The Red Dragon Lord is OP, but Insists on a Pop Culture Invasion!

"Make the plants a little cuter?"

Uffie rubbed her sleep-filled eyes and looked at the other woman on the team.

She was the lead artist—or, to use her formal title, the Chief Art Designer. She was the one responsible for overseeing the entire game’s art style.

An outstanding art style could make a game break into the mainstream. That’s why there was a common saying about designers having to beg the artists.

However, the lead artist wasn’t the one who made the final call on graphical quality; graphics and art style were two different things.

Graphical quality was determined by the technical department’s skill level, and people proficient in both technology and art have always been a rare commodity.

That wasn’t an issue on the Feilin Continent. For Illusionists, the primary technical personnel, art was a required course since they needed to mold Illusions and create illusory environments.

The lead artist pushed up her glasses and answered earnestly, "When we were designing the overall style for Druid vs. Necromancer, our idea was to convey the difficulty and brutality of resisting a zombie invasion. That’s why we chose this design."

"We also referenced the zombie designs from Holy Mountain Journey. I feel that having cute plants fighting enemies like that would be a bit of a mismatch."

Her reasoning was sound.

She was an artist with her own vision, far better than the type who just haphazardly threw together whatever elements they found aesthetically pleasing.

But Zog rejected it.

"My suggestion is to make the zombie enemies a little cuter, too," Zog said.

"Huh?" The students on the team were clearly baffled by this suggestion.

Zombies... cute?

How could those two words possibly go together?

Anyone who had ever seen a real zombie knew that few were even fully intact. They were missing arms and legs, with patches of rotting flesh here and oozing pus there, spreading the stench of death wherever they went.

For those who hadn’t, their impression came almost entirely from that one Shadow of Evil film: mindless, terrifyingly fast creatures that reaped lives like a swarm of locusts and were highly infectious.

They were even scarier than the real thing.

Cute?

Anyone who could find these things cute had to be some kind of pervert.

"A zombie in a funny outfit, shuffling over slowly... don’t you think that’s cute?" Zog asked.

The team members all shook their heads.

Zog had no choice but to find a piece of paper and start drawing.

He wanted to describe it as a ’cartoon’ or ’comic’ style, but that wouldn’t make sense. The concept of ’cartoons’ didn’t exist yet, and the comics of this world all leaned toward a realistic art style.

He would just have to create the concept art himself.

Paper prototypes were a common presentation method in the early stages of game development.

Zog first cut a few slips of paper and drew a sunflower, a peashooter, and a basic zombie on them.

Then, on a larger sheet of paper, he drew a grid of five rows and nine columns.

"Tower defense games have some strategy, but their gameplay is still primarily casual. The target audience is players of all ages, so the style needs to be easily accessible. And who doesn’t like cute things?"

As he spoke, he placed the sunflower and peashooter cutouts on the grid.

’Tower defense?’

’Using towers to defend against an offense.’

Uffie took note of the term Zog used for this type of game.

’It’s pretty fitting.’

She had thought she and her friends had invented a completely new game genre. How did it seem like their boss already had all sorts of games fully planned out in his dragon brain, and had just never gotten around to making them?

And they just happened to stumble upon one, so it was now up to them to create it.

Uffie’s eyes widened in shock as she looked at Zog.

’So this is our boss... He’s terrifyingly brilliant!’

"I want you to split the original game concept into two. The grand backdrop of resisting the Necromancer invasion can be made into a more epic tower defense game. Different Professionals can correspond to different ’towers,’ and you can have Legendary Heroes who appear to fight the enemy directly."

Zog continued, "However, that might be a bit too difficult for you at your current skill level. Why not start with a simpler version, using only the plant and zombie elements?"

"So... it would just be plants versus zombies?" Uffie asked.

"You could put it that way. The story becomes a personal conflict between a single Necromancer and a single Druid, and the battlefield is confined to the backyard of the Druid’s cottage," Zog continued, explaining his idea.

"Won’t the enemies and plants be a bit monotonous then?"

"Of course not. Use your imaginations! The plants and zombies can be incredibly diverse."

Zog sketched a few examples on the paper.

An exploding potato, a nut to block zombies, an exploding cherry.

This immediately sparked the team’s own ideas.

They started suggesting plants with more of a Feilin flavor, like a hard-punching Tree Man or a pipe-weed that could slow down a whole group of enemies.

"As for the zombies, they can also be comedic," Zog continued. "For example, a zombie holding a newspaper. When the newspaper gets destroyed, it gets angry, and its movement and attack speed increase."

"Zombies wearing armor, super zombies who were Professionals in their past lives... and then you can design specific plants to counter them."

Listening to Zog’s explanation, Uffie thought back to her own initial design and suddenly felt the immense gap between them.

And she’d been one of the top students in the Zog Group’s internal game design course.

The Zog Group offered specialized training courses for different roles to help employees improve their skills.

A proper company should give its employees plenty of time for growth and learning. The demand for recent graduates to already have two years of work experience was just absurd.

As for the fear that employees would leave right after being trained...

Well, shouldn’t those bosses reflect on why the people they trained wanted to leave in the first place?

Had they given proper raises over the years? They shouldn’t just spout nonsense; it’s tough out there for the working class.

Just then, Uffie remembered something from her class. "In this game, the zombies can attack the plants directly," she asked. "Won’t it be incredibly frustrating for the player when a plant they worked hard to get is eaten? The lecture said that games should try to minimize player frustration."

"Who said that? What’s wrong with a game having a bit of frustration?"

’This is barely scratching the surface,’ Zog thought. ’I haven’t even brought out any of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s dirty tricks yet.’

"You did. In class."

"..." Zog fell silent. ’Looks like I’ll need to prepare a syllabus for my lectures from now on,’ he thought.

A moment later, Zog had concocted an explanation.

"It’s not about eliminating frustration entirely, but about striking a balance between frustration and achievement. When your plants might get eaten, it adds a layer of tension. When you finally set up your defenses and your plants are safe, it adds another layer of accomplishment."

"Yes, exactly. Look at that mountain climbing game with the limping, armless protagonist. Didn’t that sell pretty well?"

Uffie gave her boss a skeptical look. ’Didn’t Holy Mountain Journey only sell well because of Toto’s streams?’ she thought.

She felt like you’d be lucky if even half of what her boss said was true.

"Anyway, that’s the plan. Get to work!" Zog said. "If you need any art resources, you can request them from the Zog Group. I expect you to have about ten levels ready before the public demo."

"Oh, right," Zog suddenly thought of a design that would be perfect for generating hype. "Remember to make a random-plant mode, the kind where you don’t know what plant you’re going to get. It’ll be very useful."

Although they didn’t know what Zog’s "great use" for it was, they figured the boss must have his reasons.

Their policy was to trust first, and then trust some more.

"I wish you a smooth development process." With a stretch of his claw and a little spark, Zog left the snow hut.

「A few days later.」

The Ice and Snow Game Festival officially began.