## Chapter 5 : Playtesting the Impossible
He sat slumped on the cold obsidian throne, the initial excitement of his plan fading into steely focus. Building a kingdom? Sounded like endless paperwork. Recruiting terrifying minions? A recipe for drama. But making a game? That was a language his soul understood.
"Alright," he declared, the word echoing sharply in the emptiness. He clapped his hands, the sound startlingly loud. "Step one: The Controller." Back on Earth, it was sleek plastic and buttons. Here? He flexed his fingers, feeling the immense, responsive power thrumming just beneath his skin like a living current. He concentrated, picturing a simple, translucent panel – like his status screen, but something he could touch.
A faint shimmer materialized in the air before him. Lines of cool blue light etched themselves into existence, forming a flat, rectangular plane hovering at chest height. Tentatively, Leo reached out and poked it. His finger met a slight, cool resistance this time, like touching chilled glass. A faint, intricate glyph flared briefly where he made contact.
"Touch interface. Functional." A wave of giddy triumph washed over him. Reality could be shaped like code.
"Now, inputs." He visualized simple buttons overlaid on the screen. Squares of light pulsed into being – A, B, X, Y, triggers. He tapped 'A'. It glowed with a satisfying hum. "Perfect."
Next hurdle: The Arena. A full-blown fantasy world was too ambitious for a first try. He needed a testing ground. A sandbox for physics, visuals, maybe some basic targets.
He stood, stepping away from the throne towards a large, empty patch of the grimy floor. Raising his palms, he focused his will. "Initiate: Play Space Alpha."
He channeled intent, a sliver of his power directed not for destruction, but for definition. Imposing rules on raw magic.
The air above the floor rippled. Colors swirled and bled like spilled ink – vibrant greens, deep browns, a patch of blocky blue sky. The rippling solidified into a shimmering cube of space, roughly twenty feet on each side. Inside it, the air itself felt different. It looked like a cartoonish forest clearing ripped from an old game: simple trees with pixelated leaves, unnaturally bright green grass that felt like thick felt underfoot, a small pond of impossibly blue water. Crude, early-generation graphics, but undeniably not the grim obsidian reality surrounding it.
Leo stared, awestruck. "It ....work!, It... actually worked!" He stepped closer. The air around the cube hummed with contained energy. He reached out, dipping a finger through the shimmering boundary. It felt like cool, static-charged water. He pushed through.
Inside Play Space Alpha, the air carried a faint scent of ozone and artificial pine. The grass was spongy. He looked up at the cheerful, pixelated sky. Utterly surreal.
"Graphics need serious polish," he muttered, poking a low-resolution tree trunk. Solid, but the texture was laughable. "Physics check first." He crouched and jumped.
He rocketed upwards far too fast, crashing through the pixelated canopy in a shower of glowing green fragments before landing lightly back on the spongy ground. "Whoa! Gravity constant needs major adjustment. Note: Dial down planetary mass."
Excitement fizzed within him. He needed interaction. An NPC? Too complex. Start simple: a target dummy. He focused, picturing the most basic foe: a low-level slime. Green, jiggly, vaguely cube-shaped. He pointed near the pond. "Spawn: Target Alpha. Slime variant."
A shimmer of green light coalesced. It wobbled uncertainly. Cube-shaped, footstool-sized, with two black dots for eyes. It emitted a faint, digital blorp.
Leo grinned. "Perfect!" He raised his hand towards the floating interface outside the cube. He willed the 'B' button to be a basic fire attack. He pressed it.
A small, pixelated fireball, glowing red and yellow, shot from his palm. It flew straight, striking the cube-slime dead center.
**POOF!**
The slime exploded in a vibrant shower of green pixels that faded after a second. A tiny, glowing "+1 EXP" flickered above the empty spot before vanishing.
Leo burst out laughing, the sound echoing strangely in the artificial glade. "YES! Combat loop! XP gain! Functional!" He did a little victory shuffle on the felt-grass. Pure, unadulterated joy – the joy of creation – flooded him.
The next hour vanished. He spawned more cube-slimes, tweaking size, wobble speed, and durability. He experimented: ice shards (blue pixels), lightning bolts (yellow zig-zags), a clumsy sword-slash animation (a wide arc of white light). He adjusted gravity, making jumps floaty or leaden. He swapped the skybox to a starry night (resulting in comically large, twinkling squares). He even placed a crude, immobile tree stump.
It was gloriously messy, glitchy, and utterly absorbing. The potential was dizzying. He could build anything.
Deep in concentration, Leo focused on his next challenge: the Goblin Test Subject. The wobbly, two-cube-high figure stood near the pixelated pond, utterly inert. "Alright, Greeny," Leo muttered, fingers dancing over his translucent interface. He wasn't tapping physical buttons now; his will flowed directly into the code-structure he'd built.
"Let's give you some instincts. Primary Directive: Locate Player. Secondary Directive: Approach Player."
Lines of shimmering, complex glyphs scrolled rapidly across his mental view of the 'code'. He defined parameters: detection range, movement speed, pathing logic. He poured focus into the task, the outside world – the throne room, the fortress, even the lingering echo of the obliterated army – fading away. There was only the Play Space, the interface, and the problem.
"Initiate Behavior Protocol: SeekPlayer_01," Leo commanded.
The Goblin Test Subject twitched. Its blocky head swiveled jerkily. Its glowing red eyes (simple spheres) fixed on Leo. It took a single, lurching step forward. Then another. It moved with a herky-jerky gait, its cubes wobbling precariously, but it was *moving*. Towards *him*.
"Pathfinding engaged!" Leo crowed. He darted sideways. The goblin's head swiveled, recalculating, and it adjusted its shambling course. "Obstacle avoidance... basic but functional!" He grinned, spawning a low-resolution boulder in the goblin's path. The creature paused, its simple 'mind' processing, then shuffled awkwardly around it.
"YES!"
He spent hours refining. He added a rudimentary 'aggro' radius. He tweaked the movement to be slightly less robotic. He experimented with giving it a basic 'attack' command – a slow, clumsy swing of a pixelated club that spawned on its blocky hand when Leo entered range. The club passed harmlessly through Leo (invincibility perks), but the mechanic worked.
He created item drops: glowing coins that appeared with a ching sound when a slime or the goblin was defeated, vanishing after a few seconds if not collected. He programmed a simple health bar that appeared over the goblin's head when it was 'attacked', decreasing pixel by pixel.
The sun (a bright yellow circle) in his pixelated sky began its descent towards a blocky horizon line. Leo finally dismissed the Play Space and the interface with a weary but satisfied sigh. The throne room snapped back into focus, the gloom and silence a stark contrast to the vibrant, chaotic world he'd just left.
He slumped back onto the obsidian throne, muscles pleasantly tired from concentration, not exertion. A broad smile spread across his face. He'd built a functional, if primitive, game system from scratch. From pure magic and will.
"It works," he murmured to the empty hall, the words filled with wonder. "I can make games." The sheer, ridiculous power of it – not to destroy continents, but to create worlds of fun – settled over him, warm and comforting. The problems of kingdoms and minions still loomed, but for now, the thrill of creation drowned them out. He closed his eyes, the phantom glow of XP numbers and pixelated explosions dancing behind his eyelids.