Wild Hearts

Suhyun 'Sunny' Park

"Sunny, got a sec? I wanna discuss this real quick, the costume design for our next project!"

A deep, thick English accent rang through my ears. I nodded my head as a sign that I heard him, my eyes were fixed on the wide computer screen as I was finishing adding colors on my character design for a new project.

I lifted my head and met Jared Samuel's green eyes on me. He was leaning at the door frame, holding a bigh brown envelope. The dark-haired, lean-built man looked a bit impatient with my slow-paced movement. I pouted my lips, I saved the draft before closing the computer.

I carried myself and walked towards his direction, he opened his office and directly went to his chair and threw the envelope on top of the glass round table. His desk was cluttered with computer game figurines, pile of papers, a wrap of fresh mint and five fountain pens.

I hold my hands together, standing infront of my demanding, short-tempered manager. He opened the envelope and pulled thick sheets of white papers with printed characters.

He shot me a look, gesturing me to sit down. I automatically gave myself a seat. I was quiet. My eyes were following his movement as he was flipping every pages.

He took three sheets and laid them all infront of me. My eyes grew curios as I got a clear view of three different character-designs of a bunny warrior (not likely similar to those hard-boiled muscled anime style of art) more like child-friendly. Kind of similar to Bugs Bunny but with an item for a weapon hanging on its back.

We were working on a new video game specifically to attract young gamers, our target market are ages ranging from ten to fourteen years old.

I work as an animator in a gaming company. I have been working in Age of Generations for three years now. We have developed and launched excellent games and the best one that we have introduced to the market was 'Age of Generations: Quest to Free World'. It is a game about modern society meets medieval-fanstasy-sword fights-wizardry world (phew!) and this also had level ups. The higher your level, the mightier you become and more chances to receive rare special items. A lot of young adults and kids like the concept, especially the visuals and illustrations.

I am proud to say I am part of the team who got the opportunity to visualize the characters.

It was such a fun experience in my whole animator career. We have given different seasons now for the game. Since we are heading to the final season, the company has planned to roll out another game theme and storyline.

Our manager, Jared Samuel has been juicing us out until our brain pulps were dried. There were few revisions, editing and brainstorming just to get to this theme and storyline.

And since I was the one who suggested a child-friendly concept with a bunny character as a hero, my colleagues all pointed me out to be the main 'man' for the designs and all.

Well, I do not have any issues with the idea of being the team leader for this project but I also never wanted to carry such a heavy responsibility.

It has been two weeks in a row now that I have been meeting Jared to discuss the character designs and settings. I spent most of my time 'working' here in his office and heard him yapping this and that and how he finds himself not buying my visualizations. He always put a big X mark whenever I handed him my designs. Everytime he gives me that deadly, 'are-you-sure-about-this-design look, I always picture myself jumping out of the window because of how hard to please someone like Jared Samuels.

I have never been in this kind of pressure and responsibility since I became an employee. I never knew having a certain position in the workplace was enough to drive someone's mind crazy to insane.