四月二十一日（火曜日）
A.M. Game Producing - Project Management (Trainer: Murase-san)
At the heart of all project management is managing Quality, Cost and Delivery (schedule). We learnt about forming a team, identifying tasks, and did a simple budgeting case study.
P.M. Game Visuals - BG Modeling and Animation 3 (Trainer: Matsuura-san)
No lecture, just continuing our homework assignment of modeling the Shin-Minamiguchi of the Shibuya station. Matsuura-san asked me to add animation to the escalators. I wish I had built it with fewer steps, but it didn't really pose much of a challenge as I was able to do it by the end of the day.
Thanks to Ron's insistent questioning, we managed to get our hands on some Maya samples of trees used by PA in Shikitei (see earlier post). Of particular interest was how they made the trees grow using animation, as well as how they texture map the trunk and branches.
Ron finished off most of his part, and we began merging it on my PC. I did some color correction and cleaning up for the merge, but my own portion of work was still not finished. No sleep again for yet another night.
As my modeling work was almost completed, I began to help Ron texture map some portions of the scene. I would map out the hotel building, the ground and the main road. Ron must have been overworked, since he called me in the evening and asked me to help him texure the advertisement signs on the station building also. Not a problem since I wasn't sleeping anyway.
四月二十二日（水曜日）
A.M. Game Producing - Project Management (cont'd) & Basic Knowledge for Game Programming, Murase-san (Trainer: Matsuura-san)
One thing is for sure, whoever created the Project Management slides made it repetitive and boring. He was talking about essentially the same thing over and over again. But thanks to Andrew's question regarding Agile, I learnt something new. PA uses the Waterfall method but has began trying out a more Agile approach to project management.
P.M. Game Visuals - BG Modeling and Animation 4, Matsuura-san (Trainer: Matsuura-san)
Again, no lecture, just homework time. Matsuura-san gave comments about our work and answered our questions regarding this topic. He commented that for the amount of time and the manpower we were given for this task (2 person for less than 2 weeks) we did superbly. Despite his praise, I'm not completely happy since there is still a lot of polishing and clean up to be done. But given the time frame, it really wasn't practicle, and I missed my sleep.
Andrew was clamoring for me to export the data to PMD format while I was still working halfway, which somehow resulted in my export plugins malfunctioning and corrupting my data. On the positive side, he managed to display the scene on his Debuggin Station, and learnt how to convert the DDS textures to GTF format used by the Chidori engine. His new programming sensei, Masanori Ishimatsu, was also impressed by our 3D model.
Even Matsuura-san asked if he could show our work to the PA staff. I guess we should feel good about this small achievement. Still, we didn't add a skybox, and didn't do any kind of texture budgeting. It runs on the PS3 and it looks nice enough, but I wouldn't call it "game-ready".
Dinner with Simon
In the evening we had dinner with an old friend and colleague. Simon is on leave and in Japan. We met at the famous Hachiko statue outside Shibuya station. He was late, and the place he took us to for dinner was overly expensive by our usual subsistence standard, but we enjoyed the company of a familiar face and stories from back home.
P.S. "Doctor" Jean, if you're still reading this, you should be studying for your exam instead :P Don't forget to get enough rest, and best of luck!
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