Flickers of sunlight slipped through a gap in the curtains, shedding light on the face of a young man.
A stream of curses later he begrudgingly got up from his bed, with tentative steps he approached his wardrobe grabbed a random shirt and a pair of pants, taking a moment to stifle a yawn, before dressing up.
Jake grabbed his phone from the small cupboard on the side of his bed and checked the time: 10 in the morning. After a long, caffeine driven night he spent trying to fix a bug which kept crashing his game. He decided to leave the problem for his future self to deal with and went to sleep.
The future self being now, cursed his past self for his indolence. Stifling another yawn, he booted up the PC and sat in his gaming chair, complaining to his self how the expence was not worth it. It was with these thoughts he dozed of to sleep once again.
The windows welcome sound broke him of from his daze.
The abruptness of the sound waking him up from his sudden state of dreaming, keeping the memory fresh, unexpectedly his dream being about debugging and his subconscious had a crazy idea which was currently playing on repeat inside his mind.
He quickly grabbed his phone and oppened up the text editor, and started taking notes quickly afraid he might forget what he had dreamt about.
A few moments later, a sigh of relief was heard. Satisfied he opened the game engine and started making the changes.
His face impassive he saved everything, pressing 'ctrl + s' repeatedly for an entire minute, and updated his github repository. Feeling ready, he hit the build button and watched as everything run. 405 warnings and 0 errors, his face lit up with joy.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
It was ready. He checked the date: 04-02-2022. Today was the deadline for the game jam 'Breaking Pixels' the theme being his favourite, namely: Intentional Bugs. It challenged his creativity, creating bugs that broke a game in all the right ways. Growing up, abusing a game's mechanics to speedrun games was his childhood joy. And now, he was sharing the same joy he experienced to the rest of the world.
Giddy with excitement, he hit run and something felt wrong, the engine was loading, but it was taking longer than it should be. He waited, trying to figure out what was wrong, the starting menu is fairly simple, he'd run that part before countless times, none of them returning any errors, or showing signs of a memory leak.
The feeling of unease growing each second that passed. Suddenly he felt dizzy, the smell of burning plastic being the last thing he realised before he hit the floor, thankfully carpeted.
...
"Urgh, my head." Jake took a rugged breath as he shakily stood up "Was it the coffee or the energy drinks?"
He turned his head towards his PC and paused.
Upon opening his eyes, he was welcomed with a burning smell coming from his old PC and partial blindness coming from the bright blue screen of death, flickering between his game character every couple of frames.
"Well, ain't that a fun way to start the day." Jake approached the PC and took a small sniff. "Yeap, it looks just like my social life... dead." His eyes transfixed to the smelling PC, he turned his eyes away with a force of will, glancing towards his computer screen.
"What in the unholly GolfScript..." Jake said startled. "Is my screen having a seizure?"
"Rhetorical question, did my 250 MB game just crash the computer?"
Jake's voice went up a pitch. "The starting level... of my game. Even a memory leak would need a while."
Hesitantly, he approached the keyboard and hit space.
The jumping sfx started playing and crashed, producing a god-awful whirring sound.
The character jumped, the stamina bar glitched and in the next flicker the stamina went from 10 to 0.
Jake suddenly stumbled, his head swaying and slowly everything came crashing down. And for the 2nd time this morning he fell on the floor, hitting the bedframe on his way down this time.