the end of the gamejam was a mad dash of last minute additions and changes that i can’t even remember everything. kiri and takato were stressed until the very end, and honestly me, cam, and jas, were just happy that we finished. i was a bit disappointed that my ui didn’t look as good as i wanted it to, and i could tell that cam wasn’t necessarily all that happy either, though jas seemed to be having a good time. takato and kiri were clearly unhappy at how it turned out, but i’m glad we got to spend that time with them.
we got to see everyone’s games and they were all so cool and unique. i really liked group one’s where you had to beat a fusion of godzilla and big foot using one player that could switch between eastern and western superhero identities. i also really liked group five’s (i think? it might have been group three) game where you had to take the customer’s order in your native language, but had to actually make their order in the language you were trying to learn. everyone had such different ideas that tackled the them of bridging the gaps of culture.
once we took our pictures and said our goodbye’s, a large group of us headed off to osaka. it was a thirty minute shinkansen ride, so before we knew it we were there! we immediately embarked on our quest to this mall, because it had several shops all on one floor for all of us to weeb out at. for me, that was the one piece store.
i went in all starry-eyed and amazed as if i was in heaven, similar to a toddler in toys r us (rip ✊?) around christmas time. it was magical. needless to say i spent several thousand yen here, and i hadn’t even been to the other stores yet. next up was the nintendo store where i exhibited some restraint and didn’t buy anything. however that restraint was all but thrown out the window when i got to the pokemon center. what? i bought a chouchou plushy from the one piece store and he was lonely, so i bought a ditto plushy as a friend. i had to.
me, belle, skyler, and jess got dinner at an italian place, and their four cheese pasta was alright. like it definitely could have been worse, but it also wouldn’t have been that hard to make it better either. after that though we headed to the shinkansen station so we could take the train back to kyoto.
deciding to not let the party end there when we got back to the hotel most of us decided to hang out and play some jackbox, while also sipping on some beverages(those of us that were legal, that is). it’s hard to say which i preferred between friday and today, but they both definitely give the other a run for its money.
i look forward to tomorrow because i actually get to sleep in oh my GOD. it’ll be a travel day, so not too much on the agenda, and after the brutal nonstop pace of kyoto i can’t wait to have more breathing room in akihabara.
Our final day of Game Jam was upon us! We got up bright and early again and rushed on over to KCG, in order to have as much time as possible to finish our games.
Coming into the final day, I still had about 8 animations to do and only 4 hours to do them, not to mention I still needed to push my changes to our GitHub. Luckily, Megan helped me learn the basics of GitHub and I was able to push my changes, but that’s when I realized the importance of having the same version as my peers; I was using UE 5.1, as I thought I would only be testing locally and then just sending my files off to someone else to import. However, I didn’t know how useful the ability to push your own changes was before committing to 5.1, and so when I pushed my 5.1 assets, they couldn’t be read on the 5.0.3 machines, and so they became phantom files and created saving issues. Megan was able to revert the changes though, and I then was able to import and save/push the assets correctly using her laptop, but man, I really wished I had just done the work earlier of trying to download and switch my Unreal version, then I could’ve used my own machine and not had to pilot hers and make it more complicated.
Our lunch was omurice!
By this time it was now almost 10:30am, and I still had 8 animations to do, so I was starting to freak out a bit. But I steeled myself, and just got straight to work. I powered through the rest of the animations and knocked them all out in about 2 more hours. Miraculously, I finished all the animations we needed for the game. They were a little scuffed and not super polished, but I thought they were good enough to get by and support the game. At this time, though, we were 30 mins out from presenting our games, and we still hadn’t built yet. I was a little nervous that none of my assets would get implemented despite me sending them in, but at this point I just wanted the game to function and so didn’t push the issue; if they were in, great, but if not, I still had the files for later and could try putting them in myself.
Working hard!
There were two guest judges that came by to view our games when it was time to present, one from an independent game studio in Japan, and another from Epic Games’ Community Outreach, which was really cool! They came around and gave us feedback on our games, but when it came time to present our game, disaster started to rear its ugly head. Our game wouldn’t connect with controllers, so we couldn’t play it to demonstrate. Shoma and Reo went right to work trying to figure out why, but the presentations had to move on, so we ended up waiting to go until the very end. By that time, Shoma and Reo had gotten the controllers to work, and so Shoma and Megan were able to play Co-Op and show off our game! It actually came out pretty nice, despite not having any of my models or animations in it yet. The core gameplay seemed to be there in some sort of base form, which was really cool to see. So overall, not too shabby for a 14 hour game jam in my opinion!
Reo was able to put in my work for Character A after the jam, so here’s a little gameplay sample.
Once the jam was over and we all said our goodbyes, we were free to do what we wished for the rest of our last day in Kyoto. So a group of us took the subway with Toshi-sensee and the judge from Epic Games back to Kyoto Station, which was pretty cool! I got to talk with the judge for a while, in both English and a little bit of Japanese, which was awesome. Once we got back to our hotel, we offloaded our technology and then headed back out to catch a Shinkansen to Osaka!
We visited the Nintendo store, Pokémon Center, Capcom outlet, and One Piece store, all in the same floor in a building right above Umeda Station. Osaka is a very interesting city, and after visiting it twice, I noticed just how similar to NYC it was. The buildings are all tall, the shops are more reminiscent of ones found in NYC and sometimes a bit more luxury, but I feel as though the area was not the same level of clean as other parts of Japan I had been to so far, I did find a few more things on the ground. I think it may just be the part of Osaka I visited however, and overall it was still a great place to shop and look around!
Osaka skyline!
Once we finished shopping, I grabbed some takoyaki from a nearby small shop in the basement floor of the building, which was delicious! It was probably one of my favorite foodie moments here so far. The takoyaki was hot, and the broth inside was so super and flavorful, and then followed by the octopus, it combined to create a really unique and fun sweet but tangy flavor!
Takoyaki (fried octopus balls) and a fruit sandwich!
Finally, we all returned to the hotel and packed up our things. We had a lot of fun playing some Jackbox games together too, before heading off to bed late in prep for our trip back to Tokyo the next morning. And so, our Kyoto chapter comes to end, just as our next chapter begins!
Today was an interesting day, to say the least. I woke up early once more, and while most people opted to stay near the hotel and take it easy today to rest and recover from all the activities this week so far, I felt ready to go still and so decided to take the Shinkansen to Osaka! I went with Liam, and so together we managed to get a ticket from the JR Service counter and catch one. The ride was surprisingly short, only 30 minutes! Once there, we navigated the Shin-Osaka station and manged to find the subway. I refilled my Suica card that I had purchased earlier on Day 2, and honestly I can’t believe I didn’t fill it up sooner, it’s so convenient! Although I did almost put it in the ticket slot and get it stuck in the machine conveyor.
Once we rode the subway into Osaka, we moved on to our main goal: finding the Rikuro Cheesecake Store and buying some fluffy cheescake! Pavel really wanted to have their cheesecake, but was too tired today to make the trek, so I offered to go and bring some back for him. We walked through the city, and it was shocking how urban and reminiscent of NYC it was! There were so many stores, and once we entered into a shopping street district, it felt somewhat similar to Nishiki market in terms of spacing. A bit farther down, we found Rikuro’s! They were selling their cheesecakes, but I wanted to try going to their café upstairs, since we had came all this way I figured we should sit down and enjoy their cheesecake before bringing some back. But then we learned that their café only opens at 11:30am! It was about 10:15am when we arrived. so we wandered around the area a bit. We found a Book-Off store, but it was infortuantely closed until 1pm, and we also found a small temple nestled in a side street near the shops. It was very quaint, and I was even able to get another stamp for my stamp book!
Osaka had quite the interesting style of architecture!
Finally, it was 11:15am, so we headed back to the café and got in line. But then the worst happened; the café cut off the first batch of guests right before us. The wait was an hour, and that wasn’t quite worth it for us a that time, so we settled for getting a cheesecake to go and found a place to eat it by the river in the city. The cheesecake was super light and fluffy, but also wasn’t too sweet either. It was warm, and honestly tasted pretty good! It was about 18cm in circumference, and I ate about 1/3 of it, then packed up the rest for Pavel. After that, we took the train again down to the Osaka Pokémon Center! It was very cool, and I bought my first piece of Pokémon merch from there.
The famous Rikuro Cheesecake!
Liam went back to the hotel a bit earlier while I stayed behind to look at the Nintendo and Capcom stores there, and then I made my way down to Umeda station there and found a JR ticket machine to get a Shinkansen ticket back. However, the machine gave me an error when I tried to verify my JR Pass, and so I had to go on the in-person line and get a ticket from the counter. Once I got it, it was for a 2:18pm train, and it was currently about 1:50pm, so I had time.
Or so I thought.
I walked back to the main plaze of the station, and realized my first miscalculation: I had no idea where the Shinkansen platform was. I ran around a bit trying to get my bearings, before finding stairs that led to JR Lines, and on those platforms I saw signs for the Shinkansen. “Good” I thought, but then I noticed that it didn’t look similar to the other platforms I had been on before. I found a transit officer and asked him in Japanese if I was at the right platform. He pointed down the tracks, and said that I had to be at Shin-Osaka station to catch it. I was at Umeda station. But, he told me, I could catch a train here to Shin-Osaka, but it was on the platform next to ours. So I rushed over there, and was still confused because I wasn’t sure how this would work, like if I had to pay a fare for this local train? So I asked another transit officer nearby, and he said the same thing, and pointed to track 7 and said to take that one. Track 8’s train arrived first though, and the sign said both trains stopped at Shin-Osaka. Track 7’s train even said it was delayed a few mins, so I opted for track 8, thinking it would leave sooner.
I was wrong, turns out, and the other local train arrived and left before mine, and mine moved much slower for some reason. When it finally arrived at Shin-Osaka station, I sprinted out and weaved through the crowds, frantically searching for my platform, but alas to no avail. I finally asked one last ticket officer nearby where to find my platform, and he looked and said that it had left already, and I should take another train arriving at 2:54pm instead. It was 2:21pm, I had missed my train 3 minutes. Tired and a bit defeated, I walked up the escalator to the new platform, and waited until the Shinkansen came and boarded.
The Pokémon Center, Nintendo Store, and Capcom Store were all close to each other!
After the whole bullet train fiasco, I had about half an hour to decompress at our hotel room before heading back out to our first meeting with the KCG students and the first session of the Game Jam! After receving a great tour of their new building, we met with the students in a casual snack and pizza social, and I had to put my Japanese lessons to the test. Since many of the students didn’t really speak a lot of English, I tried my best to use my Japanese to conversate, and I think it went somewhat well! I was able to hold a few longer basic converstations, and any phrases I didn’t understand I was able to somewhat decipher through context clues. I met Shoma and Reo (both from my Game Jam team) as well as Oono, Kento, and Ryotaro. During the meetup, Shoma and Reo introduced me and the team to an old Japanese snack, deep fried sugar that was similar in texture to cotton candy, in the sense that it was very airy, but had a crunchy shell to it. It was very good, probably my favorite snack of the night! After food and socializing, we worked a bit in teams to set up projects, and then we all headed home at around 8pm. Some of the KCG students rode the bus with us to get dropped off at the train station, and I had a great converstation about Gundam with Kento!
Team and group pics!
Overall, it was a very eventful day, and culminated in a great experience! Now on to see what tomorrow holds for us!
