Project Overworld

'I'm being kind of nostalgic. I feel like I'm back in the good ol' days.' Keith meditated. Since he decided to take care of his land base on his own and upgrade the design of their 'Rocket assembler', he realized that he had not been alone in a long time.

To be precise, it has been over nine months since he decided to establish the company 'Spacol' before recruiting new engineers to work under him. He clearly did not miss working on his own, but it was kind of peaceful in a way. He had an easier time thinking and finding solutions about the problems he encountered, but he would not have been able to plan for such large projects if he was all alone.

The only reason he could come down on Earth and not worry about anything was because five trusty friends of his were taking care of the EOSS and his future plans while he was away. Actually, before recruiting these people, Keith thought about developing an artificial intelligence to help him on his tasks.

An artificial intelligence had some real benefits over real people because it could be running round the clock within Project Overworld, making its effective work capacity on par with a group of several average players. The only problem about such an eventuality was the need for him to develop an actual artificial intelligence.

Having specific commands recognized by a computer and other electronical devices was kind of an easy task to accomplish. One simply had to register the line of action a computer should be following after a specific input was sent to it. However, programming an actual artificial intelligence thinking on its own to solve problems humans had not even encountered yet was something unfeasible in the near future. Both in terms of time and material limitation, Keith could not even think of having a program replace one of his subordinates.

Hell, Keith even realized a few months ago that Project Overworld developers were having a hard time containing the huge amount of informations produced by the millions of players around the world. Since the law compeled a company to be kind of transparent towards the consumers of their products, 'Advanced Simulations' had to release patch notes regarding the every updates of Project Overworld.

This way, Keith found out that they were trying to improve both their hardware and software to face the never-ending progress players were currently working towards. Only, according to statistics Keith went through a month ago, there would be no reason for them to spend extra money on upgrading their hardware since the active amount of players of their game was slowly decreasing. Project Overworld was based on a monthly subscription to be played, so either they planned to make a huge update that would bring millions more players to their game or they were currently facing other kinds of problems.

The first option was highly probable, and Keith even wondered why they did not try and release another server up until now. He was fairly certain the municipal team of Yggdrasil was working on a project destined to reproduce the earliest months this game had known, and he assumed people would be interested in a new server.

However, Keith was more inclined towards the second option as of now because he had noticed a bit of lag during heavily loaded hours. In a virtual reality type of game, any amount of lag could be deteriorating a player's experience so the company 'Advanced Simulations' had to take care of those matters before they escalated. Since the active amount player has been dropping down by several percentages recently, Keith concluded that the real reason behind these lags should be due to the simulation itself.

Back on Yggdrasil, personal computer were slowly becoming mainstream and other kinds of electronical devices as well. It was not hard to realize emulating a computer within a game, a 'computerception' as Keith liked to think of it, would be costing extra resources on the hardware Project Overworld was running onto.

'Now that I think about it, we're not really in another universe. We're simply in a game simulating another universe, so there's bound to be security breaches I could be exploiting.' Keith thought with a mischievous smile. If he could find of a series of actions that the servers running this game did not recognize, he could be making the game bug out and simulate behaviors that should not be possible.

In almost every game that ever showcased the possibility to collect resources, some duplicating exploits were found out by the players. For almost three years, Project Overworld has been void of any major exploits and this has been a really impressive feat.

'In any case, I shouldn't try to duplicate any item because I could be banned as a result.' Keith meditated. 'However, the servers should be reading those lines of code I wrote to properly emulate them, right?' If Keith ever found a way to make the servers interpret some of the code he wrote, he could be doing literally whatever he wanted.

For now, he decided to focus back on the 'Rocket assembler' as his friends were waiting for him in space. For the time he would be working on improving the design of this machine, no rocket would launched towards the EOSS. As a result, the rest of Spacol members would not be able to receive any oxygen supply until Keith was done with his current tasks.

Their lives literally were lying within the young man's hands. 'I should be quick.' Keith motivated himself.

_______________

- "So, when would we be ready to officially announce it?" Amber asked to the person she assignated to the development of 'Project : Vanilla'.

- "The enclosure wall is somewhat finished, and the welcoming hall too. The only real building left to be done is the respawn area. According to my estimations, we should be done in two to three weeks."

- "Then, I'll be announcing it by the end of next week. Good for you?"

- "Mhh... I'd like people not getting too hyped up, though."

- "Don't worry about it, I'll post several more police squad around the area so they don't bother you too much."

- "Then, fine by me."

- "Nice! Have a great time finishing everything up, then!" Amber exclaimed while saying farewell to her teammate.

It has been over a month since Asgard opened its doors to the public, and a lot of old Project Overworld players returned for the occasion, and even more new ones. Amber wanted to strike the iron while it was still hot by officially introducing the project she has been teasing up until now.

Project Vanilla was supposed to be the bread and butter of the Yggdrasil continent. She expected so much out of it that she was already planning to enlarge the area it was taking place in. In fact, they could also be adding new features to this game every now and then, maybe hiding important resources in some ruins and such things to push players to explore the map.

This was her future goals with this project, and she wanted everything to be perfect. In a way, this would be a complete game reproduced within Project Overworld. If people were not interested in a simulation game at first, they could be interested in this 'Project : Vanilla' because of its survival aspect.

In any case, Asgard already did quite well on its own. Casual players were delighted to be able to enjoy movies and their favorite card games with other players without even leaving their house in the 'real world'. This was one of the strong marketing point this city was playing onto.

Asgard was not really revolutionary in any way because most of the games they developed for their casinos found inspiration on real-life casinos, for exemple. However, people could be enjoying all of this without fearing to have their pockets emptied from all their hard earned money. At any moment, they simply could remove their headgear in one of the several 'rest areas' the municipal team installed throughout Asgard so they could enjoy a meal with their family before going back to their real-life work.

Although, the similarity with real-life ended here. The thrill of putting your money on the line in a casino was not present as much as it did in real casinos because everything was 'dummy'. Making friends in Asgard would not necessarly mean you would form complex relationsh.i.p.s because you only saw the other person through an 'avatar'. Finally, drinks had no effect on your real body. Although your vision could be altered by alchohol in the game, there was no 'sensation' to it.

In a way, this was a much more innocent way of enjoying things out. Some people really prefered this alternative over real life because they felt much more secure. The problem for Amber was the complexity of limiting access to the attractions. Since people could get bored of it in under a week if they were able to test everything out in one go, some things had to be priced quite highy.

However, since newer players had nothing to begin with, some games were also made free so these people may start earning money from it and slowly make their way towards more interesting activites. This was the real challenge she and the municipal team of Yggdrasil had to go through before opening Asgard, and kept on maintaining afterwards.

All of this had to be made in accordance to all the other ways to make money within Project Overworld, so older and active players may have a easier time going through these attractions so they could go back to their other activities at some point. They should also not be able to do everything from the get go so they could be coming back in the future.

'Such a complex project...' Amber breathed out. 'Well, I should prepare myself for next week, I have a huge announcement to make after all.' She concluded before going back to her office in Midgard.