The Mathematics
982 Words
I called the map back up.
The monument gave it to me without resistance this time, the projection assembling itself above the square the moment I pressed the compass rose, like it had been waiting. I stood inside the edges of it and pulled my focus to Zone 2, reaching out to touch the Glass Wastes the way you touch a map when you are trying to make distance feel real.
My fingers passed through the holographic terrain without resistance. The crystalline dunes scattered light in all directions, catching the projection's internal illumination and throwing it back in small prismatic bursts. I had been proud of the Glass Wastes visual design. The 3D artist who had built the assets had sent me a message after the first render saying it was the most beautiful thing he had ever made. I had forwarded it to the team as morale content.
Standing inside the projection with my hand in the middle of a zone that would kill a level four character through heat damage alone, I thought about that message differently.
"Temperature management, water sourcing, mirage entities," I said, tracing the rough boundary of the wasteland with one finger, watching the line of my gesture pass through dunes that were not there. "Daytime health drain, nighttime freezing. Sand serpents with underground movement, no warning on emergence."
I had added the no-warning emergence specifically because telegraphed enemy attacks were, in my professional opinion, a crutch. Players needed to learn environmental awareness. Players needed to develop genuine vigilance rather than pattern recognition.
I moved my finger along the edge of the Glass Wastes to where it bordered the Frozen Expanse and traced the line between them.
"And you cannot skip this one," I said, "because the water sourcing knowledge you pick up in Zone 2 directly informs the survival mechanics in Zone 5. Which I designed that way intentionally. To force engagement with every system."
I zoomed in on Zone 3, Ironhold Keep, and looked at the PvP marker for the second time. In the projection it showed as a zone in constant motion, faction banners shifting, siege lines moving in their scripted loops. Real players somewhere in that chaos. Real people I had put in a zone designed to reward aggression and punish mercy.
"Elegant," I said, to nobody, to the projection, to the version of me that had written the word elegant in a design document about a war zone. "Really cohesive world design."
I pulled back to the full map view and made myself do the arithmetic.
Level 3 currently. Zone 4 required Level 15 minimum. That was not a suggestion, not a soft recommendation: I had hard-locked Zone 4's entry point behind a level gate because I had wanted the Sunken Ruins to feel like an achievement to reach, not just a place you wandered into. Twelve levels of advancement standing between me and the fourth zone out of twelve.
I had designed the experience curve to slow significantly after Level 10. Early levels came quickly, rewarding new players with frequent progression. Past Level 10, the curve steepened. Past Level 20, it became genuinely punishing, the kind of grind that separated dedicated players from everyone else.
Zone 6 required Level 20. The final zones pushed into the thirties.
"Current level: three," I said, out loud, because saying it out loud was apparently what I did now when I needed to stop a number from feeling abstract. "Required for Zone 4: fifteen. Required for Zone 6: twenty. Required for the end: somewhere above thirty, exact figure unknown because I did not finish designing it."
The projection hummed with soft light above the empty square. Night had arrived while I was standing inside it, the village lamps flickering on in their scripted sequence, and the warm gold of the sunset had given way to the cooler blue of Respawn's night filter. Somewhere beyond the safe zone boundary, things I had programmed to be stronger after dark were doing what I had programmed them to do.
Meadowbrook felt very small under the map.
"Level three," I said again. "With six lives. Against a ten-level grind just to reach the halfway point of a twelve-zone gauntlet, with each zone specifically designed to require mastery of the last one, with a PvP zone in the middle and a psychological horror zone that uses your own memories against you, and a final zone that I did not finish and marked with question marks because I ran out of time before launch."
The math was not complicated. That was the worst part. It did not require any special calculation to understand how badly the numbers were stacked. A child with basic arithmetic and ten minutes could have looked at the gap between Level 3 and Level 30 and understood what it meant in a world with a death limit.
I let the despair have its moment, because trying to skip past it had not been working. I stood inside the projection of twelve zones and let the full shape of what I had built settle on me without immediately reaching for the counter-argument.
It was a lot. It was genuinely, specifically, thoughtfully a lot. I had worked very hard to make it this much.
The projection cycled on its idle timer, the faction banners in Ironhold Keep shifting in their scripted loops, the Glass Wastes catching its own internal light, the question marks of Zone 12 sitting in the far edge of the display with their honest admission of incompleteness.
I reached out and touched the ouroboros marker I had noted near the starting zone, the first Easter egg in the chain. It pulsed faintly when my finger passed through it, which was not behavior I had programmed.
I looked at that for a moment.
Then I closed the map and stood in the dark of the village square.
- Writer
