Monday morning, we stole into the PA office using sneak-in skills that even Solid Snake would have been proud of - by following behind the early employees who had card passes. When Kawashima-san arrived on the scene, he brought us to their company meeting taking place on the 3rd floor.
The meeting has already started as a lineup of new employees were halfway through their self-introductions to the rest of the over 100 employees. After that, some employees who went to the GDC (Game Developers Conference) 2009 made some quick reports and announced their scheduled knowledge sharing sessions (SOLID anyone?) Subsequently, our presence was announced to the staff and we greeted them with our rudimentary Japanese.
The sacho (社長/boss) then gave an update on the company, a report on the state of the game industry in general, and some lengthly speech about the Toyota company as an example of teamwork to look up to. He urged the staff to learn more than their own field of specialty and probably some other motivational stuff while the staff stood and listened patiently. My hats off to the sacho, he can really talk at length even without a script.
As planned, we started our lessons today. In the morning "Game Industry" session, all three of us were introduced to "The Japanese Video Game Industry and its History 1". Kawashima-san delivered the lesson in place of Murase-san, since the latter was busy with some work. He spoke in Japanese and Stephen provided the English translation. It was interesting to learn about the history of video game industry from the Japanese perspective.
After lunch, we split into two groups, with Andrew doing his "Game Programming" while Ron and I did "Game Visual". Game Programming was taught by Nozaki-san with Stephen as interpreter. Game Visual lessons were in English by Kawashima-san.
All afternoon lessons are split into two sessions. For today, the first was an introduction to game visuals, covering basic video and animation knowledge, 3D animation production and pipeline, as well as a look at the Maya interface (which we were already familiar with). In the second session, we received an introduction to keyframe animation. Essentially it was an animation primer using the bouncing ball as example. Ron and I has to animate some bouncing balls as our homework.
We have also received our keycard, which means we can enter/exit the office without have to sneak around anymore. Incidentally, the building security locks down the front doors at 7pm, and we could only exit via the basement car park.
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