Nakayama Takuya pushed the development unit back to the middle of the table.
"One month. If you can chew through the underlying logic of the new architecture, you pass."
The ten newcomers' tense shoulders collapsed all at once.
The long-haired girl let out a long breath and reached up to wipe the sweat from her forehead.
"But don't celebrate too soon." Nakayama Takuya tapped his fingers against the tabletop, producing crisp knocks. "This is only a skeleton. It doesn't even have flesh on its bones."
His gaze shifted to the long-haired girl.
"Art. Right now, the Peashooter is just a green tube, and the zombies are just gray boxes. Put something like that out there, and players won't even give it a glance."
"I understand!" The long-haired girl swiftly opened the sketchbook in her hands and pushed it before Nakayama Takuya. "We've already produced over thirty versions of chibi American-cartoon-style drafts. We added smiling faces to the Sunflowers, gave the zombies torn-up clothes, and we're working on pixel conversion. We can replace the assets next week."
Nakayama Takuya glanced over the sketches.
The lines were smooth, and the defining features had been captured perfectly.
He nodded, then turned to the bespectacled planner.
"Balance. I tested it just now. The Sunflower produces sunlight at a fixed interval of ten seconds, and zombies take ten seconds to cross a single grid. Who entered those values?"
The bespectacled planner adjusted his glasses and opened his notebook. "To make it easier to get the program running, we used fixed values for everything."
"That's fine for testing, but absolutely unacceptable for implementation." Nakayama Takuya leaned forward. "In the first level, the player only has Peashooters. How long until the first zombie appears? How often does sunlight drop? Those values need hundreds, even thousands, of tiny