My name is Jarod, and I am a designer / artist at Valkyrie Studios. I have been making games for almost seven years, and Septerra Core is the first RPG I have had the opportunity to help out on -- I highly recommend the experience. For the last two months solid, I have been doing effects (or, as we in the industry are wont to call them, "FX"). By our definition, this means every player or enemy attack (minus the initial animation of the character), every skill, every magic spell, every divine creature summoned to crush the enemy. When something in Septerra emits rays of light or melts or explodes into a shower of sparks, that's me. I did that. With a good deal of help, mind you, from programmer Roger, who made the tools that we use to tell the art what to do when it gets where we told it to go using programmer Roger's tools. And a good deal of help from programmer Jim, whose game engine interprets the instructions that come from Roger's tools and actually shows the art doing what Roger's tools told it to do when it gets where it was told to go by Roger's tools. Actually, after re-reading those last couple of sentences, I'm not sure I had anything to do with it at all. In any case, after a few months of constant mouse-clicking, we have pretty, sparkling explosions and glowing things dancing all across the screen. We have water, we have fire, we have lightning; the player can cast many, many hurtful spells including one in which a giant one-eyed ape made of iron and stone comes from the world beyond ours to make violent and upsetting earthquakes. It is all very, very satisfying. I live for the mornings that programmer Roger and programmer Jim come into the office, having seen a spell I made using their tools and engine, and ask me how in the holy living heck I did that. Truth be told, it's better than the mornings when they come in and demand that I tell them where I hid their chairs.