A Developer's Dream

Reading Time: 7mins 

I used to earn a small monthly payment as a developer on multiple Roblox games. My games were fairly decent, gaining a wide span of likes and each getting about a thousand players. Nothing on the populer page though. This wasn’t my dream of course, just a placeholder until I graduated from college and made a career for myself with my programming skills. Still, it was actually quite fun, and a few of my games were even nominated for the Bloxys. Sadly, my dreams of becoming an experienced developer would soon come to an end in one of the stupidest ways possible. I’ll start from the beginning.

It all started when I received a friend request on my Discord. Upon expecting it, a user messaged me, saying they were from a small developer group and heard about how good I was. I asked them what they wanted, and they replied, stating that they were working on a project and needed some assistance, offering me twenty dollars weekly. It wasn’t the best offer I had received when helping with making games, but it was the first one I had gotten in months, so I accepted the job. The group was made up of five people, excluding me from the count. The main man, who said is name was Joe, explained to me what the project was about in the Discord voice chat.

“Alright, here’s a summary: the game is like a teamwork obby unlike any other. There needs to be at least three players, so we ought to emphasize on that, so players avoid frustration midgame. Some stages are obstacle courses that require one player to unlock a certain area for others to get through, some others are pretty much puzzles. At the end however, only one player can win a badge, which means they are all forced to fight to the death with swords. Sound like your type of game?”

To be honest, it did seem pretty influential yet and not completely ambitious. So I said, “Sounds great.”

We were each assigned different tasks, mine was designing some of the object’s mechanics such as moving blocks and custom animations which I specialized in. It took a few weeks, but I was finally able to prove myself worthy to the group, and I passed with flying colors. With my five years of experience, Joe made me his right-hand man, filling me in on his daily life.

We socialized quite a bit unlike the others who were busy with their own stuff. I told Joe about my aspiring dreams of becoming a developer and how Roblox was just meant to be an easy cash grab, and he told me about things as well. He said he was born in Spain (I could kind of tell because of his accent) and after his parents died in a housefire, he was adopted by an American couple who took him back to Washington where he grew up and learned to program like is adoptive father.

All was well in our friendship, and with a lot of progress made, we were almost ready to introduce our game to the public. Sadly, do to lack of communication and major disagreements in how the game should run, the other four developers on our team departed. Joe was devastated. With so much to do and so many people lost the game would’ve been scrapped. That is, until Joe introduced me to a new developer he successfully hired. The anonymous user said their name was Cosmo, a slightly unrealistic name that I didn’t bother to call them out for. Joe and I assigned him with eliminating any bugs that he discovered while beta testing the game.

We expected it would take a little less longer to finish the game, but we were wrong. It took a LOT less. Within a few hours after we tasked Cosmo with fixing some issues, he came back with a fully finished project. At first Joe was utterly speechless, but then he got angry at Cosmo for going overboard and not letting us help out. I tried to ease him, but he just wouldn’t have it and banned Cosmo from our group, along with scrapping the entire project we had worked on for over a month.

I honestly didn’t know what to think. Whoever Cosmo was, he was a top-level programmer, completing what was supposed to be another month of development in a few hours. I had played the game myself, and it was honestly impressive. Still, I couldn’t help but feel unnerved. How did he do it so fast? I messaged Joe, asking him how he met this Cosmo individual. Unfortunately, he didn’t respond. What made things more concerning was the fact that we hadn’t talked in two weeks. Before long, I just stopped messaging him, losing the hope of a reply. Before long, I would probably just remember Joe as an acquaintance who had an interest similar to mine. But one day I received a DM on discord. My heart came to a stop when I realized who it was. That profile picture and colorful custom letters were all-too familiar. Cosmo. I had completely forgotten he was on my friends list. The message I was sent read, “Hello there.”

I responded with an excited, “Hey Cosmo! Listen, I want to apologize for Joe’s reaction a few weeks back. He has kind of a temper.”

“Oh, there’s no need to apologize.” Cosmo replied. “I’d actually like to make you an offer, much better than the one I made with…Joe.”

“And would this offer be one I’m willing to except?” I replied with a hint of sarcasm.

“I suppose there’s only one way to find out. No pay attention: I’m fully aware that you are an aspiring developer, and I have something that might push your career success through the roof. You see, I made a stand-alone game based on that Obby we made together. It’s a shame it never got finished, but I made a better version of it, somthing unlike Roblox would have. And I want you to take all the credit. Here’s the files, I’ll let you upload it anywhere possible.”

I downloaded the game in curiosity and played through. It was good, to say the least. Though there were no other players I couldn’t help but admire the skybox and hyper realistic objects and such. The game was almost otherworldly, the gameplay mechanics were practically hands in their own way, and I could feel myself pressing buttons with my fingers though I was playing on a PC. As for the graphics, it looked like I was looking through real human eyes, no, I was inside the game. That’s what it felt like. As if I was wearing a top-qaulity VR headset. It was amazing. Something people would pay for. And it was all given to me for free.

But I didn’t make this game. Cosmo did.

My dream was not only to make money but make people happy with my own work. Taking credit for something I didn’t do just didn’t feel right, even though Cosmo clearly did this for me. I excited the game and messaged him once more.

“I can’t except this. The game is just too good. Why don’t you just post it yourself?”

Cosmos response was unexpected, “No. I made the game for you. Are you not thankful?”

Now I knew how Joe felt. I know Cosmo meant well, but he just didn’t get it. “This isn’t right, Cosmo. This is your work. Your dream. How could you just let it fall into someone else’s hands? You would make a great developer.”

“You are not aware of my dream,” Cosmo said. “Frankly, I don’t care who gets the credit, as long as I get what I want.”

“What are talking about? What you want?”

All of the sudden, I could hear a deep and raspy voice rattle my headphones, “YOUR SOUL.”

“What the heck. Whats going on?” I cried aloud.

“YOU DON’T GET IT, DO YOU. I’ll ADMIT IT, YOU’RE MUCH SMARTER THAN JOE. AND THE ONE BEFORE HIM. AND THE ONE BEFORE THEM. AND THE ONE BEFORE THEM. AND THE ONE BEFORE THE-.”

“Shut up. Shut up. SHUT UP! Y-YOU- YOU AREN’T REAL!” I tore my headphones off and threw them across the room. Then I turned back to my screen to see something horrifying. Deep down, for some reason unkown to me I knew it was Joe. Poor Joe. His mutilated body surrounded by flames. He stared at me with eyes of unimaginable sorrow. Jealousy. He waved a flaccid, flesh-barren hand at me before the screen went black. I don’t know how long I just sat there screaming. I had no idea what I just witnessed but there was nothing I could do. All I knew was that Joe was gone and that thing, whatever it was, condemned him to a treacherous place that I was lucky enough to avoid. I’ll never develop another game for Roblox again. Or any thing for that matter. Because I know Cosmo is still out there just waiting for me to fall into its next trap.