As someone who has managed to achieve that seemingly distant goal, I’ve been asked how I did it more than a few times. I’ve had some time to think about my path and write down what I consider to be the most import bits of advice.
Before you start
How good is your Japanese? First year Japanese is more than sufficient for a programmer and adequate for an artist. Game designers require near fluency. Even if you want to become a game producer/director, consider becoming an artist or programmer, as those paths tend to get to game design leads faster. Most of Japan’s top creators got their starts in the other aforementioned career tracks:
- Keiji Inafune: Art
- Atsushi Inaba: Programming
- Keiichiro Toyama: Art
- Shigeru Miyamoto: Art
- Eiji Aonuma: Art
- Daisuke Amaya: Programming
- Yuji Naka: Programming
- Tomohiro Nishikado: Mechanical Engineering
- Gumpei Yokoi: Mechanical Engineering
- Yu Suzuki: Programming
Not to say that a career as a planner(what the Japanese refer to game designers as) is a dead end job, but art leads to more management opportunities and as a programmer, being able to make your own prototypes makes communicating the fun of your idea infinitely easier than a written proposal. Especially a proposal written in your non-native language.
Come to Japan. Live here a while. If you get a work visa through another job, that’s a major positive. Being able to interview at a potential employer in person is a huge plus. A lot of Japanese companies fear that foreign employees will leave within a year of employment. If you’ve been in Japan a while, that would prove you’re capable of living in Japan and assimilating into the culture. It’s also a lot easier to learn the language when you use it every day.
Gain development experience outside of Japan. In my experience, even the most broken of Western companies tend to have their stuff together more than the above average Japanese companies. While I think there are a few Japanese development practices that are superior to their Western counterparts, I find the majority to be the other way around. Especially for programmers. I highly doubt you’ll ever learn good team coding skills, data driven development or even good commenting practices at a Japanese company. Having valuable experience can help make up for Japanese language skills too.
Get a degree? I’ve heard that this is a requirement for getting a work visa recently. I already have one so I never encountered any issues. Having a bachelors from a university will get you in a higher pay grade than an AA from a vocational school. From what I’ve seen of JP vocational schools, I can understand the reason for the pay gap. Every one I’ve seen, even the so-called good ones, are absolute crap for programming, though there are a some good ones for art. If you have a bachelors and killer portfolio from a good Western game-centric school, you should be OK. There are some people who just didn’t like school, built killer portfolios and built up skills all on their own and to you, I salute you. It would be a shame if you’re kept out of the industry, while a nitwit with a degree in boring people to death gets in.
Get a printable portfolio. Printable. A lot of companies require you to snail mail in applications. Programmers are usually allowed to mail in CD-ROMs, but who even has a CD burner these days? Borrow one from a friend, you’re going to Rome, do as the Romans do.
That’s it for all, I plan to cover the application process in another post. Thank you for reading.