TGIF

10 April (Friday)
Hallelujah! We made it through the first week of training with no major problem. On this last day of the week, we looked at online games in Japan, the biggest growth market in the Japanese gaming scene. Japan is slow to catch on to online gaming, compared to countries like South Korea. Indeed, the Japanese online industry was practically jumpstarted by the introduction of the Korean MMO Ragnarok in 2001.

We learnt from Murase-san that there are a lot of new online games in production in Japan, but most of them don't last very long. 4gamer.net is the site to check for the online gaming news in Japan.

In 2006, the market size of online games in Japan is estimated to be 101.5 billion yen (about USD1 billion). In comparison, non-online games weigh in at around 7 times this amount. With a growth rate of 24%, it's not difficult to understand why everybody wants a piece of the online pie. Many wannabes starting out loud and bold, but alas most just die quietly without fanfare after their release. The situation is similar to what I observed while working in Korea a while back.

Overall, Japan is still relatively new to the online arena. Japanese game companies still lack much know-how in both online game development as well as running online game operations, but it is certainly an area that every major Japanese developer is seriously looking into.

Our Game Visuals lesson for the day was "Mastering for PS3 Development", essentially how to export data from Maya onto the PS3 using PA's tools. 3D art assets can be previewed on the PS3 from Maya using a plug-in called the DevTool Launcher. The Chidori engine uses PA Materials (Lambert, Blinn, Velvet, Hair and Toon) instead of Maya materials. A plug-in is also available to convert Maya materials into PA Material equivalents.

We also learnt how to export animation by baking keyframes, and to export textures using the DDS format. Here, Kawashima-san ran into some trouble trying to get transparency to work on the PS3 DevTool Launcher. Hopefully he will resolve the problem by next Monday. Meanwhile, we were tasked to create a small tech demo using the available features of the Chidori engine in the Maya-to-PS3 previewer.

The follow are screenshots of what I've exported to the PS3 Debug Station so far:

The bouncing ball keyframe animation exercise from
Day 1, featuring a light ball, a heavy ball and a "lively" ball.


Day 2 was about character animation. Above is a baked
walk cycle animation using my copyrighted 3D model.
Sorry about the nudity ;)


Trying out the environment fog in the Chidori engine.
Lighting was taught on Day 4, but I already figured
out how to do it on Day 1.

For lunch, we had tendon (天丼) for only 430 yen at a soba place near the PA office. There was a one-week promotion on, and we saved 230 yen off the usual price. Right on!