"Do you know how many employees the company has?" Xu Meng asked, staring into Yang Hui's eyes.
"?" Yang Hui froze for a moment. "I don't know, what's wrong?"
"101. Right now, the whole company has a total of 101 people."
"So what?" Yang Hui didn't understand why Xu Meng was bringing this up.
But Xu Meng was already growing angry. "101 people in the whole company, and 60 of them are married. Whether the game can reverse its decline and whether the company can survive is tied to at least half the income of 60 households."
"Without this half, their mortgages, car loans, rent, and child-rearing money will all run into trouble!"
"As for the unmarried ones, how much does it cost young people to establish a foothold in the city?"
"If the company goes under, will you be the one arranging jobs for these people?!"
"I'm talking about work here, and you're hitting me with social justice rhetoric? Do you take the meeting room for Weiguang?!"
Yang Hui was left speechless, her face turning pale and flushed by turns.
Yet in the end, she still shook her head stubbornly. "No matter what, I can't accept this."
"Fine." Xu Meng nodded. "Go through the process with HR. Starting tomorrow, you won't need to come in."
Yang Hui looked at Xu Meng in shock, as if she hadn't expected him to fire her so decisively, without even a single second of hesitation.
Following the shock came a strong sense of humiliation.
She angrily slapped the conference table and said through clenched teeth, "You won't succeed!"
"Just you wait, you'll be boycotted by everyone! This isn't over!"
She stormed out, slamming the door behind her.
As Xu Meng watched her retreating back, it reminded him of one thing—
Before starting work, he needed to put the company staff through a round of self-purification, lest anyone secretly harbor their own private agendas within the game—especially the writing and modeling departments.
In this regard, just a tiny bit of personal bias could often cause massive destruction.
Xu Meng made a mental note of this and instructed his assistant, "Meng Ling, go call the deputy director of the art department."
The little assistant, whose gaze had been following the direction where Yang Hui's back disappeared in a daze, instantly snapped back to reality. "Ah, right, I'll go right now!"
As she left the office, Xu Meng's voice sounded from behind her once more. "Regarding the character costumes, your first task starting now is to upgrade the texture of the black silk stockings."
The assistant stumbled in her step, almost tripping over herself.
"...What?" Chen Wanzhong thought he had misheard.
"Black silk." Xu Meng calmly repeated. "Of course, you could also research white silk first, if that happens to be your preference."
"No! Wait, Boss!" Chen Wanzhong waved his hands repeatedly.
"I don't like white silk!"
After a brief pause...
"Well, it's not that I don't like it... I mean, not that kind of like..."
The assistant slowed her pace, practically dying to stay right where she was and listen through this exchange.
Yet driven by her professional ethics, she still stepped away.
The voices behind her grew fainter and fainter, and she could vaguely hear Chen Wanzhong trying to steer the topic back on track—
"Don't our characters already have stockings?"
The boss's voice, however, was quite clear, easily audible from halfway across the office: "You call those stockings? That's just a piece of black cloth!"
"Some of them don't even have the texture of cloth, they're just a pair of black legs!"
In the art team's office area, anxiety was palpable.
Yang Hui was hardly a woman of pleasant temperament, and as she passed through here, her face was full of fury, her high heels clicking loudly against the floor.
Without waiting for her subordinates to ask, she grabbed her bag and stormed out of the company.
Chen Mengling only caught sight of her retreating back, and the little assistant stretched out an arm to try and stop her. "Hey! You haven't handed over your work yet—"
But the next second, Yang Hui's figure vanished completely.
The little assistant could only sigh and quickly call out names. "Ding Nian, Xu Fang, the boss wants to see you."
With that, she hurried away, heading straight for the office.
Ding Nian and Xu Fang exchanged a glance, then quickly grabbed their notebooks and followed.
When the assistant returned outside the door, the office was still discussing the topic of stockings—
"Boss, what kind of effect are you hoping for?"
"Bring out the smooth and delicate effect of stockings: translucent, fleshy, color gradients, and the elasticity when they pinch against the flesh—make it all." As Xu Meng said these words, his tone remained entirely deadpan. "It needs to be more charming than real stockings."
Chen Wanzhong stammered somewhat:
"Boss, whenever I see people wearing black silk on the street, I have to turn my face away... Making this... I really have no experience."
Outside the door, the little assistant quickly covered her mouth, barely holding back her laughter.
Chen Wanzhong's honest remark left even Xu Meng at a loss for words.
Taking advantage of the sudden quiet, the little assistant gave a gentle knock to signal her presence, and brought Ding Nian and Xu Fang inside.
Inside the office, all three of their expressions were quite colorful.
"No, dude..." Peng Linmu couldn't help chiming in. "There's no need to be this conservative, right?"
Chen Wanzhong looked somewhat embarrassed.
Xu Meng intervened in a timely manner. "Stop talking nonsense over here, or I'll make you wear stockings to use as a reference."
"Uh." Peng Linmu immediately shut his mouth.
Little assistant Chen Mengling subtly shifted her right foot, planning to make a small contribution—with her dorm mates constantly showering her with praise, she was quite confident in her figure.
Before she could speak, however, Xu Meng said, "Get the camera and motion capture equipment ready, and have the marketing department reach out to talent agencies to invite some 18th-tier models with great figures who are comfortable in front of the camera to record material."
"It's best to invite some foreign models and capture body data from different builds."
"Got it." The little assistant rapidly took notes.
"Prepare the costumes in advance as well—not just stockings, but swimsuits, cheongsams, JK uniforms, maid outfits, bunny suits, reverse bunny suits... Anyway, all the common 'decisive battle' outfits in 2D gaming, Frost Snow Project needs to have them all. Prepare whatever can be prepared."
"Ah." The little assistant, pen furiously scratching across paper, blushed slightly.
"Or just find a photo studio that shoots for cosplayers and hire them along with their costumes and makeup artists."
"In short, gather your references seriously, and start the character remaking as soon as possible." Concluding his summary, Xu Meng looked toward the two newly arrived deputy directors.
Ding Nian was also a young woman, 3 years older than Chen Mengling, but wearing a pink printed short-sleeved shirt, her face looked even more tender and youthful than Chen Mengling's.
Xu Fang was indeed a man, but perhaps due to some inherent trait of artists, he dressed far more meticulously than most men.
Compared to the three rough guys—Xu Meng, Peng Linmu, and Chen Wanzhong—who lived on frantic overtime, this was even more pronounced.
So much so that at first glance, Xu Meng always felt the guy gave off a distinctly gay vibe.
"Yang Hui has resigned, so you two will take charge of the art department for now."
"Your upcoming work will be to fully update the character splash arts, and coordinate with the modeling team to complete the character costume-swapping work."
"Draw the female characters first, and make their designs a bit sexier. As for which male characters to delete or change genders for, I'll let you know later."
"Right..." At this point, he paused. "You guys don't have any issues drawing this kind of character splash art, do you?"
Hearing this question, Ding Nian and Xu Fang assumed the boss was questioning their professional competence, and quickly expressed their confidence. "No problem at all!"
"Not a single problem!"
Very good.
Xu Meng nodded with satisfaction.
Qualified wage laborers.
He then brought up the next task. "Following the clothing, we have the physical dynamics of character modeling."
"To put it more bluntly: the characters' chests and butts need to be elastic; they can't just sit there like plastic models without moving at all."
"Take a look at how the players are reviewing us—" Xu Meng swiveled his computer screen around to show everyone the player comments.
"Stone boobs!"
"Don't you feel any shame in providing the players with a product like this?"
Peng Linmu and Chen Wanzhong lowered their heads in shame.
Xu Meng then laid down his demands. "Put some real effort into this! Give me the Q-elasticity and motion of jelly shaking, for both chests and butts!"
"They shouldn't just shake; they also need to respond to the characters' different actions—walking, running, jumping, combat—and produce varying dynamic changes."
"In short, crank the characters' sexual tension up to the absolute maximum!"
Chen Wanzhong's vision went dark as he listened.
Making parts of a character's model bounce wasn't a matter of whether it was suggestive or not, nor was it a technical issue—it was purely a matter of raw liver-burning labor! Stone boobs and plastic butts really didn't look good, but having a low polygon count on the models could significantly reduce the workload.
Yet the effect the boss was demanding...
To say nothing else, a single butt alone would cause the required polygon count to skyrocket from 3,000 to 30,000!
And that might not even be enough!
Scanning the entire ACG Game market, very few titles possessed that level of detail.
At this standard, every single modeler in the company was going to have to burn the midnight oil and grind themselves to the bone!
Peng Linmu felt much the same. Xu Meng's demands weren't just the modelers' problem—programmers, animators... not a single department was going to escape.
Still, once the boss had spoken, what else could they do besides go back and grind? "Understood."
"Got it."
"Go back, hold a meeting with your teams, and get me a schedule before the end of the day."
Xu Meng looked toward the little assistant once more. "Meng Ling, next is the operations department director. Help me call them in."
For everyone at Dream Building Game, today was a chaotic and rushed day.
The entire company had been pushed onto fast-forward by Xu Meng.
Like a train about to spin out of control, ignoring the parts flying off in every direction, it was about to charge forward at full throttle!
Before you continue