It's Tuesday, but instead of meeting with Morrie, our appointment was with PA. Day 2 of our training started without any fanfare. Murase-san was back and he continued from where Kawashima-san left off yesterday with "The Japanese Video Game Industry and its History 2". But before that, he showed us videos of Pong, Pacman and Sonic the Hedgehog, ripped from the Discovery Channel documentary Rise of the Video Games. We did learn that Pacman's design was based on a pizza with a wedge sliced off, since the game was about eating and they wanted a cute character in order to attract couples and female players.
Moving on, we learnt about the advent of 3D graphics in video games with the release of the PlayStation and Saturn, forcing developers to adapt to the changing trend. The CD format adopted by Sony also ended Nintendo's 10 year dominance of the game market because the latter adhered to their catridge based distribution channel which was costlier and riskier. We took a brief look at the hand-held market and the battle of the "Next-gen" consoles - the Sony PS2, Sega Dreamcast, Nintendo GameCube and Microsoft Xbox around early 2000. Sega dropped out of the console war, leaving the three remaining players to battle on even until this day.
With that, we breaked for lunch. Today's lunch was noteable because of the McPork. We had learnt about it during Japanese class back home, and had looked forward to trying it out only to discover that it wasn't available on the menu at the local McDonald's. However, it made a surprising return last night, and it only costs 100 yen (SGD 1.5) a burger! That's even cheaper than most bread you can buy from Lawson's (a local convenience store). Considering the average meal is at least 500 yen, this is certainly an appealing food option, nevermind that it's distintively non-Halal.
In the afternoon Game Visual session, Kawashima-san decided to change his lesson plan and skip ahead to Character Animation, which was originally slated for two lessons later. We went through the process of setting up a simple character in Maya in the first session, and making the character walk in the afternoon. Kawashima-san delivered the lesson and demonstrated the process. He tried to export the output to PS3 from Maya, but the result was garbled.
Other than simply taking lessons and doing our assignments, we have also been exploring the tools they provided. So far, Ron and I have successfully exported Maya animation to the PS3 Devkit using the plug-ins and tools provided by PA. It was clear to us by now that the in-house tools used in game production are generally not as stable or bug-free as commercially available software.
Pacman may have been inspired by a pizza, but creating game graphics for PS3 is no piece of cake. McPork anyone?
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