Simon Shields always tried to do the right thing. His mother and father adopted him at an early age from the orphanage because they couldn’t have children; from that day, they trained him to follow the rules and respect authority, punishing him when he strayed. His mother was a devout housewife, and his father a pastor, and they raised him well. Simon tucked in his shirt, dotted all his i’s and crossed all his t’s, and turned his parent-teacher conferences into litanies of praise. He continued to do things the right way, showing up for class ten minutes early, asking penetrating questions, diligently completing his homework weeks in advance, and studying hard for tests. He continued to follow the rules at home and school, but if he could find an instruction manual for designing games, he was willing to risk censure for reading it. What Simon wanted, more than anything else, was a step-by-step guide to game creation: from the high level of rendering surface visuals, to the low level of pushing around bits and bytes. He was tired of solving for x and computing the hypotenuse of a right triangle; he wanted to know why it mattered and how it’d contribute to making his game. As with any textbook or exam, all Simon needed was to know the steps; he’d study them, memorize them, and then follow them to a well-crossed t. With that guide, there’d be no doubt about it: Simon would learn the right path to his finished game, and he’d walk it, better than anybody.
