WHO WORKS HERE

People Staff Interview

• Getting into programming and game development through anime

  I first got into programming when I was in junior high school. The main character of the anime I was watching was a high school student who also worked as a freelance programmer. I thought he was really cool and that's what got me into it.

  When I thought about what I wanted to program, I chose to create games because that was what felt the most enjoyable to me. My father was into computers, and we had had a PC at home since the Windows 95 era, so it was pretty easy to get my programming environment together. However, at that time, there wasn't as much well-organized information about programming on the internet as there is now, so it was extremely difficult to find what I needed. Up until I started university to major in game production, I just practiced on my own with what little information I could find.

• From B2B development to build engineer at Polyphony Digital

  After graduating from university, I joined a company that specialized in Business-to-Business web and Flash production. There, I was put in charge of internal library production, and it was while in this position that I realized I was more suited to this kind of work than game development.

  After that, I joined a company that developed online games for smartphones. At first, my main responsibility was game programming, but alongside my main duties, I began working on features to support the development team. After some time, it spread through the company that I was interested in improving development environment and was actually developing it myself. When a dedicated team was established for improving the development environment, I was called to join the team and thus started my career as a build engineer.

  I had now become a build engineer and was quite satisfied with my job, but on the other the company I worked for focused on smartphone games and had hoped someday to work on development for home consoles. I was staring down 30 at the time and I started thinking about taking on new challenges and changing jobs again before I got too old.

  “Looking for a position as build engineer”. It was just a simple tweet that wasn't really directed at anybody, but I got a reply from a stranger who said they wanted to talk to me. That stranger was the Director of Engineering at Polyphony Digital (PDI). Of course, I had heard about "Gran Turismo" even before I met this person. However, at the time, I knew very little about cars, so I was worried about whether I would really be useful to anyone at PDI, who focused on the development of the Gran Turismo. However, he told me that "specialized knowledge of cars and racing is not essential" and with his encouragement I decided to change jobs. This was in May 2019.

• The pandemic creates a need for a remote development environment

  After starting work at PDI in February 2020, I quickly came face to face with the effects of the corona virus pandemic. Just a few weeks after joining the company, access to the company offices was restricted due to the spread of the virus, and I was forced to start working from home before I had really gotten to know any of my coworkers.

  The problem of the building engineer is that they cannot do anything unless they can find out and understand who is having trouble where. If, like in many commercially available tools, internal communications were only limited to those who had been invited to specific project threads, then I'm sure I would have spent many months in the dark without any idea what was happening in the company as a whole. However, PDI's own internal communication tools allowed us to actively explore ongoing projects, who was doing what, and what problems were occurring, with threads for each project open to the entire company.

  By the time I joined the company, the development environment for Gran Turismo 7 was almost solidified and builds had already begun, so I worked to improve this development environment without holding up production. Gran Turismo 7 has now been released, but updates still continue. The build must be constantly improved to accommodate new additional features, so the maintenance and improvement of the Gran Turismo 7 development environment will continue in the future.

  On the other hand, it's also a time to explore future options for the development environment. With that in mind, we're in a phase where we're investigating and experimenting with different build environments. Unlike companies that develop many different games, PDI is focused solely on "Gran Turismo" and has extremely limited timing to renew its development environment. However, I am looking forward to being able to change the environment more aggressively without being too conscious of legacy developments.

• People I want to join us

  

  First of all, anyone who is interested in improving the development environment and enjoys that kind of thing is welcome. Build engineer is a job with a wide range of applications. I myself am originally a client engineer, so I would like to see highly skilled people with a background in server engineering. It would be great if we could put our skills together to work on a wide range of tasks.

• Programmer Job Description