On Friday, we had a free day until 4 PM, as that’s when we would have our first introduction to the KCG students. Brody, Esther, Maddy, and I wanted to go to the Toei Studio Park, where there was a big Evangelion attraction. We asked others if they wanted to come, and Sten ended up straggling along.
We got the park and went straight to the attraction, which was a large statue that you could take pictures with, and even enter and go up towards the top. After a couple photos, we entered and explored the inside, which had cut-outs of many of the characters and a pilot-aptitude test in the form of a multiple-choice personality quiz.
Standing in the hand of the Evangelion attraction
Afterwards, we explored the park a little more, going to get some Evangelion-themed ramen, and going around the many stores. It was getting around 2pm and was a 50 minute journey back, so we left the park and hopped on the train. Once we got to the station, Brody, Esther, and I saw that the AEON Mall was right across the street. The thing about AEON Mall was that there was a very special store in there: a UNIQLO. Sten and Maddy went back to rest as we went into the mall with only the intention to look. How wrong our intentions were. After seeing how cheap the clothes were compared to their US prices, and the different and more diverse designs, we found ourselves on a shopping spree.
Our spree, however, was cut short by time, and it was starting to approach 4 PM. We rushed back and got ready for the bus ride to KCG. Our introduction started with a tour of their newly-built building, which had a minimalistic design to it that I really loved. It was not a very large building, but the facilities were luxurious, especially the teacher’s lounge and garden.
Part of the garden outside of the teacher’s lounge
After our quick tour, we met with the KCG students and shared some Japanese pizza with them. My teammates were really nice, and with the help of one of the translators, Quan, we were able to get along quite well.
We went back to the hotel and some of us got together for a small group hangout, but with the early morning and day-full game jam the next day, it didn’t have its full rager potential.
The day started bright and early as we rode the bullet train to Hiroshima. A trip that would be 5 hours by car is cut right through by an hour and a half on the train! I certainly appreciated the extra Z’s that I caught on that thing. This whole week has just been so tiring.
After disembarking, we were quite hungry, so our first stop was a small building with a few restaurants nestled in the Hiroshima Gate Park. I and a few others decided to go with Shimauma Burger. Their main burger boasting Awaji beef topped with a deep-fried ring of Awaji onions was calling my name (Well, calling around 6 of ours’ names. We were all curious!) It was such a hard burger to handle in terms of cleanliness, but in my opinion, the mess was totally worth it. And don’t get me started on their DIY soda system – you dispense a soda extract and then add the carbonated water yourself. Never had a fresher, fizzier soda before! I gotta say peach soda is one of my favorite flavors that I can’t seem to find anywhere else!
After calming down and readying ourselves, we took a walk around the A-bomb dome, where the horrors of history and impressive display of historic preservation left us in quiet contemplation. It’s needless to say that we all felt quite unsettled. (Oddly enough, we were the ones that had to shoot down the instructor’s idea of a group photo. Read the room, man!)
We also found certain monuments such as the Children’s Peace Monument and the Hiroshima Victims Memorial Cenotaph. They were beautifully constructed monuments, and the backstory behind them was even more heartbreaking.
Our next stop was the Hiroshima Peace Museum. Walking through the museum, seeing the photographs and remnants, and learning about the grim event, was a truly impactful experience. It’s hard to put into words the sadness you feel in your heart, but it’s an important part of understanding the history and the resilience of the city. I already didn’t support these bombings, but seeing the raw, unfiltered trauma that occurred that day just made me resentful of the times in high school history class where we had to debate that these were “necessary.”
Coming out of the museum, we all ended up wanting to discuss the experience and some way to beat the heat, so we went inside to a small counter selling shaved ice. It was on the more expensive side for the treat (still only around 5 dollars), bit it was absolutely worth it. No cheap syrups, but instead pure delicious strawberry goodness.
As we continued our exploration, we stumbled upon a group of Japanese students. (Well, more like they stumbled upon us!) They were so friendly and excited to chat with us, which really warmed my heart. For it to happen right outside the museum, I think it shows how far American-Japanese relations have come and the mutual interest in understanding each other’s cultures. Peace perseveres.
Roaming around the streets of Hiroshima, we found a vibrant plaza and an amazing colorful mural. The street art here was something I found really beautiful. It was amazing to see the city thriving and full of life.
We then made a slight detour to Hiroshima castle. It was quite the sight with hundreds of yellow lanterns lining the paths and around the torii. There was something so tranquil about the whole place, and the giant koi swimming in the pond added to the experience!
The evening was rounded off with an Okonomiyaki dinner. Nothing says Hiroshima like its famous layered pancake! Mine was filled with noodles, cabbage, pork, topped with a delicious sauce, while I was also able to try some with cheese and mochi. It was unexpectedly quite good!
After dinner, some of us broke off to visit the Pokemon Center Hiroshima. As a major Gengar fan, I was a bit bummed that they didn’t have any plushies of him (Second try and still nothing!? I thought this guy was supposed to be popular!) In the end, I wound up buying a bunch of other goodies to gift my friends back home, and some cute little socks and accessories for myself.
Our return journey to Kyoto was quite the adventure. We got a bit lost, thanks to public transit, and ended up sprinting 30 minutes back to Osaka station. My legs are still giving me grief, but it was a mad dash we all found hilarious in the heat of the moment.
At the station were a station bento place, and a whole mini 7-11! Something I found interesting was how the sign on the left was spelt almost entirely in kyūjitai, old forms of Japanese characters. There’s no old form of the second character, but everything else was changed. Gives it a more traditionalist feel!
広島駅弁当 → 廣島驛辨當
Finally, we were on the Shinkansen, heading back home to Kyoto. Though it was a long and tiring day (nothing but the journey the whole day), the memories we made and the experiences we had were totally worth it.
Today was game jam day! We started by opening up Unreal and downloaded the repo our team made beforehand. The game our team decided to make was a 2.5D puzzle game in which two players must work together to solve puzzles. The characters and environment is 3D while the backgrounds are 2D. The narrative follows 2 space explorers from different galaxies that find themselves stranded on the same deserted planet. They must work together using the various strengths that they acquired from their different cultural backgrounds in order to find their way home.
For the jam I was the designated team manager and sound engineer/composer. Seeing as how I don’t know how to make sound effects nor music, creative commons was my best friend. I also made the Trello for our team to keep track of tasks necessary for completion. The main 11 hrs of the day for me were spent finding sound assets, editing then in Audacity, asking the team members if they liked them, then repeating. The japanese students on our team seemed to really like the background music I found for the game, and I was pretty happy with the sound effects I found for each character. My goal was to differentiate the players in sound, so the technical based character had more futuristic sounding effects compared to the spiritual character. It wasn’t my job to impliment the sounds into Unreal, but I did it anyway try and learn the program a little bit, but I undid my changes before pushing the repo.
During the jam we had to communicate via both google translate and DEEPL, which was a bit challenging but not as much of an issue as I had initially thought. One of our group members spoke pretty good english, which made a huge difference, but one of them was also remote since he hurt his leg. The challenge of working together to complete this game in such a short amount of time was the real highlight of the experience. It was a bit jank and unorganized, but thats part of the fun I think. We had bento boxes for lunch/dinner which were super yummy! After working diligently for 11 straight hours and reaching a point where we thought we could wrap up in the morning, it was time to head home for the night. We bussed the KCG students over to a train station and then headed back to our hotel, where all of us hung out in one of our hotel rooms and played Jackbox games on the switch, which was really fun. After hanging with everybody for a few hours I played some Zelda and went to bed. Overall a really fun and unique experience! Excited to finish up the game tomorrow and present it to our special guests :).
Today has been all Game Jam, all the time. We woke up at around 6:15am, got breakfast at around 7:30, and then headed on over to KCG at around 8:30. We touched down on campus at around 9:30, and then we were off to the races.
We immediately went to work on our games, and my team (Team 2) was hitting the ground running. Shoma, one of the KCG students, had put together a spreadsheet detailing out our game and providing more descriptions for our planned features, and so since we had had this since early this week, we already knew what we wanted to do and the rough idea of how we were going to get there. So we went straight to work, and from then on (for me at least) it was about 10 hours of straight modeling and rigging. I had to utilize a base from a previous character I had made to create our new character, Character A, and once that was done I then moved on to rigging both Character A and the character I had created before, Character B.
Character A is on the left, and Character B on the right.
Rigging took a long time, btu overall it was good experience, and I learned more about just how fast I can position joints and perform emergency weight painting. It took about 8 hours, but I finally completed Character A and rigging Character B, so now I was ready to start animating. During this time, Shoma and Reo, the other student from KCG, were hard at work programming and designing the levels for the game, and Shoma was also working with Brody on finalizing sound. Megan was working on UI Art, and was able to finish it fairly quickly even despite the fact that she was unfamiliar with Unreal Engine and its interface. Slowly but surely, it appeared that our game was taking shape.
Lunch and dinner during the jam, onigiri and a bento!
Communicating with the KCG students was interesting, as although we both spoke a little bit of each other’s languages, there was still a language barrier we had to naviagate around. I tried my best to speak in Japanese, but there were always one or two or a few phrases that I didn’t know how to construct, and so to get around it without losing too much time, I defaulted back to English. And although Shoma knew some English, there were still a good deal of words that didn’t quite click, and so the two of us had to take a few tries to simplify what we were trying to say or let DeepL translate for us. It was an interesting experience though, and one that I think helped me understand more the nuances of cross cultural communication.
We even came up with a name for our game, Kinniku Brain!
Once it hit 7:30pm, it was time to wrap and our main Game Jam day had come to a close. I of course continued to do some animating on the bus ride back, but once I got to the hotel I sort of just crashed from the tiredness. On to the last day of Game Jam!
A test of my running loop animation I did tonight!
Forgot to add this to my last post, but LOOK AT THIS TINY FRAME IN ONE OF OUR ROOMS.
Perfection.
Anyway, today was the big day! Our team had somewhat communicated before meeting, and we had decided on a concept to expand & build upon today, which I was grateful for. While we didn’t communicate as much as I would have liked, at least we didn’t have to scramble for a concept.
My breakfast at Anteroom Kyoto was pretty light today. We headed out a bit late today but still got to campus on time with a few minutes to spare before the Game Jam officially started.
We had from 9:30am till about 8:00pm to work on our games. The entire time I was wracked with anxiety as to how I could contribute to my team. As a photo visual media major with a million hobbies, I could only call upon my self-taught skills in art & audio to contribute to our team. I was constantly trying to find little things I could do.
Cameron handled the heavy lifting for visuals, Chloe handled the UI icons & menu designs, while our Japanese team members (Takato-san & Kiri-san) handled just about everything else regarding the actual building of the game. I was designated project manager of visuals (and facilitated some conversations between our team members) & sketched out drafts of background music that we could use. A few hours before the end of our session, Chloe and I ended up taking on the task of designing our other player character while Cam was hard at work on the asset art.
It had been a while since I last drew digitally, but today was a day of trying many new things in order to pull my own weight! With our combined braincell, we had designed the character together (wirh input & advice from Cam) and Chloe sketched out a very simple walk animation for us to digitize.
Baby’s first……walk cycle animation……..
We laughed so hard at this that we started crying.
Here’s the second attempt, less than half an hour after the first try! You learn fast when you’re embarrassed of your work.
(Pictured above: our poor teammate being brought back to work by his friends while Chloe cheers him on (?) ft. Cam)
Another sideways photo but here’s our western styled bento that we had for dinner! I asked Kiri-san (pictured above) if he could read the box’ packaging label for me to see if I could understand the text verbally but after he read it, I nodded politely while my head stayed empty.
We wrapped up after many long hours and headed home shortly after 8:30pm. Otsu today, everyone!!
Since I slightly passed away from our tiring journey yesterday, I slept in today while my roomie Megan and a few others went out for an early morning kimono dress-up session. I went to breakfast at around 8am and came back and napped until around 1pm.
I headed out with Jess to Kyoto station to grab some new clothes from uniqlo & order from mister donut for the first time! We also managed to squeeze in lunch before rushing back to the hotel to head out again at 4pm to check out the KCG campus.
Here’s what Jess & I ordered wrow! I embarrassingly went into the wrong storefront after getting the menus mixed up and we apologized while going to the store to the left of the menu instead….
Pretend the image is properly oriented I can’t believe wordpress doesn’t have this option included in the base post editor
The food was so yummy…..katsu perfectly cooked & juicy, didn’t feel oily or greasy at all. I could drink a gallon of their miso soup too…
Baby’s first time at a mister donut!!! It’s been 2 days and I’ve yet to eat what I ordered but I’m sure its delicious.
Arrived at KCG’s graduate campus for a quick tour!
We then headed to KCG’s main campus to meet the students that would be game jamming with us! Shoutout to nametag guy ?
It was nerve wracking to meet our teammates for the first time, but I was excited to practice my japanese! One of our team members ended up not hanging out with us as often due to being nervous, but I have faith in him for our actual game jam. They brought tons of snacks for us to try, and we also had pizza-la delivery! I’ve heard of the chain name before but I was not expecting the pizza to taste so…sweet? Many of us ended up sharing similar sentiments after the dinner meet.
We shared a very crowded bus with the KCG students on our way back to the hotel & also saw Kyoto Tower!
Classic start with breakfast. The karaage was yummy! As was the croissant! Not sure what the spread was ontop of the bread & lettuce but it was alright!
We have a long day ahead of us today, as we are visiting Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park as well as the museum.
The shinkansen ride was beautiful as usual. My favorite part is seeing the fields & mountains.
Before heading in, we stopped by a small food court for lunch. I got this deeelicious cookie & cream chiffon cake from starbucks with Jess, Belle and Megan.
Conveniently placed tree that hides the dome from view (?).
Conveniently placed random man that ruined my almost perfectly clear shot (?).
I took exactly zero photos once we wandered into the park & museum. Besides being ‘respectful’ and not lifting my phone to snap photos, I also felt it was much more respectful to spend my time reading as many plaques & text descriptions as I could. The main exhibition inside the museum is the permanent exhibition, which displayed a large amount of personal belongings left behind by victims.
There was a projected simulation of the timeline & destruction path of the bombing near the entrance of the exhibition which offered a very helpful visual diagram of how the land looked before and after the destruction.
The whole experience was, needless to say, extremely depressing & sobering. When I was learning about nuclear energy & war a few months ago, I ended up doing a deep dive into the destruction of Hiroshima, but there are just experiences & artifacts that you don’t see online. Reading so many personal quotes & stories from victims’ families, seeing the tattered & burnt clothing of victims, and seeing chunks of glass & metal fused together from the sheer heat of the blast really hit me.
Something I really appreciated was how well-designed the exhibit was! The flow of sections leading into the next physical area/room were well-planned, and the one room with victims’ photos/plaques being displayed within a glass or acrylic panel next to gently lit display cases were nothing short of beautiful, elegant & respectful. The text was easily legible despite the dim lighting, and the vibe of the room paid tribute to the tragic event very well.
Now for something that’s just as distressing as the contents we just explored in the museum. This insane clock is right outside the entrance to the exhibits (but inside the building).
If you’re having a hard time reading the text in the photo above, here’s a snippet from the plaque: “The cogwheels represent a virtual countdown which warms us that we are on the path leading to towards the annihilation of humanity. The cogwheel at the top rotates 100 times per minute, but will spin faster if the earth shows signs of being in danger. If it reaches the immovable cogwheel at the bottom, the clock will automatically self destruct.”
HUH?
I didn’t get a video but the cogwheel at the top was spinning pretty fast….and even if the plaque is just hypothetical, I still have so many questions. Some of our classmates spent a good while discussing what we think the text means, and I tried to not fall into a deep pit of existential dread like how I usually do during the conversation.
After the museum, my feet & soul absolutely died while we were dragged around past our bodies’ limitations (or just mine, at least). I sat near the outskirts of the castle with a few others while the rest of the class trudged onwards and then we got okonomiyaki for dinner and went back to the hotel in Kyoto.
Today was the big day, the game jam! For me it started off pretty rough, I woke up a bit late and had to rush downstairs. I also found out my laptop decided not to download the engine I needed because my graphics drivers weren’t good! It was so so so fun to uninstall and reinstall all my graphics drivers and unreal itself for a couple hours ( this is sarcasm). Once I got past the pain that I downloading, I got to work. I was put on UI art which isn’t my thing but I tried my best anyway. I like design for UI but more on the technical side.
We spent the day snacking, sitting, coding, and helping each other. The LCG students were familiar with Unreal when a lot of RIT students were not. At RIT we typically use Unity which is entirely different. The day was pretty quiet overall with just a lot of head down let’s get this done energy.
we got some rice balls (onigiri) for lunch and a really nice bento box for dinner ( I forgot to take a photo). The bento box had some white rice, bamboo shoots, a meatball steak, tempura, some fried chicken, a lot of greens, and a sweet waffle for dessert. It was quite yummy. Our jamming lasted from 9:30am to 8pm so basically all day. The Japanese students on my team were very quiet other than when they needed something done or had updates for us so it was pretty quiet. I enjoyed just sitting and listening to music for a day since we have walked like 15 to 18 thousand steps everyday. Literally it’s crazy here’s a screenshot of my steps. The most being from kimono day surprisingly.
That’s a lot of steps. That’s basically it for the day. I took a nice shower and played this game I downloaded called Colorful stage ( it’s a rhythm game). Tomorrow we have to get up at around the same time (7am) and have 3 hours to finish up our games. Well then, see ya later blog!!
Today was the main day of our game jam! It was super fun to finally get to work with our teammates face to face and make some key decisions about our project.
There’s not too much for me to talk about today – we basically just sat in a room for 12 hours and worked on computers (something my body is very gracious of, as I desperately needed a break) to produce something of sufficient quality to present to everyone tomorrow. While I won’t give any spoilers on what Team 3’s game is, I can say that my main job was working on the art assets and I made nearly 30 assets in total! Combined with Esther’s assets, Liam’s localization and SFX, and Naoki, Ryuki, and Tamura’s planning and coding, if everything comes together I think we’ll have a pretty sweet product for having less than 24 hours to work on it!!
Tomorrow we’ll finish out the game jam and then have some free time for our last day in Kyoto. I REALLY want to go to Nara to visit the deer park, so I’m hoping that we can manage to get into the otter cafe early and maybe head there or Osaka for dinner depending on the park’s schedule. Fingers crossed!! To end I’ll share some of the assets I made for our game 😉
Todays the day!!! The day of wearing Kimonos!! I was so excited since I made the reservation two days in advance and I even woke up buzzing with excitement. At around 7:05am, Belle, Chloe, and I headed out to the Kiyomizu-dera area ( this is the place with the old looking pretty streets and temple that looks over Kyoto). Our reservation was at 8am and we ended up getting there at around 7:45am. We walked around for a bit then headed in. We were greeting by this middle aged Japanese lady that spoke pretty good English! Being the try hard student I am, I tried to speak Japanese the entire time we were there, the women there said I had a good accent!
We all chose our kimonos, belts, and accessories and the women there got to work. I never realized how many layers a kimono had but there was alot. There was a white under cover, a lot of straps to tie it together, towels to keep the shape firm, the actual designed kimono cover, the belt, and accessories. Overall it took 30 minutes to get dressed and about 15 minutes for them to do our hair. It was a really fun experience as I tried to speak through it.
Once we got out we headed towards Kiyomizu-dera to take so many photos. The plan was to go early to miss the crowds but the crowd was still there. We took some photos at the top then headed down the hill. A lot of other foreigners asked to take photos with us which was kinda weird but we said no. Here’s some photos though of the temple with us in it!
We headed down the hill to the shopping area. Belle and Chloe got some goods from the stores and we took photos along the way as we could. It did get crowded fast but we managed. The worst part of the kimonos were the shoes. The shoes are basically wedged flip flops that were a little too small and you had to wear socks with a little cut for the flip flop. Here’s a photo of what it kind of looked like.
We walked around a while. I headed to the Ghibli and freaked out for a bit ( as in I bought a cute mug with Spirited Away and sat next to JiJi from Kiki’s Delivery Service). After our shopping was over we went to a couple other area for photos then headed back to the kimono shop to get undressed. We were lucky it was cloudy in the morning but the afternoon started to get really warm, especially in all those layers.
After we got back in our regular clothes, we took a walk to the Pokémon Center of Kyoto. I already went earlier in the week so I won’t go into much detail there. And No I didn’t spend more money at the center this time I held back. After the Pokémon center we went exploring near Nishiki market and all it’s cool stores. We went to the otter café but it was full sadly but we explored instead! We saw a sticker store that was really cool. It kind of reminded me of Zumiez at home. We also went through some anime stores with many many figures and a thrift store that was too expensive to be thrift. We had to be back to our hotel at 4pm for our next schedule event so I grabbed a cream puff ( shuu-cream in Japanese) and we all headed to the station.
We made it home just in time for our class time and got on the bus to KCG. We were going to a pizza party and meeting the student we were going to be working with! We arrived at the school and got a tour of the grad program and meet our teammates.
Tangent time: we got pizza from a popular chain around here called pizza-la. To be honest it was really sweet and didn’t sit well in my tummy but it’s ok. There was only 1 plain pizza though the others were overly topped for my taste. There was chicken nuggets though! Ok tangent over.
We met with our groups, hung out for a bit, then headed home. We got a nice group pic on the bus ride home though!
After wards us RIT kids went to family mart for some snacks and drinks and played jackbox party pack together since it was an early night. That was pretty much my free day! I keep forgetting to take pictures of my merch but think of it as a surprise for my last post when I show everything I’ve gotten ( cause I’m not done yet we have a whole week in the anime fans center of the world Akihabara)
