Lost Planet

For this week’s exclusive developer interview, I picked the brain of the top programmer on the Lost Planet team, Akiyama-san. Lost Planet Director Kenji Oguro also contributed some answers.

[Brian] What’s your name and title on the Lost Planet project?

[Kohei Akiyama] My name is Kohei Akiyama and I’m the Programming Team Leader.

Mainly I manage the whole team of programmers. I also worked a bit on the storage and memory functionality, Guide button implementation, and other system-integration areas.

Since most of my job entails managing the other programmers, if I had tried to do any of the gameplay-related programming, I wouldn’t have had time for anything else. That’s why I decided to work on the system programming, since it’s pretty flexible and not as demanding on my time.

Click to read the rest of Part 1 of the interview.

[More:]

[Kohei Akiyama] I was also the one in charge of putting together and burning all of the preview and review discs and all the copies of the game used at the various events. I made more ROMs for Lost Planet than I have for all the other games I’ve worked on combined. Making all those discs for everyone around the world made me realize how big this game really is.

[Brian] Being the lead seems like it involves a lot more than just being good at writing code.

[Akiyama] Right. Being the lead programmer isn’t just about programming and making a game. On a project as large as Lost Planet, a lead has to be able to manage the large team of programmers as well. And that means you can’t be as directly involved with the actual creation, the day-to-day programming of the game as the other programmers. So to be a lead programmer, you have to know programming, but you also have to have a lot of experience under your belt as well.

[Brian] How did you get to be the lead programmer on Lost Planet?

[Akiyama] When I was in high school the NES was really popular. I was already into games, and I spent a lot of time at the arcades. Of course at the time, pretty much the only game makers around were Namco, Sega, Taito.

I’m originally from the island of Shikoku, and there were no game companies there at the time. So after high school I went on to a school that taught computers, and studied programming there.

Since I liked games, I thought it would be cool to work at a game company after I graduated. At the time I had no idea what people actually did at game companies. Basically I thought I’d get to play games all day.

So after my three years of study, when it came time to look for a job, I applied at a number of game companies. The company where I got an offer from the soonest was Capcom. At the time, Capcom was just making arcade games, and wasn’t really all that big. They had put out Ghosts n Goblins and some other games, but they didn’t really have any other big hits yet. Right around the time I started here, they were just putting out Final Fight. Then things really started taking off for Capcom.

But I’ve been with Capcom for the last 17 years. I’ve moved offices a few times over the years, and overall I haven’t been involved with a huge number of games.

The last thing I was working on before Lost Planet was Resident Evil Outbreak and Resident Evil Outbreak File 2. And using the experience I got on those two titles, I moved up to Lead Programmer on the Lost Planet project.

[Brian] How big is the development team for for Lost Planet? How about just the programming team? How is the work divided up between the programmers?

[Oguro] The main core development team has about 65 people in all.

[Akiyama] For people who were involved with the programming portion, just short of 30 or so. That includes people who were involved with the development engine, network support, all that.

We also had a slight personnel change during the course of the project. But for the main core members, the main programmers, there are about 14.

Programming functions are divided into sound, effects, libraries, online and networking, AI, character, and miscellaneous.

I keep track of everything going on and divide up the work between the programmers. For example, if it looks like we are starting to run behind schedule a bit, I can reassign tasks, or just push the programmers to go faster.

In Part 2 we talk about video game programming and how it fits into the development process, while Part 3 gets into the Framework engine the game is being developed on, along with the kind of physics simulation working beneath the surface.

—Brian