The Art Director (1)
[Screenshot of buildings constructed on the Galicia continent]
[Screenshot of Galicia Online service termination notice]
The sweet house I built plank by plank with lumber I cut down myself, stripped of bark, trimmed, dried, sanded smooth, oiled, and treated for preservation is gone!!!!!!!! Service terminated!!!!!!!! Fuck......... I’m actually crying..... The story’s just pausing here for a bit so they’ll obviously renew it and bring it back, right??? I’ll hold my breath until then, huff!!!!!!
While staying on Earth in Se-rin’s body, she could feel hunger and all the usual desires like any normal person. But at least on the Galicia continent, Se-rin was a true goddess.
She didn’t need to sleep or eat to work… a perfect work environment where she could pour all twenty-four hours into her tasks and everything would stay in peak condition except her mental state.
Besides, a developer stuck in crunch mode didn’t have any desires left anyway. All that remained was the single thought of I just want to finish this and rest.
So Se-rin threw herself into normalization like a woman possessed. The Galicia continent had been an absolute disaster.
She started by cleaning up the grotesque, half-collapsed buildings that previous Galicia Online players had left behind, along with the countless sites of environmental destruction that had sprung up at the same time.
She redeveloped everything her eyes could reach, reshaping the land until it looked somewhat presentable, planted a massive World Tree in the center of the continent for atmosphere, and even laid down a few protective barriers in preparation for the impending descent of the Archdemon that was supposed to destroy everything.
There were still plenty of aesthetic shortcomings, but the original Galicia continent—which had resembled the wild frontier of the American West—began to look decent at an astonishing speed.
“What the hell were you doing while it got this bad?”
“Kids are supposed to grow up the hard way… Aaaaack!”
Se-rin mercilessly pinched Elisha’s cheeks while the smaller girl flailed. As she did, she pondered their situation.
The Galicia continent was certainly smaller than Earth, but it was still vast, and there were areas beyond the reach of her power. Why can’t a god reach everywhere? Yeah, exactly. Fuck.
“No bad words!”
“Oh my dear child.”
“Uwaaaah! That’s a bad word too!”
What was normally supposed to overcome such limitations was Faith—the power that could replenish a god’s authority.
Of course, there was Faith on the Galicia continent as well. Elisha wasn’t completely incompetent; she had been making whatever effort she could. But was the Faith she gathered enough to change the world? Sadly, it was not.
That brought them back to the fundamental question. Why had Elisha and the other virtual reality game developers—dimensional administrators—gone to the trouble of turning their situations into games and releasing them on the higher dimension known as Earth? The answer was Faith. Specifically, Faith from a higher dimension.
So how did one obtain that Faith? Thinking about how churches operated made the answer obvious. Very simply put, a church operated by having believers visit, testify to their faith, and donate tithes.
When expressed in game terms, that became concurrent user count (DAU) and their willingness to spend money.
“This… is what gods are…?”
While Se-rin clutched her head, having reached the pathetic truth behind sacred dimensional administration—
“Whoa……”
Elisha, who had been dragged to the Galicia continent by her pinched cheeks, looked around with sparkling eyes at the changes that had occurred in a relatively short time.
As expected, Se-rin is competent! As expected, I’m useless!So Se-rin will just do everything, right?
She had an insolent thought that would have earned her three sharp flicks to the forehead if Se-rin had known, while continuing to look around.
Then her gaze landed on a line of bizarre shapes standing in one corner of the heavenly realm.
“What are all those?”
Since they would be seeing each other every day for the foreseeable future, Elisha had decided to speak casually. Se-rin looked up at her.
“RPGs need monsters.”
It was a simple truth. Of course, Galicia had enemies. They were collectively called the Shadow of the Archdemon.
Even Elisha, who had turned the place into a complete mess, had some excuse—she had at least worked hard to fight them off so they wouldn’t erode the world. The problem was that she hadn’t done anything else.
But just as their name suggested, the Shadows were amorphous and closer to natural disasters than proper monsters.
If players were thrown at them as-is, the genre would come across more like post-apocalyptic survival than fantasy.
In fact, the few remaining players of Galicia Online had treated it as a survival simulator rather than a fantasy game, so the essence was the same.
“I’m going to give the Shadows physical bodies and turn them into proper monsters.”
That was Se-rin’s plan. She and Elisha would diligently hunt down the Shadows, collect them, purify them once, and then grant them monstrous forms.
When players defeated the resulting monsters, the Faith originally extracted from the Shadows would instead be used to strengthen the players’ bodies. It was the fundamental framework for levels and an experience point system.
The minor problem was—
“They look so bad……”
Why did large-scale game development always separate the art director and art team from the rest of production? It was to create visual designs that naturally blended into the world the planners had envisioned.
And unfortunately, Se-rin’s aesthetic sense wasn’t particularly outstanding. The results spoke for themselves.
A slime that looked like it belonged in an adult game. A rabbit that appeared to have rabies. A goblin that looked like a twisted zombie fresh from the grave, except for its green skin. An orc whose muscles were so ridiculously overdeveloped that it probably couldn’t even run…
A lineup of grotesque prototype creatures that looked like they belonged in some gore-filled dark fantasy title stood there blankly.
“……”
Naturally, even Se-rin had been wondering if this was really the right direction, so Elisha’s perfectly reasonable criticism left her speechless. She soon reached a conclusion. One person could only do so much. Wasn’t that exactly why the concept of division of labor had developed as human society advanced?
“Elisha.”
“Yeah?”
“Is it possible to hire other people… Earth humans… for game development?”
“We’ve already crossed so many lines, so maybe? Wait a second!”
Se-rin pretended not to hear the mutter that definitely should not have been said out loud. After a moment, Elisha—who had been moving her mouth as if sending a telepathic message into thin air—made a slightly awkward face.
“It’s possible, but……”
“But?”
“They said we should make it look as much like a normal virtual reality game development company operating in reality as possible. Otherwise, souls like yours will end up bound to the dimension.”
Se-rin’s brow furrowed.
“So you’re saying I’ve been dragged into some ridiculous fraudulent contract and have become an unfortunate person whose soul has been mortgaged?”
“Ehehe……”
Bonk!
Elisha, who had earned yet another stack of forehead flicks today, clutched her head and rolled across the floor. Watching the pathetic sight, Se-rin let out a deep sigh. But what was done was done…
“Make it look like a real company, huh.”
In that case, large-scale recruitment was practically impossible. While it was possible to silence a few mouths, controlling public opinion on a large scale was nearly impossible.
Hadn’t she herself once tried to track down the employees who posted trash threads about their company on the anonymous worker community Behind only to eventually give up?
Especially that persistent sexual harasser who kept writing “I want to lick the boss’s collarbone.” She should have caught them for sure, but even after the company went under, their identity had never been uncovered.
“Then……”
She couldn’t gather all her former employees from Blue Edge. Realistically, she couldn’t offer the same high salaries as before. So she would start with a tiny number of trustworthy, talented people.
After all, once she had proper concept art, pulling the designs from her imagination and implementing them in Galicia would be simple. The reason she was struggling now was precisely because she didn’t have any.
Therefore, she would start by recruiting at least an art director.
One person immediately came to mind. The one who used to follow her around like a puppy, constantly calling her “Director, Director.” Young, but so talented that even major corporations sent her love calls.
And… for some reason, Se-rin had a feeling she was currently unemployed and would wag her tail and come running the moment she was called.
She would make an excellent slave… no, talent.
Still, scouting talent face-to-face was only proper etiquette.
“Elisha.”
“Yeah?”
“Can I return to my original appearance, even for a little while?”
“That’s impossible!”
“…Ha. Fuck.”
Face-to-face… she would just have to do it anyway, wouldn’t she?