WHO WORKS HERE

People Staff Interview

• Took to the path of Graphics after being shocked by Demos I came across during my Jr/High school days.

  I had enjoyed playing with the Super Famicom(Super Nintendo) and the PlayStation as a child. But I wasn't particularly an indoor person that just played games, but a normal kid who would also go outside to play. My turning point was the 'Demoscene' that I came across after my parents bought me a PC during Jr. high school.

  A 'Demo' is a PC program that displays real time CGs, and at the time there was a popular culture of creating these programs and showing it off centered in Europe. It left a strong impression on me that you can draw these beautiful CGs in real time with a PC on hand. After being shocked by this, I started to think that while programming for a game specific console might not be possible to get into, but PC programming is something that I can challenge myself right away. Using advanced programming from Europe and the US as a reference, I self taught myself to imitate that programming and created my own Demos to display on the web.
  I started to spend whole days programming, and spent all night chatting online. I looked for a path after high school that I could involve myself in programming that I loved, and I took CG rendering as my major in the University, and researched computer vision as a grad student.

• Participation in Technical exchange meets and study sessions, and through meeting people there joined Polyphony Digital

  In the world of engineers and programmers, there are many technical exchange meetings being held almost daily, and there are various levels of that from study sessions on an individual level, to those that are large in scale like CEDEC. After entering my University I started to participate in various events big and small, starting from a study session I found on the Web. Eventually I started helping out with the operation of these events. Of course the new tech and knowledge gained from participating in these events were important, but it was also fun meeting these people who I could share common interests and passions with.

  One friend I made through this was Uchimura, and I started to see him at some of these events and we started to talk off and on. Thereafter when I started thinking about looking for job after graduating college, I remembered that he worked at Polyphony Digital (PDI), and I decided to try visiting them.
  The PDI I saw with my own eyes, was a company where I could really tell that it offered a great deal of freedom from the words of their employees. In my actual job hunting I applied to other IT companies and game companies and was accepted, but in the end, I decided to join PDI as I felt it had a similar culture as my University and grad school where 'You're good as long as you do the work you need to do', and also had a solid history and showed their accumulation of effort in their products.

• Meeting with a different culture called 'Artists'

  The biggest shock I felt after entering PDI, was the meeting with CG artists and technical artists. For someone who had always walked the path of science like myself since my younger years, meeting artists that see and handle an image with their senses, and their fixation on the peculiars of these images, was really a culture shocking experience.

  In Gran Turismo 7, I worked closely with our artist Yasutomi to implement the skysphere simulation and rendering that involves things like the sky and clouds. It was a very stimulating experience to write a program while inspiring each other with someone like Yasutomi who has his own vision of the world.

  Looking back, the first job that I worked on together with Artists was the 'Scapes' camera app that was implemented in Gran Turismo Sport, and that was the first big project I was responsible for after joining PDI.

  Back in 2014 when I first joined the company, it was a period in which the updates for Gran Turismo 6 that released in the previous year was still going on, while the development of Gran Turismo Sport had started in parallel. So myself being assigned to the development of Scapes might have been the fact that it had not been long since I joined and my hands just happened to be free, just by chance. But having been able to work closely with artists in the very first big project like this, I feel a bit of destiny that goes beyond just chance.

  Our backgrounds are different, we see the world differently. Communicating intent with artists that even use different words was not easy. But using a system I created through repeated, thorough communication with them, the artists created images way beyond my imagination and expectations. By repeating this process further, even more impressive images were created. This process is a stimulating experience that I don't think I would ever have even imagined if I did not join PDI.

• Whether you can enjoy the unpredictable chemical reaction, or fear the darkness one step ahead

  

  It's not possible to create a game just with game programmers. Game development is something where totally different skills come together and cause a chemical reaction, including of course the artists that I was shocked by, as well as designers, UX, engineers, and so on, and the result of that chemical reaction is sometimes unpredictable.

  Of course game development does have scenes and job fields that require fixed, predictable subjects as well. But the epitome of working as a graphics engineer in PDI is being able to experience something beyond your imagination through working together with colleagues that have a different set of senses than yourself.

  In the process of creating something with colleagues that have a very different background than yourself, those that can enjoy the experience that goes beyond your expectations, rather than fearing that there is 'darkness one step ahead' because you can come across unpredictable situations; I think it's that kind of graphics engineer that is best suited for PDI.

• Graphics Programmer Job Description