"Uh huh. I just wanna understand this right." Catherine's voice wasn't assumed as the Single Point of Contact looked over her notes. "You went into the game, and what did you manage to accomplish?"

  Jasper cleared his throat, having been forced to make a report to his boss about their previous adventure. "Well, we managed to perform a successful adjustment period and determined the viability of the proposed solution in accordance with company guidelines and our key metrics. This was especially to determine if our proposed model is feasible, with a junior member of the team, who performed beyond any expectations set by local management." He rambled a quick word salad while trying to remain calm. The truth was that they hadn't really accomplished much during their last dive. They had solved quite a few bugs, but they hadn't really managed to set up any game mechanics for the game, which had been their original intent. It was like the world just dragged them in, and forced them to engage with it on a political level.

  Cathrine was, unfortunately, well-versed in the art of corporate speak, and she could see right through Jasper's attempt at obfuscating what he had been up to. "So, in short, you see this as a quick Trial to get Riez comfortable with the AI setup... yeah, I can probably sell that to the higher-ups. But we need to start seeing some returns, and soon. Map things out, and don't just go in guns blazing."

  Jasper nodded. It was a strange situation to sit on. He couldn't figure out if Cathrine was on his side or not. It was a stupid thought to have, Cathrine wasn't on a side. She wanted the project to succeed, but at the same time, it was her responsibility to shut down the project if they were just goofing off. There was a lot more pressure on them compared to the last time around, so things really should go as smoothly as possible.

  The next two weeks were a whirlwind of coding, bug-fixing, and a couple of meetings with various departments. In fact, it started to be more meetings than coding, as almost every department wanted to talk with them. The internal security department wanted Jasper and Martin to register that they followed safe coding guidelines, which was a joke. They were using AI, and while it had some oversight, there was no way to live up to the usual regulations.

  Then there was the Privacy team that wanted to know if they followed the rules set out by GDPR. That was actually something they could prove, since they simply pointed at the AI and explained how they assumed it would be cleared between restarts. This did refer to internal documentation, which the team had accepted previously, and let them deal with the mess that had happened.

  Next was the Marketing team, who had an initial meeting from which Martin had to take a break, as they kept bringing up market analysis and wondering if the game could be a battle royal or hero shooter. Jasper had ended up calling Frank, the right-hand of the owner of Weird World Computing, to try and get the marketing team to back off, only to be told that the team was just doing their job. It was incredibly frustrating, but at least they weren't talking about the game being on mobile.

  It was better than nothing, and they did manage to make some progress on the whole game aspect, while the AI generator was modifying the world, fixing some of the elements that the team had flagged, and especially fixing some of the elements it had identified on its own. All this, while the time inside the world progressed rapidly.

  There was one more element that was needed before they could truly claim that they were ready to really dive into the game creation aspect of the setup: Riez.

  The fact that Riez wasn't at the office was honestly a bigger hindrance than Jasper had expected. Most of all, thanks to her not being able to participate in the talk after the session. So, using some HR program called that was designed to get people to stop performing remote work and turn up at the office, Jasper managed to swing the funds to have Riez join them in Denmark.

  It wasn't on a permanent basis, but it was probably better than almost anything else that she could have gotten. The intern would be flown in from their sessions, on company coin, every three weeks. Two weeks between sessions and each session being five days long, it would be fairly easy to have Riez move back and forth, especially since while she was staying at the office, she would be booked in at a local tavern, which might not be the best sleeping arrangements, but it was almost perfect for their current setup.

  Riez wouldn't be spending much time there, anyway, and she would be a valuable member of the team while she was around. Then, when their session was done, she would go back and take care of some of the stuff that she usually did during her normal working hours. All in all, it was actually quite perfect.

  So when Jasper finally revealed the slide show he had prepared for their next session, it was with every member of the team in the room.

  Riez had a very sour look on her face, since less than an hour before, Jasper and Celeste had been insisting on her trying some Nordic candy, which turned out to be a lot of liquorice... a whole lot of liquorice, rye bread and fish. Riez had been a good sport about it, making exaggerated expressions of disgust at anything that fell even slightly outside her comfort zone.

  That look still lingered on her face as Jasper got everyone's attention.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "So, instead of jumping into the game, we will be doing a small bit of brainstorming. For one, we have a working title now." The team leader announced.

  The slide shifted, and the words

  CHAMPIONS: Of Strength and Arcana

  were written in big bold letters across the screen.

  Martin gave Jasper a look, and Jasper just shook his head ever so slightly to shut down whatever thought the massive programmer might have.

  "So, with that out of the way, we can talk about our approach. Martin, you have done some thinking in this regard?" Jasper said and flopped onto a couch before allowing Martin to take over with the explanations.

  "Yeah, so I have thought about this for some time, and as our Senior Game Architect..." He paused for a second, wanting to allow Jasper to say that Martin was their only Game Architect, but the man didn't interrupt, clearly wanting to hear Martin's ideas, rather than cause a comotion by interrupting.

  "So, as I was saying," The mountain of a man picked up, now that he didn't get the banter that he had expected. "We effectively have two approaches. Class system and free system. As with all good things in life, we will be doing a mix."

  Martin clicked a button on the keyboard set up next to the small computer that was displaying the slideshow.

  "Mostly, we will be doing the open system, where everyone can obtain any skill. That means that we all need to develop some skills while we are in the game. I have implemented the framework for skills. Each skill has a level between one and one hundred. Easy, simple, no fuzz. A skill is trained by using it in unique ways, while this does not take into account people's initial skill, the idea is that people who have experience with a skill will know how to use it in a way that beginners do not."

  He looked around the room and was pleased to find nobody was protesting the idea.

  "There aren't necessarily milestones for each skill, and the game can only do so much to help you on the right track. For example, pickpocketing at 100 doesn't make you invisible, but it does let you know if you will get caught stealing something with 100% accuracy." Martin explained, and both Jasper and Celeste nodded along, while Riez seemed like she was about to try some of the salty liquorice once more.

  "However, such a simple system might not be challenging enough, assuming that players will want specific builds, I am also introducing Skill Frames. They work a little like Prestige Classes from DnD 3.5, but in essence, they are classes where you need a certain level of skill to be able to pick them. So far, I have a setup where you can only have 2 Skill Frames."

  Celeste raised a hand, "Uhm... What does that mean?"

  Martin opened his mouth and then closed it again, before shooting her some finger guns. "Good points. It means that you can get a persistent bonus or unique ability from stacking these Skill Frames. An example could be a person who focuses on grappling. If they obtain the Wrestler Skill Frame, they might be able to deal damage based on their grappling ability. However, to obtain the skillframe, the player might need a skill level of 50 in grappling, 25 in acting, and who knows how much in deception."

  Celeste nodded slowly. She assumed it would make more sense when she was inside the game.

  Another click of the keyboard, and another slide was revealed. Martin took a sip of water before continuing. "Now, one of the more important elements, or rather the lack thereof, is the fact that we will not have stats. After analysing how much we are using them when we are gods, I don't really see a need to keep them around. They are honestly mostly in the way, at least for players."

  Riez seemed to think about this and raised a hand following Celeste's example. "But people will want to have stats. That is like one of the main things that we see across almost every RPG game."

  Martin nodded, not dismissing Riez out of hand. "Yeah, that is true, but we are kind of betting on the skills to carry that dopamine hit. However, there is nothing stopping us from having a Strength skill or a dexterity skill. However, remember, if you have broad skills, then they will be harder to design for, and you will have to do more work. We hope the AI will pick up some of the slack, but honestly, there are no guarantees." Martin explained.

  Riez seemed to accept this, but Celeste raised her hand again. Jasper was tempted to say something about it being a work-related injury from teaching too much, but he didn't want to interrupt the productive session they had going.

  "First of all, will this not be extremely unbalanced? Some characters would just be outright stronger than others, right? And how do we establish skills? We were running low on Worship a whole lot before."

  Once again, Martin nodded, clearly having expected those questions. "Well, the first one is honestly a lot easier than you would expect. We are designing a single-player game. It is true that while we were planning on making this an MMO of sorts, we would have needed to balance everything, and the truth is, we simply don't have time for that. So we are making this single-player, with the option for co-op, but even in that case, power levels don't really mean anything. As long as there is not something that sets everything to easy mode, it should be fine." Martin grabbed another sip of water before he continued.

  "As for new skills, I have implemented a system that will allow us to create a new skill by spending a single point of Energy for the day. However, you will be able to customise the skill a lot more if you use Worship. So that means that we will still be making changes to the world." Martin concluded.

  Jasper nodded along before clearing his own throat and standing up to press a button on the keyboard, and the slide on the presentation shifted.

  "While Martin worked on that, I have worked on a new Domain that every god will get." A groan followed the announcement, but Jasper raised his hands in a placating motion. "Relax, it is nothing too wild. It is a Domain for interacting with followers. It should stem the tide of gods who are trying to get into the mortal realm and mess up the place."

  A grumble of acceptance followed, before another click showed the next slide. The last exercise before diving back into the game was to come up with some basic skills that Martin could implement outside the game, so that they weren't just starting from nothing.

  By the time they were done, they had made fifty new skills that Jasper ran through some quick implementation setups, which he had prepared for this occasion.