Work on Dunn came quickly. I was surprised at how much I got done in those early days really, a lot of it would end up being re-written as I continued to work on it over the next two years but my focus was razor sharp. It had helped that I had been toting around the turquoise duo-tang for the better part of a year working on this, adding thoughts and ideas as they came up. Having a clear vision for what I wanted as the single best reason I covered so much ground those first six months and by the middle of that year I had the skeleton done. I can’t count the number of times I was daunted by the overwhelming amount of work that Dunn would take but as my mother always said, “You can eat an elephant, just take it one bite at a time.”
Bite by bite I ate that elephant. The skeleton eventually grew muscles, which evolved to skin, then to hair and eventually clothes. With every bite I took Dunn felt more and more real, more and more diverse, something completely true to what I had envisioned. It was a true and open world. I don’t mean this in the game sense, the actual game I was developing was a narrative driven story, with a fully fleshed out world of course. No, what I mean was my hand in it, my brain on the canvas; building a world not from Minecraft blocks but from code and colour palettes that I decided. It was amazing.
Marcus was my biggest source of inspiration for this. It took him awhile to understand how the wires and coloured dots and arrows would translate into the vivid and colourful description of Dunn I had painted him but eventually he understood. Maybe not in the way you and I do but, well, maybe trusted is a better word. He trusted that what I told him was true.
As the bones were built Marcus became something I never expected, a healthy, helpful and colourful addition to the world building I had been so proud of. For all the work I had done my universe did lack a certain pizazz in certain corners and this is where Marcus excelled. As I populated cities and streets, markets and mercenaries, Marcus (who would be on my bed behind me, thumbing through his dog-eared, well-worn copy of The Legend of Drizzt) would look up and spout some creative flair I hadn’t thought of.
“That market has no flags, I like red flags.” He’d say without looking up from his book. Sometimes his suggestions were a bit too out there (I mean pineapples in a European climate, come on?) but more often than not they were good suggestions. Things I wouldn’t have thought about, things that made the world not just a backdrop, but alive. In those days, within my second year of creating Dunn there were many things I added on Marcus’s suggestion that I didn’t even remember. Marcus would have though…
When the bones were done, we tackled the NPC’s. I say we because at this point Marcus was with me most of the time while I was building at least until his bedtime. On the days I was breaking or needed to sort out a bug he was my play tester, Marcus had an all access pass to playing anytime he wanted (when I wasn’t working on it) and he exercised that right often. I began really enjoying his company and together it felt like we were finally connecting on something, creating something together. When he went to bed, I could feel the air in the room differently, when he was away or at his soccer practice or at his lessons, I felt… lonely.
Lonely was a feeling that wasn’t very common to me. Despite having no real friends I had long since suppressed the desire for interaction and acceptance so much so that I didn’t yearn for it. I didn’t miss it. You can’t miss something you didn’t have; however with Marcus – with Dunn – I started to miss it. It became much work over the summer when Mom and Dad let me know that Marcus would be spending the summer at Camp. What had begun as simply missing the company and the interaction on some nights of the week quickly turned to me feeling lonely and uninspired. This is when work on Dunn began to slow.
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I really lost the will to create during the first few weeks of summer. I ended up using the computer more for gaming than building. Every time I opened up the program I would stare at the screen blankly and then just shut it down. Everyone was out there with their friends, hell, even Marcus was spending time this summer with other kids and I was here, alone.
So I created Kappa.
Kappa was, err… is an NPC; a colourful, intelligent Non-Player Character and a companion for the Player. I designed him to be the player’s best friend. Okay, in reality, yes I designed Kappa to be more my best friend than anyone else’s. He was created to fill the void that Marcus left when he went away to summer camp; you got me. But ultimately I wanted to breathe life into Dunn and Kappa became the vessel in which my Artificial Intelligence experimentations would exist within.
You can create pathing, schedules, routes and a myriad of other predetermined actions for NPC’s in a video game. It’s not easy but it’s definitely the simplest route to populating your world. Dunn required more however, it deserved more and so I spent the end part of that first summer month back at the library, back with Mr. Derrigar to learn all that I could about AI and how it works. This time however it wasn’t Mr. Derrigar teaching, it was both of us learning.
By this time I was 16 and Mr. Derrigar and I had known each other for a few years. I had learned enough about him to feel comfortable sharing a computer screen or leaning over the same book together. To my surprise Mr. Derrigar was just as interested in learning how to build AI as I was, maybe even a little more. We spend weeks learning all there was to learn about AI and bouncing ideas off of each other. It didn’t take long before he, with that famously raised eyebrow of his, asked the question I had been expecting for the past few months.
“Alright.” He said with a coy smile, “What’s your game called.”
Honestly, I was impressed I had kept it quiet for this long and when I brought over the flash drive with the game files to the Library and copied them onto the computer he was almost as excited as me to see my game. At this point I had a lot of Dunn realized; the main town of Verham was pretty much completed and even a number of quests could be started but only one could be completed. The character creation screen was completed and as I walked him through character building he marveled at how impressive the game was. It felt wonderful honestly. Other than Marcus no one had seen the work I had done and it was really nice to hear a positive reaction to something I had worked so hard on.
After we created Mr. Derrigar’s character, a witchy looking sorcerer woman he named “Drewhilda”, we entered the game’s starting town. Drewhilda entered one of the two main taverns in Verham called The Bubble & Squeak, owned by an NPC named Gundor. Gundor was a friendly Orc with a wonderful gift for baking apple tarts and the ear to offer for any lowly traveler with a tale to tell.
Additionally he was dumb as a brick and as Drewhilda entered the tavern he failed to greet him, in fact none of the dialogue or interaction options that were supposed to come up triggered and he failed to make eye contact. All of the other in depth systems I had been working on still functioned; the hunger system, the crafting and cooking, even the hitbox bug that I had been working through was fixed by the time Mr. Derrigar played but the AI was lacking in every possible way.
“This is beyond impressive Lester,” he said after we dumped three hours into it. We had stayed well past closing at the library and as he leaned back from the chair, he had a sort of bewildered look on his face.
“I’m just so… flabbergasted.” He said turning towards me, “I knew you were working on a project of course but I never imagined this level of depth of this much progress could be made in such a short amount of time.”
Hearing those words felt truly and wonderfully inspiring and as I closed down the game and removed my USB I was overcome with a renewed sense of creation. The game was great. It was unfinished, a number of quests to implement and complete, a huge number of bugs to works out but the game was where I wanted it to be. The AI wouldn’t have been a make or break problem for Dunn to be an amazing game. I could forgo the AI all together and just finish it as it was… looking back I wish to god I had done that.