Another Manic Monday

18 May (Monday)
A.M. Game Design - Ideas (Trainer: Hattori-san)
To help us create design documents, Hattori-san gave another lesson on putting ideas onto paper, instead of the lesson on Racing games as originally planned. The 3 main points to consider when coming up with a game idea are:

• Game Characteristics (what makes the game fun, game rules and game controls)
• Game World (character background and motivations)
• Sales Point (is the game novel, unique and friendly for its intended target audience)

The key points for creating a design document are:

• Theme (what kind of game it is)
• Concept (the kind of game experience that supports the theme)
• Features (game system and rules that realizes the concepts)
• Sales Point (how the game will succeed from a business point of view)

We also briefly went through the planning process, the selection of wordings as well as the two approaches to take (the Designer or Producer approach, which we had covered before in a previous class). Large scale games tend to use the Producer approach, while handheld and casual games tend to follow the Designer approach.

P.M. Motion Capture 3 & 4 (Trainer: Kawashima-san)
Today we learnt about more advanced aspects of motion editin. We started with re-targeting the actor and control rig to better match the CG character's proportion to the mocap action, then moved on to motion editing (setting keyframes on additional motion layers, switching between IK and FK, editing motion curves, and using constraints to edit the motion). Finally, we looked at creating looped motion (making a motion into a cycle animation) motion blending (merging two mocap motion into one complex animation), and time warping (manipulating the timing of the motion playback). All pretty technical stuff, and definitely a lot of things to try out in our own free time.

Change We Can
Our PA trainers, responding to our feedback in the survery as well as to the shacho, decided to adjust both the timing and nature of our scheduled on-the-job training. We were to start our OJT earlier than expected (tomorrow in fact!), and instead of creating another original mini-game, we shall be participating in actual production work on ongoing game projects at PA. Ron and I have been assigned to help out in the graphics of an Activision PS3 game. Andrew has been assigned to work on a soon-to-be-announced PSP title by a Japanese toy company.

Our training has certainly gotten more interesting to say the least :)