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Ryota_H-momiji

I have a lot to be thankful for today. Even though my last job left me feeling terrible, the fact I've got such caring people in my life never ceases to amaze me.I swear, at times you all think miles better of me than I do. I've got a lot to live up to. Whew!

I did about a month's worth of travel around Japan. I've been working on a graphic novel I've always wanted to do. Random freelance work has kept me afloat for the time being.

I'm not used to seasons in Japan. The part of America I used to live in didn't have them at all. It's cold...Time to make some tea!

I might have to move. There are some promising leads in Osaka. Osaka is dangerous to me; there's delicious food all over the place. I'll have to run everywhere to stay slim. Moving is always expensive and a pain in the rear, but wow. Osaka! I have some former co-workers I got along with living there. I was tempted to move to Osaka while still at Ubisoft Nagoya because the team I worked with was there and the people were friendlier. The Nagoyans were plenty nice but mighty reserved. And they really had a solid clique formed and I never got in.

Ah well. I've made new friends through Pixiv, gotten rather addicted to Sound Horizon and improved my digital painting skills by leaps and bounds. Life isn't completely rosy, but it's not terrible either.

A lot has happened since I last posted. I have certainly learned a lot more about myself during this job than any other experience in my life and not all of it is good. It's been very depressing to think about, but I think I'm at the point where I can talk about what the heck happened.

I need to be more assertive about me hitting my limits. One thing a co-worker told me that if I was to survive, I'd have to learn to say "no" to my superiors at the right times and in the right way. I was a complete door mat and I got trampled to say the least.

Don't let fear make the best of you. I had a fear of failure that ultimately became a self-fulfilling prophecy. It grabbed a hold of my urge to please(which has gone overboard since my confidence sunk into a pit a few years back) and twisted it into something that would do/say anything that it'd think would make others happy. Including some behaviors I will regret the rest of my life. I wanted to regret stuff like tattoos, driving a motorcycle too fast on a curvy road or spending too much money on sushi in the Ginza, not bad interpersonal crap like this.

All that and a hectic schedule rendered my brain into mush. I was only part way understanding things. I knew how some systems worked, but then when trying to apply stuff with them, my brain just fizzled. This was not always the case, but I was not in a normal state at the time. I'm still not sure if I'm fully recovered yet. Travels on the road to recovery are slow but at least they aren't going backwards.

if you can configure your laptops with a variety of different hardware set ups, why can't you do that for the PS3?
Think of the marketing savvy you'd have if you let people pimp their PS3s their way. I know you'd have limited options in order to maintain the advantages of being a console and not a PC, but here's how I'd pimp my PS3:

-40 gig HD(I can upgrade this myself)
-Backwards Compat enabled.
-2 USB ports
-Wired internet port
-Wireless internet
-Card Reader enabled
-I'd make the case some screaming color of metallic blue.

Thanks.

Insightful article from Spiderweb Software.

Getting into Level Design

Please, get rid of the rubber banding in your AI.

It makes no sense, it makes the player feel their wins/losses are arbitrary rather than due to skill or lack there of. A good racing AI should...drive. Yes, drive. With some specific behaviors in mind like boxing players in, stay away being technically excellent(not over or under steering) and other things relevant to the game type.  I could understand rubber banding if you have a combat aspect where the AIs will want to line themselves up with the player.

For a pure racing game where getting to the finish line first is everything? Having an AI roar past me only to slow down is terribly illogical. It's even worse if you have disparaging vehicle stats involved. If I drive a Ferrari Testarossa, I do not expect the AI to suddenly over take me in a Geo Metro. If it does, I'm taking the game out, putting it in its box, getting rid of it and telling all my friends how terrible the game is.

Supposedly, this DirectX based game dev tool is easier than Game Maker. And Game Maker is incredibly easy. Limited, but fine by me.

It's available here, I'll check it out when I have some time. http://www.scirra.com/

I haven't been very active here for a few reasons. 1) Been doing overtime. Not as crazily as some others, but I'm doing 9, 9.5 hours a day instead of my fairly steadfast 8. 2) Since I'm in Japan, I want to take advantage of the amazing self-publishing resources available. They aren't necessarily as sophisticated as Lulu in ways(no ISBN # help and it's not Print on Demand) but unlike Lulu, the process is far more affordable and friendly for individuals who want to make a high quality book in the 20 page range.

Anyways, my to-do list goes as follows. Perhaps all of you out there could help prioritize the list!

1. Beyond East & West: Nintendo as a Global Standard of Quality.
   
2. Let's Dissect! What makes Monster Hunter Freedom Unite/2nd G Fun!
3. Forced Evolution: Stories of Adapting to a Western Development Method
4. A random Japanese cultural column. I thought of this since today I took part in "mame nage" or a bean throwing ritual to ward off demons. If you want this to be about work culture and job, I could do that too.
   
5. The Level Design of Every Day Places. My local subway station as a surprise source of level design enlightenment. The use of cues, placement and some incredibly useful information.
   
6. Social Experiment with Monster Hunter. This might not come for a while since it requires me to go to a public place in my free time and see if I can get along with total strangers through a few sessions of Monster Hunter Freedom Unite.
   
7. Prattle on a random video game design topic of your choosing!
8. Something not mentioned on this list.
   

Let's say you find a really simple core loop in gameplay. Let's say, that core loop of a game goes as follows:

player goes somewhere -> enemies spawn -> player lays the smack down on the enemies until all the enemies are gone -> go back to beginning of said loop.

Keep the controls simple, the enemies plentiful and the levels busy with all kinds of interactive objects going off. Get rid of some of the archaic junk like lives and save points in favor of systems friendlier to the player that lets them keep their progress. But sheesh, getting dumped on for lack of innovation when it seems like they just want to see innovation for the sake of innovation?

It's been a while since I've posted here, I actually have a lot of things I'd like to put up. I had a deeper dissection of Monster Hunter in the works, along with this post about where I'd like to go and where I see things going.

Goals and Aspirations for 2009

1. Improve my creative discipline. What do I mean by this? The ability to be creative on demand and really focus. I had so much on my mental plate when I first got to Japan that my ability to focus took a downturn. I need to get that back, especially with my co-workers making threats about "the nasty overtime is coming." Yes, I've got a lot of work to do with no consideration to schedule every time a new task is added. I will hone in on efficiency and discipline over staying 12 hours a day.
   
2. Train in a production skill. A pure game designer is necessary to spec things out, but that's hardly a task that goes through the entire production cycle. A few production oriented skills would be basic Flash/C#/Game Maker to prototype my own ideas, 3D modeling to do my own area layouts that the environment artists can build upon, 2D artwork for icons and interface building. I've been doing a bit of pixel work here and there. I need to do a lot more simplifying if I want to be able to animate stuff quickly. 
3. Get better with my tablet. I started drawing storyboards with it at work since it cuts down on the need to translate. This is important since both Japanese only and English only speakers review my work at times.
   
4. Maintain my health. Eat 3 regular meals. I've got some bacteria I use to make yogurt. Eat that every morning, get a good lunch and even if I am stuck at the office late, get dinner. I don't see how some of my co-workers can manage to stay til 10 and not bother with dinner. Then again, most of them are in their early 20s. Young and think they're invincible.
   

1. Rush to the Nintendo DS. I mean this in every way possible; low cost to develop, low cost to the consumer. A lot of Japanese developers have been heavily targeting the portable console market, and I'd expect that to happen with the rest of the world. I think the Nintendo DS is a fabulous market. There are a lot of consoles out there and in the hands of people who enjoy games of all ages. Brain Training pushed the DS into the hands of people who wouldn't normally play games, though the DS did it before the Wii.
   
2. The PSP will become somewhat of a nerd's machine in the US as far as gaming goes, as the Japanese will continue to develop for it but PSP game development lags in the US. Ready at Dawn studios(developer of God of War for PSP) returning all their PSP Dev Kits to Sony isn't too terribly encouraging. A bulk of PSP games are likely to be shovelware or localizations of Japanese games.
3. The DS becomes less of a gaming console. I think Nintendo made a big mistake by trying to keep the DS a games only console but then try and target the non-gaming community. The DS has fantastic potential to replace the Palm Pilot in ways. It's pretty tough, the touch screen almost begs for a calendar, organizer and other such "pedestrian" features making the DS the one piece of hardware any person needs in their purse or satchel. The DSi is clearly move in this direction.
   
4. Japan buys their way into the West. A number of high quality western developers are in really dire straights. Though most highly conservative JP companies wouldn't consider it, Western market minded companies like D3, Square, Konami and Capcom will be on the look out for a good buy. Free Radical seems like a strong candidate.