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“Rui, I brought Robonene over for the special upgrade,” Nene announced. She stepped in through Rui’s door with the large robot in hands.
From the corner of his room at his desk Rui waved his tools. “Bring her over here.”
Effortlessly, Nene lugged the large robot over to the table. She took great care as she placed the delicate contraption on Rui’s workspace. With a flick of a switch, Nene turned off the robot and the beneath it buckled inward slightly at the sudden increase of weight.
“What were you planning on adding to her? Hopefully nothing too crazy...” Nene asked.
Rui took a screwdriver to a panel on the robot’s back. “I’ve been very interested in adding some kind of wind propeller to her functions. Being able to quickly access a wind current might prove useful in our shows in the future,” he said.
Nene nodded slowly. “But why’d you have me come over to your house for this one? Couldn’t you have just done it at Phoenix Wonderland?”
“Because I have something else I’d like to show you,” Rui said. With a final twist, he peeled off Robonene’s panel and looked up to Nene. “Here, sit down.” He motioned toward the computer monitors at his side.
“Sure,” Nene said. Seeing as she had nothing better to do, Nene plopped down in the unoccupied stool in front of the three monitors at his side. The computer was on, but only one of the screens was occupied by some gibberish Rui was referencing for whatever he was doing to Robonene.
From his seat at the table, Rui reached over to grab his mouse. He flipped through some file folders on one of the lower screens and opened up a file named “forNene.” A simple chip-tune beat sang out from the computer’s speakers to accompany what looked to be an unfinished title screen.
“What’s this?” Nene asked.
With another click of the mouse the screen faded to black, revealing an empty flat line with a crude, pixelated character on top of it. Nene couldn’t quite make out what the character was supposed to be behind its 16-bit appearance, but it looked almost like little Robonene.
“It’s a game,” Rui said excitedly. “I’ve been using it as a way to practice coding on the side and I thought it might be fun to have you test it while I worked. I bet it’ll be more fun than sitting around waiting for me to finish at least.”
“Mmm... I don’t mind waiting, but I’ll give it a try.” Nene smiled at him.
“Excellent!” Rui returned to his seat. “I’ll tell you when I’m done.”
With a nod, Nene’s attention returned to the computer screen in front of her. The game looked to be a basic platformer, at least from what was visible on the screen. There were no icons anywhere, just a line and a character. To be certain, she’d need to find out how to move.
Seeing as the game was on a computer and there were no controllers in sight, the character was probably controlled with either the keyboard or the mouse. Nene’s first instinct was to try out the classic WASD-style controls, but it only took a few seconds to realize those weren’t working. The arrow keys, on the other hand, moved the character instantly. As much as Nene preferred WASD, arrow keys worked, too.
Aside from the character’s walking animation, there was no indicator that Nene was moving forward in the game. All she could see was a constant black and white line in front of her. That is, until the line at the end of screen plummeted off-screen ahead. It looked like a classic jump, meaning this was definitely a platformer.
After some trial and error with the Z and X key, Nene found she could make her character jump with the up arrow key. An odd choice, but she didn’t ask questions. Effortlessly, she jumped across the first pit of the game. There were a few more after, but the ample space between the jumps and the small ground to cover through the air made all of them a little too easy.
Everything was going smoothly, until she ran into a large cliff. The jump was far and high, but Nene figured it was still doable with the jump arc she’d seen from her character. After some adjusting along the edge to try to get the best jump, Nene made her first attempt. Her character hit the wall of the cliff without a sound and plummeted to it’s death.
Much to Nene’s mild irritation, she respawned at the start of the stage. There were no checkpoints in between, but at least it wasn’t that far to the problem jump. In under a minute, she was back at the large cliff jump.
Even though she could just tell there weren’t acceleration mechanics in the game to get a further jump, she tried to get a running start this time. Only to meet the exact same fate as before. In fact, she noticed that her character hadn’t even made the height at the top of it’s jump arc to get over the cliff before it plummeted into another swift respawn.
A little embarrassed to be failing, Nene turned to glance at Rui. He wasn’t even facing in her direction, his focus instead fully on installing a large fold-able fan into a slot within Robonene’s tool compartment. At least he wasn’t watching her while she lost to his game.
With a shake of her head, she ran through the gauntlet of easy jumps to once again stare at the cliff. There was no way Rui had made this impossible. It just had to be a difficult jump and Nene wasn’t doing it right. She jumped up and down at the edge of the gap, checking with disappointing results to see if Rui had put in a double jump or something.
All she could do was try, again and again. Unfortunately, no matter how much she tried, though, every jump led her to the same fate.
Nene let out a frustrated huff as she once again fell down the way too large hole for what felt like the hundredth time. Rui definitely hadn’t play tested the game at all or this was just his way of messing with her by making her be the first to play test his game instead of running it through at least once on his own.
“Everything okay over there, Nene?” Rui said.
“This jump is impossible!” Nene said. Her suppressed gamer rage made the words come out louder than intended.
Rui set down his tools and stood up. “That can’t be right. I tested it rigorously before letting you see it. Here, which jump is it.” He pulled his chair next to Nene’s and held his hands forward for the keyboard.
Wordlessly, and maybe a little embarrassed she hadn’t been able to figure it out, Nene handed over the controls. It didn’t take him long to get through the easy jumps and reach the wall Nene had been suffering at.
“This one?”
“Yeah, you can’t jump that high.”
Rui chuckled. “Oh, I see the problem.”
Without explaining further, Rui walked toward the wall and, instead of pressing any of the keyboard buttons to jump, he pressed the spacebar. The character on the screen shot up with a rocket trail animation behind it as it effortlessly passed the unjumpable barrier.
Nene stared at the screen with her mouth open wide. After the shock had worn off, however, her expression took on a scowl instead. “You didn’t say there was a different jump! The game doesn’t say that anywhere!” She didn’t try to hide her frustration.
“Ah, I’m sorry,” Rui said with his pathetic smile. “The tutorial isn’t quite ready yet.”
With a bit of a pout on her face, Nene yanked the keyboard back in front of her and returned to triumph over the stage with her newfound knowledge. Without saying anything, Rui simply sat by her and watched her completely clear all of his hard work.
There wasn’t much after the large jump. There were a couple larger jumps after Nene’s initial barrier, but nothing in Rui’s game was too complicated for her. Everything had been way too easy after she found out the game basically had two jumps in it. A little triumphant tune played as Nene finished the level without falling once.
Rui clapped. “Bravo, Nene. How was it?”
“The game moves well, but I’m still a little mad you didn’t tell me about the rocket jump,” Nene said.
“Well, Robonene is done whenever you’re ready.” He picked up the big robot and placed it on the floor next to her “The game was fun at least right?”
Nene smiled at him. “Yeah, it was.” She picked up Nenerobo and headed for the door, but not without one more thing before she left. “Next time, tell me when you add something, okay? Bye.”