Posts

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.
   

A few things concerning my "Japanese Mythbusters" type column. I'm at the point where my personal well is dry and I need some user input to find more stuff to bust or ultimately prove true. When it comes to gaming, there are always exceptional exceptions like 78 year old Akira Kitajima who keeps his FPS gaming PC up to spec regularly plus writes Japanese language FAQs/Walkthroughs on his personal website. Hell, he's so die hard he uses an American Keyboard. Browsing his site, he seems like anything but a Japanese gamer geek, having traveled the world, played sports, etc. The stereotype being a Hikkikomori.

>Japan's entire attitude about gaming seems to be going in a look-don't-touch direction, what with Japan's own games >advancing mainly in aesthetics and storytelling and not really in gameplay.
For RPGs, sure. But for other genres? I'd hardly call anything of action and the subcategory thereof "look don't touch."  Though don't touch is a very important principle in Danmaku Hell shooters. Touch a bullet, you're dead! But I know that's not what you're talking about.

>How popular are America's NBA, MLB, NFL, and NASCAR on Japanese TV?
Baseball is pretty popular since some major Japanese aces have been imported by American teams. Matsui, Ichiro,  Daisuke, wow, I don't even like baseball but I know a few names. The rest might show up on some premium sports channel, but they're pretty much ignored in favor of home grown versions. Soccer is a close second behind baseball, and soccer hasn't caught on for squat in the USA. Really, America is a great big soccer island. I'm sure any European readers want to strangle me since I'm not calling it "football." And behind the real football according to the rest of the world is high school baseball. Yes, high school baseball gets on national TV. Arguably, sports is the ultimate war metaphor, so of course there's all kinds of unwarranted pride coursing through peoples and "their" teams.

>Could you write a post about the state of American software translation in Japan?
It's certainly on an upswing with Fallout 3, GTA4, just about every major release on 360 is getting localized to Japan. I wouldn't be surprised if the localization is done entirely in the USA. I mean translation, editing, any necessary programming or in-game artwork is all done here in the US for European releases(at least it was when I was at Lucas Arts.) Likewise, Japanese development teams are responsible for integrating English and other languages when their games get released elsewhere. For more on that specific nightmare, check JC's blog, he's had to wrestle with that far more than I have.

>I read interviews with the producers of Silent Hill and Lost Odyssey who said that one of their problems is that they >want to use cutting edge American tech like Unreal Engine 3, but that it has a ton of documentation that gets late >and poor translation into Japanese, if at all.
This is a huge problem. The overall statement of engine documentation has a lot of choice 4 letter words you can assign to it, but I'll just leave it as "poor." Unreal Engine has 1 master, namely it's creator; Epic Games.

Also, the amount of work required when you start taking an engine and deviating it from the type of game it originally was used to make, goes up exponentially as you deviate. Epic can't even adequately support star Western developers such as Bioware, so I can't even think of how poor they are to Japanese companies. Unreal killed my enjoyment of Mass Effect. Random framerate drops, random pauses to load, the scene going from a bland version of Killer 7 to realistic over the course of 3 seconds, etc. And this is Bioware. They have experience making engines like the Aurora Engine they used for the original Never Winter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic games. Bioware is a company with top tier talents working for them and they still struggle. That's telling.

Unreal relies on cutting edge hardware, which game consoles may not always keep up. I am not sure if normal mapping and all that dynamic lighting that Unreal has in their tech demo is hardware accelerated by consoles. It sure is on the PC they use to show off the tech to executive bean counters that just like the sounds of those buzzwords.

For those uncertain as to what normal mapping is, it's an "invisible" texture layer that just contains data on what the mathematical normal or "up vector" is for any given point on a model. It lets you add amazing amounts of detail to a model without actually having to sit there and actually push the polys. However, the normal map data is used by the shader so until the lighting kicks in, you won't see the detail. And yay, I just used that linear algebra I busted my brain on at the University. Woo hoo! To see how to make a really good normal map and what it can do, check this tutorial out at CGTextures. Scroll about 2/3s of the way down to see a rock texture rendered with a normal map. No modeling required. Pretty amazing tech no doubt, but it comes at a steep hardware cost.

Now, if Epic provides a complete manual, that places them miles ahead of just about every other game engine out there. A previous employer of mine used Torque Game Engine. The original version of that engine would just...die if you tried to make something other than a corridor shooter. Support consists of trolling Garage Games' forum and praying someone tried to do what you did. A lot of people are trying due to the low price and cross platform abilities that TGE boasts. Their scripting language is basically C# with some variables already set which is another very good thing going for it. C# is so easy, I've been able to use it.

Other middleware could be different. Havok's cloth physics is getting around for making character costumes behave in a life-like manner. Soul Calibur IV and Folklore use it, I'm sure there are plenty of others. Seeing how specialized this middleware is, they can really fine tune their interfaces and make their product easy to implement and properly support it.

To me, Unreal Engine on a console has become a scarlet letter/seal of disapproval and it decreases my interest in the product. I might go back and play all these Unreal engine games when I upgrade my PC when(maybe if) I move back to the USA, but by then I'm sure I'll have forgotten about them or decide not to ultimately buy them due to other PC gaming issues like DRM.

If there's one thing SquareEnix has demonstrated repeatedly in the past, it's that they know how to make something look good without bleeding edge tech.