The cast - 4. The programmer

Another popular career for foreigners in the industry in Japan seems to be programming. As an artist who is mostly busy with his own tasks I must confess I am not quite in the know; not enough to write an authoritative post on the subject anyway. I sincerely hope anybody with a deeper knowledge of the subject will leave a comment to point out the inevitable glaring mistakes and omissions. My apologies in advance.

Firstly the software seems to be the same as in the west, but localised in Japanese. As a tools programmer you'll most likely be working in or from Maya, with a few exceptions here and there when 3DSMax is used. Proprietary in-house tools seem a bit rarer than back home, but they do exist.

Things tend to be hard-coded, making changes very laborious. Be prepared to work closely with the artists and planners assigned to your little corner of the game.

As programming requires more esoteric and abstract ideas, which are often communicated in meetings, your Japanese needs to be up to scratch. I'd hazard a guess that your reading and writing skills can be lower, as you'll have time to pore over documents with your dictionary, but spoken Japanese and knowledge of the terms would seem a minimum requirement.

As for pay, I don’t think you can expect the royal treatment you do in the west. From what I gather artists and programmers are fairly equal on the pay scale; with both earning much less than back home. Be prepared for a pay cut if you move to Japan!

The quality bar is maybe not as high as for artists though. As with every discipline there are good and terrible programmers, which should come as no surprise. If you’re the kind of anally retentive, obsessive compulsive programmer, who likes to work with documentation, specs and schedules, in other words, my kind of programmer, you may be making a mistake working in Japan. From what little experience I have things seem to flow a little more impulsively here, often with little or no source control and documentation. Whereas previous games I’ve worked on reached an acceptable stage fairly early on, with the rest of the time spent on adding features or optimization and balancing, I found the games I’ve worked on over here only really came together in, what you might say, the nick of time. This may explain why playable demos are fewer in Japan; there is hardly a game there until just before it’s time to ship it. Balancing usually happens during development with the director requesting changes to features as they go in.

So, in summery, you probably have a good chance of landing a programming job if you’re willing to take a pay cut and have some previous experience; but you will need a higher level of Japanese than us artists. Of course, if we’re going to get prissy, if you’re moving to Japan you really should make the effort to master the language, let’s be honest. But if you want to make the move soon, before you’ve reached native level (say, within the next few decades) as a programmer you’ll have a harder time. It is obviously not impossible, and I know of a few gaijin programmers, but, you know, us artists don’t like to mix with that lot.