Late October in northern France. The weather was clear and the sun shone brightly, but a cold wind cut through the streets, offering absolutely no warmth to anyone caught in it.
Joe pulled his coat tighter around himself and hurried across the street, knocking on the door of his good friend Dandy's house.
Joe and Dandy were both middle school students, and for them, after their studies were done, the most important thing in life was still gaming. This weekend was their most important gaming time of the week. The usual routine was simple—Joe would come over to Dandy's house and they'd play Dungeons & Dragons with their two other friends, Ham and Jason.
Dandy opened the door looking like he'd been waiting for Joe forever, and eagerly pulled him inside.
"Ham and Jason got here early! We've been waiting for you for ages! Come on, come on—we've got something new and awesome to play today."
Joe shrugged off his slightly oversized trench coat. It was actually his older brother's coat. Partly because the cold wind was really biting today, but also because kids always felt like wearing a long trench coat like this made them look cool—almost like they were wearing a cape or something.
He explained as he struggled with the coat, "I got stopped and questioned by a cop on my way here. So annoying! He actually thought I'd stolen these clothes. Can't he see this is obviously a cool cape?" Then he asked, "What's new today? Didn't we save our game last time? Are we starting a completely new campaign?"
[Note: Dungeons & Dragons is a tabletop role-playing game, also known as D&D. Groups of three to five people can play together in sessions. The tabletop game can be paused and saved between sessions, which players refer to as "saving."]
As soon as Joe finished speaking, a thin teenager with oversized glasses and messy hair walked out from the back room. He looked at Joe, who was still struggling to get out of the trench coat, and immediately started mocking him.
"Oh, poor Joe. I told you before—you don't look cool at all in that trench coat. You actually look kind of ridiculous in it, to be honest. Not strange at all that a cop stopped you to ask questions."
Joe frowned at Ham. Ham was the biggest schemer in their little friend group, and he had this habit of constantly studying random obscure stuff online, which resulted in him saying things the others often found hard to understand or follow.
Ham continued talking, mostly to himself at this point. "This afternoon we're playing a computer game instead! I dug this up from this underground gaming forum I found. We've played tons of games before, but the code for this particular game is absolutely mind-blowing—even God himself would be impressed by it! The base game file is only 64 kilobytes total! And the upgraded multiplayer version I downloaded for us is still only just under 200 kilobytes!"
Unfortunately, none of the other middle schoolers really understood what those file sizes meant or why that was supposed to be impressive.
After Joe finally put away his coat, he followed Ham into the back room and was genuinely surprised to find that the large soft floor mats they usually used for playing D&D were completely gone. In their place was a large table with three open laptops sitting on it.
At that moment, Dandy came back from the kitchen carrying drinks, handing each person a bottle of soda before announcing, "Alright friends, time is limited. Let's get this party started."
Joe, still full of questions about what was going on, followed Ham's lead and picked one of the computers to sit down at. All three of these laptops belonged to Ham and he'd brought them over. As for why there were only three laptops instead of four—well, this was Dandy's house, and two years ago he'd managed to convince his parents to get him his own computer by promising it was for studying and homework.
When they opened up the game, the first thing that caught Joe's eye was a prominent logo icon on the title screen. It was this simple drawing of what looked like a planet or sphere, wrapped in layers of crisscrossing lines. It looked exactly like...
"Why is the game developer's logo just a ball of yarn?" Jason, who was usually pretty quiet and taciturn, grumbled out loud.
The other three teenagers all looked at it and immediately agreed with that assessment.
If Evan had known about this reaction, he probably would have cried himself to death. He'd spent so much time the previous night coming up with that logo design, which was supposed to symbolize Earth wrapped in the interconnected web of the internet and networks. But here, it had been instantly interpreted as nothing more than a ball of yarn. Wasn't that just openly mocking his artistic skills and design abilities?
After clicking through to select the local area network multiplayer mode, Ham was the first one to create a game room, then sent invitations to his other friends to join. After confirming that all four of them were properly teamed up together, Ham hit Enter, and the game officially began.
After sitting through a fairly long loading screen, a pretty rudimentary character selection screen appeared before all four of them. There were a total of three different character types to choose from.
Below each character model was a simple symbolic icon—crossed swords, an intricately patterned shield, and a medical cross representing healing.
After a quick discussion among themselves, Dandy and Jason both chose the crossed swords character representing offensive damage dealing. Joe selected the thick, sturdy-looking shield character. Ham, being Ham, chose the healing cross character all by himself. This setup was basically a variation on the most common class composition in online games—the classic warrior-mage-priest trinity. Damage dealers paired with a tank to absorb hits up front and a healer to keep everyone alive. A very stable and well-balanced triangular team composition.
Once they actually entered the game proper, the four friends spent a few minutes briefly testing out their different abilities and getting a feel for the controls. All three character types could still fire guns as their basic attack, and their starting weapons weren't really any different from each other. But each character class now had distinctly different special abilities to use.
The character with the crossed swords symbol had gained the ability to launch small grenades. The grenades dealt pretty high damage over a large area of effect, but the ability had a somewhat lengthy cooldown period before it could be used again.
Joe's shield-wielding character had gained the ability to deploy a protective force field barrier. The barrier could block all incoming damage completely, but as a trade-off, Joe couldn't move at all or attack anything while the barrier was active.
Ham, as the team's only healer, had gained an area-of-effect healing ability. When he activated it, he would stop attacking entirely and couldn't move, but he could slowly restore the health of any nearby teammates who stayed close to him. As another trade-off for the healing role, while the other character types used rifles and shotguns as their weapons, the healer character was only equipped with a pistol that looked like a Desert Eagle.
"This is actually really cool," Ham mumbled while examining his character's abilities. "But I do wonder if we'll be able to pick up and change weapons later on in the game. I mean, I'm supposed to be the core support keeping everyone alive here. The Desert Eagle pistol is strong and everything, but honestly I'd be way happier if I had something like an RPG rocket launcher instead."
Dandy was busy checking and adjusting the mouse sensitivity and control settings, and he replied without looking up, "Don't overthink it too much. Our enemies are already starting to show up."
The distant enemies were still spawning automatically just like they had in the earliest single-player version of the game, and their visual appearance was still pretty bizarre and alien-looking. However, unlike that early version, Evan had actually implemented a fairly sophisticated algorithm into the code. The system would dynamically generate both the number and specific types of monsters based on how many players were in the game and which character classes they'd chosen. The overall design principle was to make the gameplay challenging and fun, but not impossibly difficult—giving players that satisfying feeling of overcoming challenges through teamwork and cooperation.
Originally, Evan had also envisioned adding multiple skill slots to each character type, with a chance for new skills to randomly drop from defeated monsters in a roguelike progression system. However, implementing all of that had seemed like way too much work for the timeline he was on, so he'd decided to save that feature for a potential future update.
[Note: Roguelike games are characterized by randomly generated maps, monsters, and treasure. Game progression is one-way and only moves forward. Death results in an immediate game over with no extra lives or continues.]
Back in the game, Joe and his team's cooperative adventure continued onward.
After several close calls where they nearly got wiped out but managed to pull through with careful teamwork, Joe's squad slowly started to develop a good rhythm and flow together. During their exploration of the game world, they also discovered that the map was significantly larger than any of them had initially imagined. The monsters seemed truly endless—after defeating one wave, new ones would always come rushing out of the darkness to attack them. And the monsters kept getting more numerous and progressively stronger as time went on.
Finally, after a particularly massive giant monster appeared on screen, the four friends' run came to an end and they were defeated.
Still riding the adrenaline high and feeling pretty excited despite losing, the four of them stared at the final score that popped up on their screens. They exchanged glances with each other and could all see the same excited energy reflected in one another's eyes.
"One more round?"
"Yeah! I can definitely do way better this time!"
"Let's go again!"