I had found a mistake the day before. Not a major mistake, just a little one, but one that would cause major headaches down the road. I’m an indie game developer, in other words I’m unemployed, really. Well, that’s not entirely true. I have a steady stream of income from YouTube videos and I just opened up a Kickstarter.
To be honest, I’m getting kind of tired of this life. I want to just go back to having a regular old job, but really I’m unemployable. I’m unmanageable. So, I spend my days hunched over like a troglodyte in front of these glowing boxes typing code. This game’s going to be good, I can feel it. Just let me get it finished, then beta tested, then released, and the rest will take care of itself. The game, if you want to call it a game, is this: equal parts World of Warcraft and social media. Log in to your new life, I want to say. Delusions of grandeur: people will live inside my game, they will convert their fiat currency for my in-game crypto. The computers of players mine the crypto, behind the scenes, but they don’t get to keep it. It goes into the pool.
When you’ve been staring at code for hours per day, most days each week, most weeks for well over a year, staring at the same lines of code, staring at new lines even, one can easily become disoriented. I begin to see the code as more real that the things happening around and inside of me. My office put together inside of the walk-in closet in my bedroom. I go into the office and the world disappears behind me. Staring at the screen, trying to solve problems, typing furiously, sometimes cursing to myself. It’s all part of the process, especially the cursing part. But I don’t know, I think I need to take a break. I need a vacation, but I feel like I haven’t earned one until I officially release the game.
My desk is made from an old door someone left at the curb on bulk-pickup day. I walked that son of a bitch home and attached some legs I had bought years ago at Ikea. It’s a perfect desk, just the right size, even has a little hole to poke all the cables through. Two monitors, one for writing code, the other for documentation and other stuff. The cheapest keyboard money can buy, rubber domes. An expensive mouse, though, I don’t know what I’m doing.
The bug I’ve been working on today involves the way that crypto integrates with the in-game merchants. There is a way to exploit the merchant interaction window to cause the player to receive currency instead of spending it. Interact with a merchant, open the console, type mc.exch_rate=-1 which sets the exchange rate. The console needs to stay, but it can’t allow players to make changes to the game state, even on their own machine. Did I mention I’m a terrible developer? Whatever, it’s not like I’m the only shit dev out there.