A.M. Game Producing - Basics of Promoting and Advertising (Trainer: Yamaji Katsunori, the shacho of PA)
Monday starts as usual with the weekly PA company meeting, where we listened to the shacho talk for 30 minutes, followed by our advertising lesson where we listened to the shacho for another one and a half hours.
We learnt that 3rd party PR is more effective than advertising, since proper use of the press can cost nothing and still appear more credible to consumers than a fully paid ad. Also, the internet may be the fastet growing form of media for advertising, but in the US and Japan, the number one mass media is still TV. The US has 3 major TV networks (ABC, NBC and CBS) with a viewership of around 200 million, while Japan has 5 (Nihon TV, TBS, Fuji, Asahi, TV-Tokyo) and about half the number of viewers.
The marketing/PR team kicks into gear only later in the development cycle (approximately around the Alpha stage for a major game title, and Beta for a minor title), so there need to be strong information sharing between the development team and the marketing team in order for detailed and unique features of the game to be effectively promoted to potential consumers. The marketing team would most certainly be p*ssed if the release deadline is slipped.
P.M. Mini-Project
For the project, we each encountered our own technical difficulties. My running animation which looks fine in Maya ended up getting corrupted on the DevTool Launcher. After a fair bit of fiddling, Kawashima-san managed to get it to play properly the PS3. Then it turns out that while it works on the object previewer, a similar data corruption occurs when playing the animation in Andrew's code.
An example of Murphy's Law
Everything has been done according to specification. Kawashima-san called in the local graphics lead, but he could not find any immediate problem with the Maya scene either. Hopefully we can find a solution tomorrow or all my weekend work might be wasted. There's still other animation to be done, in addition to other graphics tasks like creating the UI, and only two days left on the deadline. やばい...
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