Featherstone Heights

We only intended Featherstone Heights to be a fun simulation app to play on your phone or X-Box. We added a bunch of randomly generated stuff for replay value, and an artificial intelligence to make each gaming session lifelike and unpredictable.

We used some experimental algorithms for our AI. All of it, we assumed, only gave the appearance of life, enough to fool our would-be customer, but somewhere along the line the metaphorical chocolate truck T-boned the peanut butter semi, and we had something we could no longer control. I guess a few lines of code got crossed, and it went haywire. We still don't know if the damn thing was alive, but it sure fooled the hell out of us.

In Featherstone Heights, you move into a town full of monsters and talking animals. Open ended gameplay. 

The basic gist is that you live in a new townhome and owe the property manager, Melvin Monster, a large amount of money. Actually, Dream Gems. Pay it off, and you're a new home owner and he offers to remodel on credit. Don't give him anything for thirty days and you're evicted and have to sleep on the ground, or in a tent if you didn't blow all your gems at the casino.

Every new game had a different geography. Sometimes you have a bowling alley or a shopping mall and an auto dealership. Sometimes you have farms and dirt roads instead of paved streets. An Arctic research station expansion pack had even been in the works. The strategy guide would have been five hundred pages thick.

Our characters started flaking out during the beta tests.

We'd headquartered Facedancer Studios in an old frathouse. The doorbell didn't work, the floorboards creaked everywhere, it needed a new paint job and it was drafty, but rent was cheap, and the nearby school provided us with beta testers and programmers. Give those guys enough pizza and soda and they'll work for peanuts, which was basically all we could afford from our Kickstarter backing.

Our computers were older machines jury rigged to do more processing than they'd been built for, the wiring a fire hazard. Furniture came from curbs and thrift stores.

When the incident occurred, I had three guys `moving in' to Featherstone Heights: Rob the Builder, Samurai Dan, and Wreck It Rick. Rob always played the nice virtual citizen, steadfastly coloring within the lines. Dan, gaming ace, had a knack for defeating every difficult obstacle we programmed in, making us wonder if we weren't making things hard enough. And Wrecker...he just had a sixth sense about how to fuck up the entire system with a couple seemingly innocuous button clicks. Believe it or not, these were all valuable traits, we had to make sure the average twelve year old could play a consistent, error-proof game.

Although each game was different, and it changed in real time according to the clock and calendar, it always began with the same formula, so I could spot check the controls and event handling.

Nobody talked. Rob, sitting crosslegged in a tattered recliner, had his tablet out, long brown fingers panning the camera view. His character arrived to City A via helicopter. He'd get to name the place later. At present he only got the option to choose his name and gender, and talk to the delivery stork from Package Express. Gameplay basics, bla bla bla. Rob actually took notes.

We were going for the `sandbox' effect, so the helicopter looked like a toy, the landscape like dollhouses on a model train set. Pretty impressive rendering, but we didnt do shit like fur or grass and leaves blowing in the wind. We already had enough bandwidth issues.

Already I could se Rob adjusting his glasses and bringing the tablet close to his coffee-tan face, making me wonder if the existing rendering was overkill.

Samurai Dan was already roaming Town B, which he'd renamed Camp Crystal. He'd taken a boat, and used buttons to skip dialog. You could customize, so he'd made his child-like player character resemble Walter White from Breaking Bad. The nicotine stains on the X-Box controllers were his fault, but he refused to test anything without a lit one in his mouth, and at least two bottles of Mountain Dew. I don't think I ever saw him eat. Not all Japanese guys are healthy, just sayin'.

Sly, our furry black company mascot, jumped up on the couch, digging her claws into Dan's Def Leppard shirt. "Ow! Stop it, bitch kitty! I'll use you as an ashtray!" He brandished his cigarette ember threateningly.

Wrecker sat on the opposite end of the orange couch, stuffing his mouth with Cheetos as he moved Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes through a pastel colored shopping district. He had the larger plasma TV because his big fat body seldom moved from the cushions. He'd been there since last night testing games, while Dan had chemistry finals. "Hey, don't be mean to bitch kitty!"

His flabby arms reached for the cat, and it padded over, butting its head against him. When Wrecker attempted to put Sly in his lap, though, the feline stuck its head in his family size chip bag. "Whoa, hey, not cool, not cool!" 

"Yeah, no kidding. The next thing it'll do after eating those is fart right in my face."

Wrecker shoved the cat off onto the floor. 

"Brice, isn't there supposed to be a koala bear in the general store?" Rob was scratching his curly haired head, positioning a Boondocks inspired guy through the cluttered aisles of the Buddy Blinx Country Store. Instead of being greeted by a koala, a purple bird followed his avatar around the rooms, giving us the same script Buddy should have been saying. Rob shook his head, took a sip from the smoothie he'd been nursing.

"What the holy hell!" I cried. "She's supposed to be in the Package Xpress office! Check the mail center!"

Shrugging, Rob took Boondocks kid outside, past City A's swimming pool, to a building bearing a striking resemblance to a FedEx store. He pushed on the front door, but found it wouldn't open. A note on the glass read, `I'm out of the office right now. Be back soon.'

Dan smiled and tapped ashes into a near empty soda bottle. "Damn, Rob! You found a glitch?"

Rob laughed. "To be fair, I wouldn't call this a glitch."

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah? So how the hell are you supposed to mail letters?"

"Wait for her to come back?"

"And when exactly will that be? Our koala is missing."

"Maybe...I could ask around? The dialog is supposed to be smart, right?"

"Not to the point of making the gamer look like an idiot and throw the controller down."

He checked back at the store again, but Kookoo Bird provided no explanation for her strange behavior, just listed the stock prices for turnips and told him his daily horoscope. "Can I try the microphone button?"

I furrowed my brow at the suggestion. The game really hadn't been set up for voice input, mostly because the X-Box version only had a letter wheel for writing things. "Sure. Why not."

Rob pushed the red button. "Hey, uh, Kookoo Bird...any particular reason why Buddy isn't running the thrift store right now?"

Kookoo didn't respond. She only blinked, smiled, and did her standard idle animation.

"Kookoo. Where is Buddy Blinx?"

"Play with it, man," Dan joked. "Don't talk to it."

"Did you just quote Innerspace?"

I sighed. "Rob, talk to the city folk. Maybe they know something. I hope this is just a prank Sasha slipped in."

"I doubt it. She was out with her girlfriend all night."

My face flushed with anger. "Then who the hell finished all this code?"

"Dude, it's AI," Wrecker remarked, navigating Calvin into his own Quiktrip-like version of Buddy's store. "Maybe it wrote itself!"

"That's not how it works."

Dan was writing a letter to one of the game characters. His FedEx office actually had staff. "You know she can work remotely, right?...Damn, could you make the keyboard input a little less annoying? Or make these letters less long so we don't have to type so much? Not everyone has a virtual keyboard."

"We talked about this," I said. "It's too late to do anything about it, and it's too expensive to make a keyboard peripheral just for this game."

"It works just fine on the tablet," Rob added.

"Yeah, that's great for you."

Wrecker brushed his long dark hair back from his plump face. "I beta tested Version 1.8 last night, and one question kept popping up in my mind: What do these creatures do when their doors shut at night?"

"I dunno," I said. "Sleep?"

Dan had a snappy answer. "They drink beer and have wild orgies."

"I stood outside Groozy Goblin's house at dusk and watched her go in by herself. How's she going to have an orgy?"

"You were watching the wrong house. Duh."

"Damn, you got it all figured out. So what was Groozy doing?"

"Probably...drinking beer and masturbating."

"Okay, I'll buy that. But where do they get the money? Or the beer? All day long they talk about buying stuff and they have all this furniture and shit to trade..."

"They work the stock market."

"Social security," Rob suggested.

Wrecker pointed to his screen. "I think yours is the only game acting up. I've still got a koala in my store."

"I think you're losing your edge, Richard." Dan took a swig of soda.

Green liquid suddenly came spraying back out. For a moment, I thought he'd drunk from the ash bottle. "Shit, aren't there supposed to be two squirrels in the textile shop?"

I marched up to the flat panel, frowning at the display. Rhonda Squirrel was supposed to be endlessly running squares of fabric through a machine. We hadn't programmed anything in there about her taking breaks. "Have you noticed anything else weird? Menu objects switching around? Dancing blocks of color? Glitches in the letter system?"

"The letter system is a glitch, in my book."

"Right, smartass," I groaned. "Aside from that, nothing else weird?"

A second later, the missing rodent came strolling in. Ironic, because at the same time our programmer chose to make an appearance.

I could smell the McDonald's fries before I saw her. How such a tiny girl could eat that shit all the time and not get fat, I don't know. One time Dan suggested the girl's lesbian girlfriend helped her work off all those Big Mac's, I don't know. "Sasha, we've got some strange sprite puppeting. Did you add a subprogram about Buddy taking time off work?"

Sasha snorted like it were funny, but I don't think the question registered beneath those dark braids. I heard the sandpapery scrape of oversalted fries being removed from paper.

I repeated myself. "Sasha, did you add a module about Buddy Blinx taking a mini vacation?"

The girl's small hand paused halfway en route to her mocha skinned face, nearly dropping the fries. "Do you want me to add that in?"

Me and Wrecker stared at each other.

"Sasha, we've got a problem. Rick just found a sprite puppeting error."

She rolled her eyes when we explained it to her. "Is this a joke?"

Sasha was smirking until she noticed we weren't. Instead of being frustrated, though, she seemed excited. "Let me see!"

It's the gift of IT specialists to make technical problems disappear when the get close to the device. Rick attempted to show her the store with the incorrect character sprite, but by then our koala was back to tending his store, and the post office was open. Of course she didn't believe anything unusual had transpired.

Sasha ate her lunch, coded a couple minor touch-up modules, checked her email. She had to leave for her side job at the bar a little while after that.

The app did its normal thing of dimming as the sun set in the real world. Nothing unusual to note. Inventory system glitch free. Randomly shaped boundaries and insurmountable-waist-high-fences positioned in such a way to prevent users from stepping off into oblivion and locking up the game. It seemed those errors had been successfully ironed out in Version 1.7 and 1.8.

The AI was adequately smart, characters reacting in interesting new ways each time you spoke to them, each character appearing to have their own personality. But then...

"Dude, isn't this supposed to be a kid's game?"

Wrecker had found something.

On the monitor, I saw a cutesy dollhouse basement. Not so cutesy: The dead body of a sundress clad kitty cat in a pool of blood on the floor.

The two of us stared speechless as a coverall wearing koala dragged the corpse through a secret door in the basement wall, the post office bird cleaning up behind him with a mop and bleach.

The door slid closed, and you couldn't tell there had ever been an opening there.

Rick tried to get a screen-grab with his phone, but the game jumped back to the title screen the moment he pointed the lens.

His brow furrowed a moment, then his eyes bugged out in surprise. "Shit! Oh shit shit shit!"

His thick fingers jabbed the glass repeatedly.

"What? What's going on?"

Rick held up the device to show me.

Instead of the standard Android icons, I saw nothing but code endlessly filling the screen.

I felt my phone vibrate like I got a text. It turned out this thing had gotten me too.

1010101010101011000101010100101

1110001010101010101010110101010

0101010101110111111011100101000

1101010101010110000000111000001