Project Overworld

- "Follow me, please." Some guard stated before leading the group to an heavily armored military truck. It has been a few weeks since Keith went back to helping his friends on the Spacol Moon base and this also marked the beginning of the new NASA employees training within the game.

Using his alternate account, the young man spawned inside Midgard at an early hour and waited for everyone to connect to the simulation. Leyla, Michael and Tyler also waited alongside since they were also affected to the 'Sandbox creation program' as Horace Johnson decided to call this new program.

In the mind of the human resources manager of the NASA, this game was supposed to help them design new devices and machines for their own use within the real world. That was why, to him, Project Overworld was but a sandbox where his engineers would be testing their ideas.

In any case, it took a bit of preparation for everything to be settled. Some of the NASA engineers who were chosen for this program were totally neophyte with the new 'Simulated Reality' technology and had to spend a bit of time calibrating their headgear and creating their Project Overworld account.

Now that they were all connected to the game, Keith led them to a group of policemen Amber had affected to help them reach the 'Area 51' before climbing aboard one of the trucks. This sort of commotion did raise a lot of suspicions from the nearby citizen but they could not recognize anyone from this group of people.

'Good thing I decided to create another account for the occasion. No doubt I would have been recognized immediately otherwise.' Keith relievely thought.

A few hours later, the procession of military vehicles finally arrived at the 'Area 51' and the group of NASA employees climbed off the truck in which they spent the whole travel.

Keith, already familiar with this building, immediately took the lead and plunged into the darkness of the bunker. Fortunately, this place was connected to the main electricity system of Midgard so the young man activated the light system of the building. With a loud din, the large spotlights all lightened up and left them within a really empty illuminated room.

- "And so... here we are!" Keith proclaimed. The echo of his voice reverberated everywhere, eventually stopped by the huge pillars that were holding the roof of this bunker. "This room alone is about five thousands square feet in size so we should have plenty of space to store our creations. Also, the roof is about one hundred feet up there but it shouldn't be a problem if we made some holes in there if we happen to build something taller than that. In any case, we've got a storage area for our materials of about two thousand square feet. Also, the whole territory that is affected to the area fifty-one is about five miles in radius so there are a lot of room for expansions."

With that being said, the young man then started explained how the crafting worked within this game.

- "It basically works like in the real life expect there is also a system able to help us at any time. You can go within the options of this game to disable it but I suggest you let it assist you for the time being. The System will sometimes take control of your character to correct a detail you've forgotten or reproduce a craft you've already done several times before. It's an artificial intelligence so it may result in unexpected behaviors but it has gone a long way since the start of Project Overworld and it is now able to do a lot of things with surprising precision." Keith started off his explanation. "The most confusing I've gotten within this game is related to the physics engine. It is notably different to real life, in a simplier way, but can lead to a lot of variations in your builds."

Taking a brief pause to organize his thoughts, Keith resumed after a few seconds : "Basically, there are a lot of details disregarded such as granularity of the metal being totally uneventful on a vehicle. Whether the surface of your rocket is totally flat or not won't affect the flight too much so don't just assume something's good because it did launch correctly within this game. It may crash down after literally a few seconds if it was reproduced within the real world." Keith claimed. "There are other physics-related differences but we'll be able to witness a lot of them during the next few weeks anyways. Also, I'm currently writing a manual listing all the differences between this game and the real life. I'd really like it if you could read that during your free time and help me with a few formulas I've put in there. The ultimate goal is to have a method to translate all of our in-game builds to the real world taking into account the materials used and the physics-related stuff. That's all for now, let's start our first project shall we?"

Being the leader of Spacol for a few years, Keith naturally had the guts to take the lead of the few dozen NASA employees and explain everything to them. That was also part of Horace's request, he specifically designated the young man as the leader of this Project Overworld squad as he trusted the young man would do a great job with that.

Horace had been following the news of this game from up close and he knew about the whole 'Spacol industry'. Keith had even recently been recruiting a few new members into his company and things apparently went a lot more smoothly than last time.

Thus, just as he traditionally opened with, Keith decided that they should be spending the next few weeks working on an actual rocket. Although some of them were totally oblivious to this 'Simulated Reality' stuff, they were a lot more knowledgable with rocketry than most people within this game were. That was why, Keith was not that concerned about the well-being of this training session.

On top of that, his friends were there to help him with this task and a few people from their group had already played Project Overworld and built a few interesting things.

'The training itself shouldn't be requiring a lot of time. By the end of the month everyone should be able to reproduce a rocket on their own, albeit small. Anyways, this game's simplicity should help with the rest and the real work should begin in about three to four months.' Keith determined. According to him, these NASA employees were sufficiently knowledgable that in a couple of months from now they should be able to experiment new ideas already.

The young man had planned a lot of things for following months, maybe years. He had included in their projects the construction of a 'Rocket assembler', that he deemed a really good idea to be exploited within the real world. Though, it would not be his first priority for the time being and Keith actually wanted to test everyone's comfort within the game before engaging on complex builds.

Keith decided to make four different teams with one member of Spacol at the head of each. Thanks to this organization, it was a lot easier to have everyone participate in the elaboration of a specific rocket so they could learn more quickly.

After only a week, the four teams were able to reproduce the most important parts of a rocket and the NASA employees also got to familiarize with the game. Thanks to Amber, the 'Area 51' had constant access to resources while being heavily guarded so Keith and his subordinates could freely focus on the matters at hand.

'It feels a lot different to play this game for working purposes.' Keith realized. Although the construction itself was the same has he ever did, the fact that he was overseeing real NASA employees did change a lot of things for him. Things were a lot more formal and since it was everyone's job they were required to participate, unlike a real player.

In fact, there have been a lot of times when members of Spacol, or even some of Keith's friends, had real life obligations and could not connect at the usual time. They behaviors also changed a lot depending on how complicated their day had been so it would not be rare to see players slacking off in a corner while enjoying the beautiful scenery. Of course, Keith could not complain about that because he sometimes did the same.

However, when playing Project Overworld became their real-life job, this sort of behavior was kind of forbidden from happening. They were not just playing a game, they were literally engineering in an unfamiliar environment with different rules. Though, there were also advantage to this situation since Keith could be planning things out a lot more precisely. He knew they would get seven to eight hours of work every day and that nobody would fail to connect to the game for any reason, unless it was their day off.

'Well, it's a bad for a good. I've never really been able to clear off this many hours off my schedule to play Project Overworld and now we're given this opportunity for our real-life jobs. We should be able to progress a lot for the incoming months and I couldn't be more happy about such an eventuality.' Keith meditated. 'Anyways, let's get back to work!'