May Day

1 May (Friday) May Day/Labour Day/International Workers' Day
A.M. Game Design - Game Design Documents (Trainer: Murase-san)
Today was NOT a holiday in Japan, so we had lessons as usual.

Japanese game design documents are not the same as the GDD of western developers. A closer translation of their 企画書 (kikakusho) is probably "project plan document". In Japan, the whole purpose of the GDD is to explain the game idea to clients in order to get funding for game development.

A ideal GDD should be interesting, emotionally moving and easy to understand. To come up with interesting ideas, brainstorming sessions are held and a multitude of new ideas are first collected and then filtered by the producer and planners. For clarity of idea, one way would be to narrow the game description to one key concept, akin to the "high concept" used in Hollywood for movies.

One important point about writing a GDD is to establish a strategy for presenting to potential clients. Two possible approaches include the Game Designer's approach ("What's interesting about the game") and the Game Producer's approach ("Why the game will make money").

P.M. Game Visual 2 - Advanced Game Visual Rendering 1 (Trainer: Kawashima-san)
In the second part of our Game Visual course, we moved on to advanced game visual rendering. In truth, we have already touched upon some of these during the first part and while we were developing our mini-game.

Most of the advanced rendering techniques are closely tied to the Chidori engine. One example is the Control Map which uses the R, G and B channels of a texture image to contain the diffuse, ambient and specular maps respectively.

Famous Animation Director Itano-san was due to give another workshop in the afternoon, but Ron didn't feel it would be useful since he could not understand any Japanese, so we passed and did our own self-study.

Shibuya Bakudan
More screenshots of our mini-game can be found here :P