The final demo was finally cobbled together just in time for Dimitri and Haru's wedding. Danika would have taken the time off anyway, but she was glad that it hadn't been looming in the background during the wedding.
Her grandparents and various northern relatives had mostly approved of Shinichi, which Danika had expected. After all, she approved of him very much. But the visit had been a little rough on him.
The language barrier made it too easy for her family members to tease him. And when he'd seen the rambling eight bedroom structure that her grandparents lived in, he'd asked, "Were those reporters right, and your family is actually very old and rich? I mean, your dad seems pretty well off too, and then this?"
"The family is old by some standards I guess, but it's really new according to most of the locals. Belovas have only lived here for about two centuries, whereas you can walk into almost any pub and meet people who will tell you about their ancestors who have lived here for at least thirty generations instead of our six. And while there are a few family members that I'd call rich, my grandparents really aren't, although they obviously aren't poor either." Danika had explained. "You seem really impressed by all the old furniture, but I used to follow my grandmother around for hours while she oiled it, and rich people don't have to do all of that themselves."
She had felt very much like a foreigner herself during the visit, even though she had lived there with her parents and grandparents as a small child, and had come back to visit many times. She thought that perhaps she was just more self conscious about it now because of Shinichi's difficulties.
Even though Shinichi had to return to work instead of returning home with her right away, Danika was surprised by how glad she was to go home.
--
Jade's demo failed.
However, Lin Hao got to keep his server, because two of the five demos were approved for further development. All of the team members secretly rejoiced that the children's game had not been one of the two. Even Lin Hao hadn't had much confidence in the core AI's ability to keep the game running without breaking any of the many conflicting restrictions in the international standards.
Each of the AIs that did not contain Jade's memories were noticeably different, both from Jade, and from each other. None of them seemed inclined to make changes and reevaluate things as often as Jade did. The garden empire's AI remained the simplest in its interactions. Lin Hao was rather disappointed that it had not been selected either, because he wanted to see how much of that was because it had lacked the complex storyline quests.
The seventh division became very busy, because Lin Hao decided that before they could be released to other developers, they needed to create a version update framework for the 'Game Cores'. One that would allow modifications to one server to be transmitted to the others, or not if it wasn't a suitable change for that system. Danika privately suspected this meant that he was creating some of the "doors" that Jade had asked for.
To her relief, Danika found resuming her regular shift in the 'Living Jade Empire' server to be comfortable and familiar. There were a number of changes, but her assistant dragon had listened to her worries before she returned, and did a surprisingly good job of summarizing everything. It helped that she'd kept playing it the whole time. It also helped that her first choices of assignments were simple ones.
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'Living Jade Empire' was maturing. There were fewer hybrid race modifications needed this year, both because more of them already existed, and because the "gods" had more data on how such crosses might be expected to look and behave.
At the morning meeting of the sixth a few days later, Devon Yu announced cheerfully, "There is a problem with the repeatable quests that could become a serious flaw in the future. A few of the quests have built up to such an absurd point that the problem was finally brought to our attention. Personally, I rather suspect that fixing it is going to result in the end of eternally repeatable quests within the Empire. However I thought that I'd let the rest of you have a chance to propose solutions before putting anything into motion."
Danika exchanged glances with Ariana and Takahashi. Devon looked far too amused for his serious sounding announcement.
Devon's smile widened as he went on, "I also have your orders for the next expansion. We need to revamp the marriage and inventory systems and force the Turtle to migrate farther north, to make room for a new continent. Although only the southern edge of it will stick out of the ice bound edge of the map, to leave room for future expansion on a larger landmass. I think that thematically this expansion will be much easier than the previous one, since turtles are associated with longevity and lasting marriages in several cultures. And I suspect that we can associate the inventory system modifications with the 'house' of the turtle shell easily enough."
The morning meeting was a long one, and Danika couldn't decide which of the two project teams she wanted to join. Paul's white mice were one of the repeatable quest culprits who had gotten the problem noticed, and when she heard about it, Danika realized that she should have noticed it herself a long time ago.
ZipZing had never received the infinite cheese stone promised in the contract she had with them. Tens of thousands of people had successfully assisted the mice with their quest to produce an infinite cheese stone by now. There were dozens of genius level enchanter players by this time too, and more than one of them had actually created an infinite cheese of one kind or another.
Repeatable quests were a standard part of thousands of older RPGs. They were what your character always fell back on when you needed money or various kinds of consumables. In a way, the quest framework system they had come up with had given every storyline in the game the potential to repeat if the conditions were right. However, the existing repeatable quests were essentially as illogical as the warehouses that had created goods in their storage spaces, that the Emperor had brought to her attention with the problem of pirate ships that had far outnumbered the legitimate shipping industry ships.
The simpler ones weren't really creating any significant problems, they were simply adding items to the world like the warehouses had. But several others, like the mice, seemed to be wrapped up in knots of ever increasing complexity as the history of their adventures and acquisitions built up. The mice could never quite completely succeed, even if the finished product was handed to them, because they always had to have their quest available.
The expansion also had things that ZipZing could be considered to have a vested interest in. Everyone always wanted a more convenient inventory system, but she couldn't help pointing out, "It's not just marriages, all of the contracted relationships are part of the same system, because currently you can hold one contract of each type with a different person, but not more than one type of contract with the same person, or more than one person with the same kind of contract."
Devon remarked, "Actually, I was going to suggest a system of selectable contract terms for the marriages, but I hadn't considered them as part of the same system as the other contracts. I can easily imagine a set of selectable contract terms for guides and other temporarily contracted NPCs too."
Someone else said, "I have really wished that I could choose my own terms when my wizard binds a guardian. Especially the distance setting."
"I would have multiple husband's, like all of those stories about men with multiple wives. My character is definitely rich enough to afford them," one of the other women announced.
"Just like in real life, the second problem would be finding enough time to maintain your relationship with each one?" Takahashi suggested with amusement.
"They wouldn't necessarily be NPCs," she replied a little smugly.
Danika suspected that non-NPCs would only increase the time management difficulties, but she didn't want to be the one to point it out, and decided that maybe it depended on the people involved.
The part that really attracted her to the expansion team was how they would create the story of the Turtle moving north to reveal lands hidden beneath the eternal ice at the top of the world. She really wished that she could create two instances of herself and choose both teams.