CH 5

Weekday afternoons always seemed long— the sun outside the window would shine lazily and the office was filled with a drowsy atmosphere.

Tao Zhiyue saw that many of his colleagues seemed to be drifting away mentally and some of them were even secretly dozing off. Wang Heng, the planner who usually communicated with him often, wasn’t seeking him out either. Based on the lack of proactiveness, Tao Zhiyue guessed that the requirements for the next version have probably not yet been written.

Tao Zhiyue almost fell asleep again before he forced himself to wake up. If he fell asleep now, he would suffer from insomnia at night, which would be a vicious cycle that would break his routine.

There was really nothing left to do and there were no new hot technical topics for him to explore in the Little Green Bird community. Tao Zhiyue simply opened the game’s official page and read the players’ feedback in the comment section.

Most of the comments were insulting the official game for being stingy, the depressive drop rates, some ugly characters etc. However, there were also some comments that complained about game bugs. Tao Zhiyue looked through the comments carefully before jotting down and relating the content of the bugs to the code that he wrote.

Although the functions have been tested before going online, especially by Tao Zhiyue, who would do it several times, in the actual utilisation process, it was inevitable that there would be some sort of problems.

Sometimes the problem would stem from the modern adaptation of the game’s design and sometimes, the old code would accidentally be overwritten. More often than not, it generally took quite some time to pinpoint where an error had occurred in the game.

Although he died suddenly because he worked too hard in his previous life, Tao Zhiyue still had a pure love for programming.

When he was a child, he liked to watch construction teams build houses. It was almost like magic to watch a group of people combine unremarkable bricks, tiles and cement into magnificently tall skyscrapers.

Programming was the same for Tao Zhiyue. They were tasked to construct complicated and meaningless data into a clear logical chain, constantly seek an optimised path and finally, obtain a set of simple and beautiful codes. All of those would bring immense amounts of joy to Tao Zhiyue.

He carefully analysed the causes of these bugs and began to conceive optimised solutions. Then, he sent a message to Wang Heng, asking him if he could add them to the requirements and solve these problems in the new version.

After that, he saw Wang Heng bounce up from his seat, waving at him courteously.

Tao Zhiyue, “…?”

Upon seeing Tao Zhiyue’s face that was practically full of question marks, Wang Heng quickly bent down to send him a message.

[Planner-Wang Heng: Brother Tao, let’s go out for a walk. ]

[Planner-Wang Heng: Light a cigarette for the boss.jpg]

A moment later, Tao Zhiyue stood by the side of the road, holding the milk tea Wang Heng bought for him and took a sip blankly.

The sweet and milky taste filled his heart, accompanied by deliciously soft taro balls.

Tao Zhiyue was very polite, “Thank you, it’s delicious.”

Wang Heng immediately became excited, “Brother Tao, do you want to be a producer yourself in the future?”

“Ah?” Tao Zhiyue felt that his thoughts were jumping, “What producer?”

“A game’s producer!” Wang Heng was in high spirits, “Brother Tao, with your capabilities, you definitely won’t work for others for your entire life. What we’re doing is merely a skin-changing game that everyone just wings— even the producer wouldn’t care about the player’s feedback and feelings since they just want to make a wave of quick money. But Brother Tao, you still remain ever so responsible. I think that if you were to make one on your own accord, you could definitely produce a very good game.”

Tao Zhiyue wanted to explain that he was merely just bored and was looking for something to do. If he wasn’t afraid of offending his colleagues, he would also like to solve the bugs left by other programmers together. Nevertheless, upon looking at Wang Heng’s serious eyes, he couldn’t say anything.

If programmers were classified as creators, every creator should have fantasized something like this, screw the boss, screw the other party; as long as I have a say in it, I’m going to do the things I love the way I do it.