Chapter 1: Chapter 0

So, before I tell you what just happened, let me tell you a bit about myself. My name is… was George Windsor. I was an Electrical engineer working for one of those PCB manufacturers that anyone can order from as a screener. That is to say, when people send in their designs, I am the first person to look at them and check if our machinery actually can manufacture them. For some repeat customers I give the go ahead, but for most I do some revisioning to fix the errors and send off a mail to the customer to ask if the revision breaks it for their requirements. A small minority however does not seem to understand that a PCB is a physical thing with physical limitations and I get great amusement from looking at their what can be generously described as hopeful designs. Luckily there is a threshold after which I can say “we cannot manufacture this, please revise and send again” or some other polite variation of “your design is shit”.

 

It was a good job at a good company that, while small, made a decent profit and paid well. This is all to say that I had disposable income to put into my favorite indie game “Arcadium” or as some of us on the forums call it “dress up simulator 3000”. We call it that because it literally has more than 3000 sets of clothing, not counting palette swaps. Which is very impressive for a team of 12 people. The way they did it was a combination of in house design, freelancers and giving the player base access to some of the dev tools. People could make their design and import it into their game, or submit it to the developers and, assuming it passes QC, get some in-game currency or a smaller amount of real world currency. Aside from the dress up part(my favorite), it is a primarily offline fantasy RPG, though it later got online co-op and pvp. The developers started it as a passion project and as such has focus on some unusual parts of the game, like spells and hit detection are driven by the physics engine and is not a separate thing, which means that you can hit specific parts of the body like say a leg or a finger. Dynamic animations are hard, so instead of removing the hit body part, it applies a status effect like slowness for the feet or confusion or stun for the head. And again statuses are easily added, and as such there are a whole bunch of them, which in turn enables my unusual character. I primarily played a support mage/healer in a single player game and it’s great fun. High mobility and higher mana combined with the basic attack ‘mana bullet’ which all mana based characters can use, and self-buffs and enemy debuffs means that despite technically being a support, I can win a lot of fights solo, even in high level pvp when I tried it for fun. 

 

So yeah, I quite like my character ‘Zena’ or as the game lore calls her ‘princess Zena of Zendor’. Yes, the developers made my character cannon. Partly because I personally know them and have the account with the most playtime, though Zena is not my first character, just my, and the developers, favorite. She is my third character, my first two were melee dps and mage dps and they failed to finish the first mission. The developers really wanted the first mission to have a great ‘woah’ factor and as such is an army vs army scenario. Turns out that the only way to beat it is to use AOE buffs, though they fixed it later after people (and me) complained on their forums. Seeing as I had already beat the hard mission with Zena, I continued as her since she had that mark of honor and it was great fun. I did however go back and try the other characters I made, but turns out that dps was a lot less fun since you just spam attacks with no strategy. 

 

I started playing the game shortly after its release as a way to cope with the death of my best friend. I like to think that I am over it now, but that kind of hole in the heart never truly goes away. So when I got stuck in the Impossible starter mission and went to the forums, I found out that the developers actually listened to their players. I have to admit, even after 8 years, that it’s not the best game out there, but it hits all my buttons and I am sort of emotionally attached to it since it helped me get past a dark part of my life. Despite me calling it ‘not the best’, it is a really great game and as a passion project, the team put a great amount of work on it, but it started as a 12 person team and they never expanded it, which is probably the reason it lasted so long. They did a lot with it over the years, aside from the apparel, and the game world, while not an open world, has gotten quite huge. Part of it is my kingdom ‘Zendor’ which cannonocally is one of the greatest sources of textiles and fashion. They did not decide that, I simply made my kingdom that way and they loved the idea, though they changed it to be Zenas parents that founded the city state, hence the ‘princess’ title with her being the rebellious teen traveling the world. Though that alone probably would not have been enough for them to make it cannon. The primary reason is that as they developed the ‘kingdom come’ expansion that let players build their own kingdom, though only a city state as there was no real way of conquering new territory, they came close to running out of funding. As I had befriended David, their community manager and marketing person, at that point, I gave him a call and offered to “invest” a good chunk of money into their business. He was worried that I wanted some control over the future development, but as I explained that I trust in their abilities to further develop the game. This turned into a conference call and I got to know the rest of the team. They were immensely grateful and it turns out that my cash injection was just enough to finish out the expansion, after which their profits spiked again. They even paid me back from some of the profits. After this Zena became cannon as the rambunctious runaway princess and they designed an official outfit for zena, with my input. I think they really appreciated my modest taste as opposed to a lot of the player base that firmly believe less cloth is more sexy.

 

That brings me back to the current event, me standing here in front of a clear lake within a forest clearing with a small waterfall feeding it, looking at it through the eyes of Zena.

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