4
Sadie didn’t begin work on the storm until the middle of August. She knew the storm would be the gamer’s first experience of Ichigo, and she felt pressure to make it spectacular. She also knew it would, in all likelihood, be the last thing she had a chance of completing before she and Sam both had to return to their respective schools in the fall.
Sam and Sadie hadn’t said it to each other yet, but they both knew they weren’t going to finish the game by September. They knew the work they were doing was good—better than good even. They may have felt that if they articulated the fact that the game would not be completed in the summer—which after all, had been Sam’s arbitrary deadline—they would somehow break the magic of their collaboration. Marx, ever the good producer, had tried to gently broach the subject with them. He had suggested they come up with a school year work schedule, but neither had wanted to discuss it. Sam and Sadie would ignore the realities of their lives and crunch for as long as they could.
Like most twenty-year-olds, Sadie had never built a complicated graphics and physics engine before, and it was to be expected that she struggled with building one for Ichigo. Sam and Sadie wanted the graphics to have the lightness of transparent watercolors, but Sadie could not achieve this lightness, no matter what she tried. When Ichigo ran, for instance, she wanted the look to be less solid, almost watery. The aspirational design document she and Sam had written described Ichigo’s run （in contrast to their walk） as having “the speed, beauty, and danger of water in motion. When the child runs, they resemble nothing so much as a wave. When they jump, they are a typhoon.” In her initial attempts, Ichigo only looked blurry and invisible—nothing like “water in motion.” When she approached the look she wanted, the game would, more often than not, abruptly crash. But the real weaknesses of Sadie’s engine did not become apparent until she was forced to make the storm.
What is a storm? Sadie thought. It is water, and it is light, and it is wind. And it is how these three elements act on the surfaces they touch. How hard can that be?
Sadie showed her first attempt at the cutscene storm to Sam. He watched it twice before he weighed in.
“Sadie,” he said, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but this isn’t that good yet.”
Sadie knew it wasn’t good, but it still pissed her off. “What isn’t good about it?” she demanded.
“Nothing feels real.”
“How can anything feel real when our landscapes look like woodblock prints?”
“Maybe ‘real’ is the wrong word. I don’t feel anything when I look at it. I don’t feel scared. I don’t feel…” Sam played the scene again. “It’s the lighting,” Sam said. “I think the lighting is off. And the texture. The water…The water doesn’t feel, like, wet.”
“If it’s so easy, you try building a fucking storm!” Sadie went into her room and she slammed the door, and then once she was alone, she effortlessly made a storm with her eyes.
Sadie was exhausted, and she felt that she was failing Ichigo. The ideas in their design document were beautiful, and the work Sam was creating was beautiful, and it was her job to render this work in game form. Sadie loathed games where the box art was spectacular but when you went to play the actual game, it looked nothing like the concept art.
And it wasn’t only that Sam hadn’t liked her storm, or that his criticisms potentially suggested larger issues in the game’s graphics overall. It was that she had barely slept or showered for three months, and they still weren’t going to finish this game! They had done so much work—they had mapped out all the levels and they had written the entire story and they had designed the backgrounds and the characters, and yet…there was still SO MUCH WORK to do. She felt herself begin to panic. She went into Marx’s nightstand where she knew he had left a passel of neatly rolled joints, and she smoked one.
Sam knocked on the door. “May I come in?”
“Sure,” Sadie said. She was beginning to be pleasantly high.
Sam sat on the bed next to her, and she offered him the joint, which he refused. He hated when Sadie or Marx smoked, and he opened the window. At twenty-two, Sam was a complete teetotaler. He never drank, didn’t even like taking aspirin. The only drugs he’d ever taken were whatever painkillers he’d been given in the hospital, and he hadn’t liked the way they had clouded his ability to think. The body part that worked consistently well for Sam was his brain, and he was not going to compromise it. Because of this experience, Sam often suffered through pain that probably should have and could have been somewhat ameliorated.
“It’s the engine,” Sadie said without emotion. “It’s my lighting and texture engine. It’s no good.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Sam asked.
“It’s…” Sadie said. “It’s me…I’m not good enough at making one yet.”
“You can do anything,” Sam said. “I completely believe in you.”
Sam’s belief weighed heavily on her. She got into bed and pulled the covers over her head. “I need a nap.”
While Sadie rested, Sam went to work researching game engines. He knew it was possible to borrow game engines from other companies. If you found one that was like the work you wanted, using another designer’s game engine might save you a lot of work and even, in the long run, expense. He and Sadie had discussed this once before, and he knew she was against using another designer’s engine. From the beginning, she had insisted all the programming be theirs. Because if it wasn’t, their game would be less original, and they’d cede power （and often, profit） to the maker of the engine. Of course, she was parroting Dov’s teachings.
Still, Sam spent the rest of the afternoon looking through all the games that he, Sadie, and Marx owned. As a largely self-taught programmer, Sam learned to do things by taking games apart. Although reverse engineering is a common practice in tech, Sam had learned this technique from his grandfather. When something broke in the restaurant—from the cash register to the outdoor floodlights to the pizza oven to the pay phone to the dishwasher—Dong Hyun would painstakingly disassemble the broken thing, meticulously laying out all the parts, in order, on an old tablecloth. Most of the time, he would be able to fix whatever it was. He’d hold up a corroded gasket in triumph and say, “Ah ha! Here’s the culprit! I can get a new one of these for ninety-nine cents at the hardware store!” And then Dong Hyun would replace the part and put everything back together again. Sam’s grandfather had two core beliefs: （1） all things were knowable by anyone, and （2） anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken. Sam believed these things as well.
Sam decided he would study other games to find anything close to the lighting and texture effects they wanted. He would dismantle the game, if it was possible to dismantle, and see what he could learn/steal, and then he would report his findings to Sadie.
At the bottom of Sadie’s pile, he found a copy of Dead Sea. Sam had heard about Dead Sea, but he’d never taken the time to play it.
* * *