In the morning, we took a tour of Nintendo, Germany. All of us were super excited, yet some were tired(or just me). As a star company, Nintendo is very careful about its information; we were given visitor passes, had to sign in and were only exposed to certain areas. On the 16th floor is the European headquarter of Nintendo where we weren’t allowed to go. In this building, there are no game developers(they are mainly in Japan as we were told), instead, it’s a marketing and localization team for the European market. Very nice and understandable of the organizer, we were treated to some freshly brewed coffee before the tour started. After passing 100 security doors, two PR workers gave us a presentation on the company’s history, values, and leaders. The lady was very patient with us during the question session, however, all of the questions were about marketings rather than game development. Afterward, we had lunch at their cafeteria and I dripped tomato sauce on my white shirt, rip. I think the break room was the highlight of our Nintendo trip where they display the old consoles, Nintendo figures and a bunch of other gears. It was like a Nintendo museum. There was an employee only shop where I bought 2 amiibos, 4 coasters, and a keychain with the host’s help.
Our second stop was Crytek. For those who doesn’t know the company, they were the original developer of FarCry(Ubisoft now owns the IP), Crisis series, RYSE son of Rome, Robinson and their newest game Hunt showdown(still in EA). For their presentation, the HR demonstrated a brief overview of the company and how to get jobs in the interview. After that, Brian gave us a live demo on CryEngine; I can tell he tried really hard to sell us the engine but… In my opinion, CryEngine has a lot of potentials and may be able to compete with Unity or Enreal in 5 years, but for now, it has a lack of functionality. I understand that they made the Engine for Crysis and it’s a side project of the company, yet I just don’t think it’s ready to be popular. For example, Brian showed us how you can add invisible wheels with spring to an empty mesh to create a trampoline without writing scripts, however, you’d have to play with the two values to make the perfect elasticity. First of all, it’s kind of weird to have wheels on random meshes even though they are invisible. Second of all, it takes a lot of time to come up with the perfect values while you don’t have a formula.
Even though the presentations were a little frustrating, I enjoyed Crytek the most out of all companies. Because it was very casual and people actually make games in the office. We got to walk around their studios and talk to people, many of them were catching deadlines for Hunt’s new patch and all QAs were working hard. The whole floor was overheated, no doubt, feeling bad for the game developers. We weren’t allowed to take pictures at all due to upcoming releases.
After the two companies, we headed to a ramen place for dinner. It was a 20 minute walk and I was hangry the entire ride. My day was very fulfilling and I was satisfied with what I saw.
