The cast – 7. QA

At the few companies that have enjoyed my employment QA, or Quality Assurance, has been remarkably absent as a department. That is not to say there was no bug checking at all, but that it was usually outsourced and done by the team itself.
A tradition of Japanese development seems to be to dump a devkit on the desks of those that have or are about to finish their tasks for the project and have them check for bugs; not only their own parts but the whole game. I personally have no qualms about testing my own work, but if the project lingers on you’ll find yourself playing the game for weeks, if not months, and that is a very soul crushing experience.

When QA is outsourced it seems to go to regular outsource companies, that also provide art assets or FMV, and occasionally to smaller, befriended companies that need some extra work to remain solvent. There is a danger therefore that if you apply to tiny companies your services may be hired out as a tester when times are slow.

If you’re planning a career in QA in Japan you may be barking up the wrong tree. Like back in the west general QA staff are usually graduates and work cheaply. If you’re going for a managerial QA position your Japanese will have to be very good (read and write reports, communicate with the development team or their producer, etc.) that you are probably better off using your linguist skills in a better paid position in, for example, localization. Or climb up the career ladder back home, get some development experience and try your hand in Japan in planning or producing.

As I said, few companies have in-house QA departments, so you’re limited to smaller development houses, for which you’d need another applicable skill, or outsource companies, of which I have little experience other than dealing with them indirectly. As for salaries, that’d be anybody’s guess but I’ll be very surprised if it amounts to anything much.

The quality of QA in Japan is good enough though. I wouldn’t say it’s due to professionalism but rather a sense of duty that bug reports are filled in properly, and are usually stamped (signed) by multiple people to track back the chain of command. As a result you are mercifully spared the “silly arse” bugs or the “hear ye my opinion” bugs. Again, as a developer, your dealing with the bugs will probably go through an eXcel file and will tax your Japanese abilities.

The cast – 6. The lead

Like the previously covered senior position the lead role doesn’t differ significantly from its western counterpart. Duties include scheduling, decision-making, team management, task allocation, all that funky jazz. The Japanese lead may find himself in meeting after meeting, probably moreso than the western lead, but that is more due to the Japanese developers’ love for and dependency on meetings than the actual role itself. Whereas regular team members only attend the meetings that specifically cover something relating to their discipline, the lead will have to contribute to any meeting that could possibly affect the area of his work; which usually means everything. Planning, graphics, programming all have an effect on each other so the lead will probably have to attend all of them.

On top of that he will have to deal with, and probably work on, the previously mentioned XL files that comprise the design of the game; from asset lists to scheduling, a lot of dry digital paperwork will have to be written and read. The lead will have little chance of doing actual work, an art lead will have little time for art creation, in stead organizing the art team and the assets they have created, as does the lead programmer for his team.

Leads are usually promoted from the seniors available, although they are also sometimes hired in from the outside. Again the decision is usually based on the applicant’s longevity rather than skill. It is often painful to watch a good senior be promoted to lead where his talents are underused. In my current company for example after one lead quit, the next senior in line was pushed into this position; though he is good at it, he doesn’t seem to be enjoying it so much, as he really wants to be creating rather than managing. These kinds of promotions don’t automatically come with a pay rise; after a while the wages may be adjusted, after the candidate has proven himself. Or rather, that is the usual standpoint, but it sounds more like a cheeky way of keeping expenses down in the short term.

As a result Japanese ability is an absolute must. You simply won’t get by on beginner’s level. The many meetings, as well as the many documents and the communication with the rest of the team are the main bulk of your job, and if your Japanese is rubbish, well, you are going to be rubbish at your job. But does that mean foreigners are excluded from this position? Not at all. Yours truly was promoted to lead in a previous company and I have also met a few other foreign leads. It is good to have the title but the work is very tiring as you must lead by example. If the lead pisses off without working overtime it will reflect badly on the whole team, especially if they do work late into the night. Hours are usually mandated by unwritten and unspoken pressure from management so a lead isn’t in a position to make the team go home at a humane hour.

So being a lead is good for the resume but it doesn’t put you in a position to make creative decisions much. It will help you move into a higher wage scale, but again it is pittance compared to the same position back home. And if you are to have a chance of landing this job, you had better be hitting those books and study until you are a competent Japanese speaker.

The cast – 5. the senior

Ｉ found from personal experience that the distinction between junior and senior level employees is a lot less formalised than in the west. Some companies have the distinction, others don’t. When they do they may have their own terminology, but I found “chief” to be most common. So as a senior artist you’d be a “chief designer”, a senior programmer a “chief programmer” with no special nomenclature for the juniors. Although there is a term for recently hired graduates, fresh from college: “shinnyuushain”, literally “new employee”, which these grads are referred to until they pass their first probationary contract.

But what does it mean to be a senior? Well, pretty much the same as it does back home. You’ll be in a (slightly) higher wage bracket, it means you can be left alone and trusted to get things done without constant supervision, it also means there is a higher chance you’ll be working on the juicier parts of the project, with the more boring tasks delegated to the juniors. You might also be involved in deciding the technical specs for your team’s work as you plan, together with the leads, the best approaches within the technical constraints, or how to best turn the creative director’s guidelines into practical use.

If you have a few years’ experience and a few titles under your belt before you move to Japan, with the higher wage demands you’ll have it will not be unlikely you’ll be hired as a “chief” class employee, mostly so the employer can justify your higher earnings; higher than those of your Japanese colleagues, but still massively lower than your wages back home. If your company has a formalised bonus calculation scheme you may find your percentages go up a little higher too, but again nothing to make you rich.

With the higher wages and increased responsibilities you may also be expected to put in the extra hours when things go awry or take over the burden of some juniors should their work fall behind.
As mentioned previously though, you’ll be earlier in the queue when it comes to deciding who does what and the chances of working on the more interesting parts of the game could fall in your lap, with the juniors having to create the more boring and tedious assets or fixing little problems.
You will also be expected to throw the weight of your knowledge and experience into the ring. Currently I am lucky to work with two other senior artists who both know their shit very well and between us we have set out the technical details and art guidelines the rest of the team are following, with me adding some technical tips and trickery into the mix, complemented beautifully by their input and approaches. Though our remit stops short of laying down the laws for the art team, we form the bridge between the leads and the juniors; the leads demand and approve, the seniors formalise and make it workable, the rest of the team follows.

If you’re hired as a junior artist (or a “regular” artist) it is not impossible to be made a senior during your employment. Don’t expect a massive pay rise to come with that though, as those are still fairly rare in the Japanese industry. It is often best to apply as a senior and get the higher wage that way than to be promoted within a company.

Also there is the possibility of being hired as a senior as a mere formality to justify your wage, but your work will be fairly average and junior-level. If you prove your worth though, that can easily change. Because the titles of junior and senior aren’t as formalised as they are back home you could easily become a senior with the Japanese speaking ability of a junior. To do your work as a senior properly however some more advances skills are necessary as you’ll be ploughing your way through documents and specs and you’ll need to communicate with and help the juniors on the team.

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.

The cast - 3. The game designer

In the beginning there was Word, and Word and Excel. As a game designer in Japan your job title would be “planner" and your toolbox would be Microsoft Office, more likely than not the Japanese version. Powerpoint and/or Word for initial design and pitch-documents and after that Excel for everything else. Bear in mind that I’m generalising here.

Don't expect to be the God of the game design, though. You will answer directly to the producer and, if he feels like a managerial decision is called for, the boss. In fact, you may have certain things dictated to you, and you'll just write them down in Excel sheets. If you're working on, say, a racing game or RPG be prepared to write page after page of specs, test them out, rewrite them, etc.

Other tasks often include asset control; creating naming conventions and asset lists, running between programmers and artists constantly adapting the list and annoying everyone by making them redo and re-export stuff as slight changes are called for. Even, if the task hasn't been assigned to the leads, as it should be, you may find yourself writing schedules.
Of course you will also be working on level designs, but as mentioned above you will play second fiddle to the producer but it will be you who does most of the hard work.

Because of the software and the lists you need to create for the rest of the team your Japanese should be pretty advanced, with very competent reading and writing abilities. You'll also need to discuss and check with other team members as they do their work and follow your designs, so good speaking skills are also a must. You will also be in meeting after meeting getting game designs dictated to you by your superiors, followed by meetings where you dictate those designs to the rest of the team.

There doesn't seem to be the same kind of career structure for planners as in the west; as there are no real QA departments to promote aspiring designers from. I'm not sure where these planners come from or what background they usually have, but it isn't in code or art. As such the naming conventions and asset lists are usually very rough and full of mistakes and oversights and require constant reworking. If you want to actually be the auteur you’ll have to work your way up to producer. But being a planner isn't necessarily the career path to producerdom. These seem to spring up from all disciplines, from art to code, and are often chosen for longevity and not necessarily skill.

What with the high levels of Japanese required, as well as the many obscure differences in tastes becoming a planner in Japan may be one of the more difficult careers for the aspiring foreigner. Indeed, I have not met any yet. I wouldn't say it's impossible but be prepared for a lot of hard, underpaid work and many dead-ends.

The cast – 2. The artist

The very first thing you need to know is that artists are called differently in Japan. They’re either “designers”, “cg designers” or occasionally “graphicers”; it differs from company to company. Video game designers should browse the recruit pages for “planners” but more on their discipline in a later post.

Of all the different jobs in video games art is probably the easiest for a foreigner to get into. It being largely visual a lot can be communicated with sketches and simply pointing at the screen combined with some elementary body language. That said, a complete non-speaker won’t do at all. You still need to communicate with your leads, read design documents and attend meetings. It is just that you can get a lot further with crappy baby Japanese, as I have.

Your day to day tasks won’t differ tremendously from what you did back in the west, with maybe a little more emphasis on the detail often at the cost of larger looming issues. You may find yourself redoing assets a little more as someone higher up changes their mind about something seemingly trivial.

You will probably also need to have a personal relationship with the programmer who is coding that part of the game you’re creating assets for as they tend to hard-code things over here. Slight changes may have to go through a bit of a process before they can be implemented or checked. This is a little tedious and very wasteful but it’s just one of those things.

You’ll be using the same software as you always have. Maya is the norm at most companies, with a few using 3DSMax or even XSI. Maya’s menu is all English and 3DSMax comes with the English version so you can choose which to install. XSI I’m not quite sure of, but that may be in English too.
Adobe’s programs are all localized though and with ever so slightly rejigged menus this can be a bit of a pain. You’ll get used to it quickly enough though, but knowing the kanji for “saturation” and “blur” may be useful if memorizing their positions in the pull-down menus is impossible.
I had never used Optpix before I came to Japan, and really I’m not using it now, but occasionally you may have to learn some new software which will be in Japanese only. If you’re lucky some friendly colleague can walk you through the basic steps, but you might have to hunker down and plough through the manual at some point.
Tools will be in Japanese only. Exporters and converters, all that, are made in-house usually, but will often come with some explanatory emails or text files so figuring these out won’t be that much of a problem, though it may take some time.

Scheduling seems to be an arcane magic used irresponsibly over here. Often the lead or producer will dictate some date based on release and submission and not on what the team is capable of. At the same time, of course, they expect high standards. You may find yourself grinding into a crunch a little earlier than you did back home. It is avoidable if you use, what I call, “pre-emptive designing”. With a little experience you’ll learn which things will change, usually, so building assets with those inevitable changes in mind will save a lot of time. Or when you know the design will change at some point, don’t waste your time creating something perfect. Create something “good enough” and reserve some time for later to make it “perfect”; chances are that time won’t come as it’ll be trashed or completely overhauled before then.

As for quality, no the Japanese are not naturally better at creating art. You’ll probably work with some inspiringly great artists but you’ll also find yourself covering for some terrible no-hopers. Incompetence is a global problem. So be confident! If you feel you’re a good enough artist don’t put yourself down; you’ll probably be good enough for Japan too.

(I notice I sometimes repeat myself in these posts, but for completion’s sake I think I should mention salient points again where necessary)

The cast – 1. The studio boss

In a new series of posts I hope to highlight a few of the differences between developer roles in the West and Japan. Now obviously I can’t tell you how to be a boss, though having more money than sense seems to be a minimum requirement, I can hopefully shed some light on the role your boss will play in your everyday working life.

There are, of course, as many different types of boss as there are bosses and each studio head will have a different approach and relationship with his staff.

One noticeable thing is that there is a gap between the staff and the boss, which can sometimes be less noticeable at smaller UK development houses. He is always referred to as “(name)-sacho”, never “(name)-san”. Even when out drinking the boss can act like one of the lads, get drunk and embarrass himself at karaoke, but there will always be a palpable sense that he is your superior, no matter how pally he gets.

When it comes to the projects I found the bosses back home were a little more distant. Aside from publisher and producer interference, it was left up to the leads and designers, with the occasional nudge to keep the project in line with company direction. In Japan the boss will often decree changes over the heads of the team leads, art director and designers. To ask for “more cowbell” is one thing but to demand drastic changes on a whim can seriously affect the schedule and game design. Often these decisions seem arbitrary or obtuse, but it’s something you’ll have to get used to.

Though I don’t have any hard figures to back this up with it is said bosses in Japan make a lot less money than their Western counterparts. They do, however, have access to the company funds, so they’ll still turn up in expensive cars and clothes. How this all works is a bit of a mystery to me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some suspect tax maneuvering is going on.

If you’re lucky you’ll get one of those bosses who worked his way up; who created some classic titles and runs his studio like an auteur. That can be a very inspiring work situation. If you’re unlucky you’ll get a boss who is backed by old money and runs the company like his personal vanity project with seemingly little regard for long-term business plans.
Also, the previous role of the boss can have a serious impact on how the company is run. If the boss worked his way up from being an artist you’ll find the artists in his company rule the roost. If he was a programmer, than his programmers are his darlings.

All in all, what kind of boss you’ll end up with is always a bit of a gamble. Just be prepared to deal with his influence on the project in manners you aren’t used to in the West, for better or for worse.