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?

[wpvideo tSVdoor4]

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!