Miracle

28 Apr (Tues) Day 17
A.M. Game Producing - Human Resources (Trainer: 社長 XD)
HR is all about how to the right people into the right position, and to avoid and solve problems through communication. Out of the producer's 3 main concerns (Quality, Cost, Time), skilled human resource can improve quality and reduce the time taken.

There seems to be a trend amongst game companies to maintain only a small core team and outsource most of the work, but Yamaji-shacho prefers the other way round. He tries to stagger project timelines so that the peak period with highest HR needs for one project coincides with the lull period of other projects. As such, the in-house staff can be maintained at a particular size and the amount of outsourcing kept to a minimum.

On the topic of avoiding HR problems, the shacho feels that introducing pretty female staff to a male dominated team will reduce interpersonal conflicts as well as improve productivity. Hence, he is always trying to increase the number of female employees. No wonder he has such a successful company XD

We also covered roughly a bit of legal and contract issues, most notably royalty contracts and how royalty is typically calculated.

Turtle Burger
For lunch, Robert brought us to a local hamburger joint. It was certainly a change of taste for us. They served decent burgers and tasty fries (which were more like potato wedges).

P.M. Mini-Project
Miraculously, many of our problems managed to be solved, and without help from our trainers either. Kawashima-san was away today since he had to conduct classes at the University. Matsuura-san was covering his duties, but he is clearly not a technical person.

My animations are now running properly in Andrew's code, which is shaping up nicely as more features got hacked in. We have also decided to spoof Ultraman in the character design, and the game design moved toward a more funny direction. Somehow, we're back on track to making a game demo XD