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PG Break Episode 06

April 27th, 2012 by

VANQUISH

Filed: Anarchy Reigns, Community, Games, PGTV, PlatinumGames, Vanquish

PG Break returns from a week off with Anarchy Reigns character announcements, Vanquish figures, and general stupidity. Also, Hideki Kamiya’s head.

Show Notes:

- Around the World -
The Crimson Dragon sisters join the cast of Anarchy Reigns! Check out their character clips here!
The Vanquish Play Arts Kai figures are out! Pick up Sam or Bogey (Zaitsev).
The amazing Anarchy Reigns team battle video (in Japanese)!

From JP’s Twitter:

A follow-up to the team battle vid – The goal is to kill the other team commander. Classes are assigned based on your individual kills. Classes are re-assigned during the course of the match to top players on team. You can be Squad Leader, Spec Ops, or Medic. Each has buffs.

Feel free to hit up “Kaiser” Taura (@pg_taura) for tips and tricks. Or just to call him pretty.

-Community Spotlight-

Win a Vanquish figure! Make JP laugh the hardest and get your choice of Sam or Bogey. Just post using the #PGLIVE hashtag to win. The rules are simple – Make it something you can tweet, make it safe for work, and preferably make it PlatinumGames related. The best tweet that takes JP’s mind of impending E3 crunch will get a toy for their trouble! If you have any questions, ask them on the forums at http://community.platinumgames.com/

Young Nicholas was wrong. Kenji Saito’s favorite Metal Gear is MGS1 because of the awesome characters.

The great Japanese Max Anarchy site is coming in English.

- Interact and Follow -

Join the PlatinumGames Community
Like us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter for all the latest updates!






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The Technology of Bayonetta – Effects

November 4th, 2009 by

Bayonetta

Filed: Bayonetta, Community, Games, PGTV

Hi everyone. Kenji Saito here once again.

For this entry, I wanted to talk a little bit about the effects engine in Bayonetta.

Our effects designer, Kudo-san, wrote about effects in his previous blog post, but what you probably didn’t know was that the tools he used to create these effects were actually developed in-house. Moreover, these effects can be created from within the engine while manipulating the game in real-time.

It’s a little hard to explain with words, so please take a look at a real-world example of what I mean.

This video shows creating special effects as we control the character.

So why did we create an environment for real-time effects creation? At PlatinumGames, we use a “crash and build” development style, so things are often changing in the design. To match up with that style, as well as to match with the effect designer’s request that we have an environment where they can quickly check the effects they create, we set-up the in-game effects creation engine. This allowed us to give the effects designers the ability to go about their work in a final game scene-like environment, which in turn allowed them to create high-quality effects in a very productive manner.

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On Bug Checking

October 28th, 2009 by

Bayonetta

Filed: Bayonetta, Community, Games, PlatinumGames

Hi everyone. Programmer Kenji Saito here again.

For my second post, I thought I would give some insight into bug checking.

The minute a programmer hears the words bug checking, or debugging, they will launch into a thousand-yard stare. For programmers, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that this is where their work truly begins.

Just for those who don’t understand what bug checking is, let me explain:

Bug checking is the process of fixing the errors caused by miscalculation or faulty design (bugs). Also, depending on the game, bug checking may also include making sure that the game is performing up to specification.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Bayonetta was an incredibly large program to create, which means that it required an incredibly long time and an incredible amount of effort to debug. Once Bayonetta had all of its features in-place and was finished as a game, it took two months to check for bugs. To give you an idea of the people involved, checking included all the members of the development team plus numerous Q&A testers outside of the company, all working approximately 10 hours a day. And the number of bugs… Well, let’s just say there were many.

Then there is another type of bug to rack your brain upon. Kamiya-san likes to change the game design by calling these issues bugs. This type of bug easily falls into the top three things a programmer never wants to hear. By adding things at the very end, it may make the game more fun, but it may also be adding on the number of bugs as well. Decisions have to be made as to whether it can be done, and those tough calls continued on for days and days. Bug checking is soul-crushing work. Really. It is.

But if you don’t work hard at bug checking, you will see issues result in the level of quality of the game, so we regard it as highly important. Bayonetta’s development team worked very hard to pay close attention to the details, whether it was bug checking or otherwise, in order to raise the quality of our game and make something truly special.

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What in the World Does a Programmer Do?

October 16th, 2009 by

Bayonetta

Filed: Bayonetta, Community, Games, PlatinumGames

Hi everyone. I’m Kenji Saito, the lead programmer on Bayonetta.

I’d really like for all of you to take this opportunity to understand what a Programmer really does, so I thought I would do so by giving you an insight into my work.

Basically, a programmer takes the ideas from the game director and game designers and combines them with the materials (CG, sound effects, etc.) from the artists, sound designers and company, and then “puts together a game.” Programmers are also charged with creating the development environment for the artists and designers. While this isn’t a job that is immediately apparent, I suppose it correct to say programmers are the unsung heroes.

So what does a programmer actually do? To put it in simple terms, he takes the director’s ideas and translates them into a programming language that a computer can understand. How good or bad a translation it becomes is directly related to the programmer’s skill.

However, with a game on the scale of Bayonetta, the amount of translation to be done is incredible. How about we take a look at one of the source code files for Bayonetta?

This is one of the player character source code files, and it weighs in at around 13,000 lines. The whole of Bayonetta is somewhere around 1.8 million lines of code. (That would be about 170,000 printed pages.)

Kamiya-san has filled Bayonetta to the brim with the many things he holds dear. I really hope you all check it out!

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