names. That wasn't even the worst I’d seen. The creative ones that bypassed the profanity filter were something of a wonder of the world. We needed to implement a stronger moderation system for that, or they were going to have a field day.

I thought Tensei would be laughing at that, but she seemed a little uneasy for some reason.

"Hey, Tensei, is something the matter?" I asked.

"O-oh, it's..."

*Rumble*

There was a sudden tremor across the land. As the ground shook, everything vibrated with a strange distortion.

*Rumble* *Rumble*

It happened a few more times, then dark and colourful clouds started rolling in.

“What’s going on, Tensei?”

“Oh no…” She shied up and landed on the ground to hide behind my leg. “Not this again…”

She was shivering. Whatever was happening had her so frightened she could hardly speak.

-Ray, my screen is getting really dark. I can hardly see you guys.-

It wasn’t much better on our end. Storm clouds were moving over a mountain not far away. The sun was blocked out and a sheet of black covered the blue sky like it was turning night time.

*BOOM!* *CRASH!*

Lightning struck down from the clouds and split the mountain in two!

Everything shook even more violently and anyone standing fell over.

A huge beam of light blazed out from the parted mound of earth and lifted into a vortex of clouds. Veins of red and green light scattered across the land and got thinner as they went. By the time they reached Spawn Town, the veins were thin as a hair, but went over everything.

“Tensei, tell me what’s going on right now!” I shouted, panicking at the destruction.

“Eeee…!” she clammed up and screamed out from behind me. “T-that… I…” She was too freaked out to give me an answer.

A monster's massive head peeked out of the light show and it let out a fierce cry that echoed across the region. It was a ravaged looking beast, even from this distance, like a zombified lion.

We were all struck with silent awe until Rose finally broke the moment with a chat.

-Teny-Chan, sweetie, whatever that is, we’ll keep you safe from it (-‿◦☀) So please tell us, what kind of monster are we looking at?-

“O-okay…” she took a breath and looked back toward the parted mountain. “That’s a raid boss. A powerful enemy that spawns every few hours. I-it’s j-just…” she looked back up to me with cowering eyes.

That’s what I figured we were dealing with, but the raids weren’t supposed to start this violently.

“They’ve been corrupted really bad. A-and can delete things from the games files.” she poked her fingers together and looked toward the ground. “One almost got me,” she mumbled.

No wonder she was scared. I had a hand in designing those raids, and I could say first hand that they were formidable events. It normally took several high level players partying up to take one down. If one of those got upgraded by this corruption, then I could only imagine how bad things were going to get.

“These corrupted raid bosses are usually sent to areas where glitching isn’t very strong,” Tensei said. “They’re meant to shake things up and make a mess of the code.”

I saw some of the bugs we fixed already starting to come back. All of the now panicked NPC’s were T-posing again, and their dialogue was…

“Inverted circles, weather time love nuts?” said a man in a jumble of voices to his wife.

“Bird time truck pin duck man,” replied the woman. “D…Open…Waitress…?

They were speaking a gibberish of all sorts of random voice lines mashed together. It clearly frustrated them based on the confused looks they kept giving one another.

-So the more bugs we fix, the more likely a raid boss is to spawn to mess things up again, right?-

“That’s right,” Tensei nodded and flew up to my hand to hold it. “I’m really scared. These are so powerful that I don’t know what we can do about it.”

That meant these raid bosses were going to be the thing standing in the way of us solidifying any fixes we made in an area. We had no choice but to destroy them when they appeared.

-Don’t worry, Teny-chan! We’ll take care of that raid boss, no sweat!-

Rose had the right spirit, and there really wasn’t any other way around this. But I couldn’t say I had the same confidence. If that thing had the power to delete code from the games files, did that include players?

We weren’t ready for that sort of battle. Even if we had other people to help us out, I still wasn’t confident that we’d be strong enough on the games mechanics alone.