KYOTO, Japan – After spending over 20 years working at buttoned-down corporate game companies, Yoshiro Kimura had his epiphany while attending last year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
"A lot of indie games appeared in front of me," he said. The expo was filled with independent creators going their own way and showing off their personal projects. "Suddenly, I felt a teardrop. I was crying in front of games," he said.
"I thought: Why? What have I done? Why don't I do this? I should make real games by myself, my way."
BitSummit, held on Saturday in Kyoto, was the gaming event that Japan needs right now: an indie-focused celebration of gaming, one that's optimistic about Japan's future. The Japanese big-budget games industry, once the world's dominant maker of top-selling games, has fallen out of favor in the Western world. And while the indie scene has thrived outside Japan, making millionaires out of tiny design teams, such a scene has not yet emerged here. Putting on a suit and working for an established company is the socially acceptable thing to do. Going your own way isn't celebrated; it's looked upon as being a little weird.
BitSummit hopes to change all that. The event was organized by James Mielke of the Kyoto developer Q-Games as a means to shine a light on independent Japanese developers, connecting them to each other and to the press. With sponsors that include Q-Games, Epic Games, and Unity, BitSummit is intended to be an annual gathering.
"Japanese independent game development is vibrant, the community is enthusiastic, and it's much stronger than the world realizes," Mielke said in his opening remarks to the crowded room.
"My simple hope for today is that we can reduce some of the barriers standing in the way of bringing your games to a larger audience outside of Japan, and to introduce you to some of the resources that might help you on that journey," he said.
To that end, a series of speakers took the stage to discuss strategies for game development, publishing and marketing. Some of these took the form of sales pitches, particularly the presentations on the Unity and Unreal game engines. Others were more like pep talks.
Hidetaka "Swery" Suehiro, director of the cult hit Deadly Premonition, gave a talk on what he felt were the lessons Japanese developers could learn from indies produced overseas. He encouraged creators to create what they want to create, rather than conform to established genres and games, which he said would only put them in competition with established game companies with more resources.
"There might be someone on the other side of the world who's been waiting all their life to play the game you created," Suehiro said.
The developers in attendance ran the gamut from seasoned veterans with decades of experience to amateur students programming in their spare time. Some had already found success in the market, while others were in the process of making their very first games. Nearly all were Japanese men, though a few women and non-Japanese were also present. The one trait all the attendees shared was enthusiasm for videogames – not just their own projects, but all of them.
After his life-changing experience at Game Developers Conference, Yoshiro Kimura created Onion Games and got to work on his passion projects. He and his team ("me, one engineer, and one character designer") have spent six months working on a game starring a "naked policeman" on a quest to retrieve his stolen uniform from underground creatures. He had brought some concept art with him to the show.
"I'm not sure what's happening to the Japanese game industry these days. Some say it's over.""It's hard!" Kimura said of shifting to independent development. "I must continue."
Ryo Agarie came from a similar corporate background. He and his United Kingdom-based collaborators are all formerly of the Microsoft-owned developer Rare, and now their small team Nyamyam is working full time on an iOS title called Tengami.
Agarie and his wife are creating the art for the game, which resembles a pop-up book. Sets fold open and closed as players swipe across the screen, and the environments include pull tabs, which can trigger events.
"I'm not sure what's happening to the Japanese game industry these days," Agarie said. "Some say it's over. I think what they mean is we just keep making the same kinds of games again and again." Agarie disagreed with that assessment. "There's a lot of people making something new but it's not out there to be seen," he said. He hopes BitSummit will prove him right.
One of the less-established game creators I met went by the name Himo. He has no game-industry background and was entirely self taught. His free Flash game Zato, which he calls a "second-person shooter," tasks the player with aiming and shooting from the perspective of the targets, rather than down the sights of the gun.
"I'd talked to other [creators] in private before, but never so many at once like this," Himo said.
He said he hoped to make use of "all the new ideas [he] encountered today" in future projects. In the meantime, he said he was working on a sequel to Zato and, after hearing a presentation by Valve, hoped to put it on Steam someday.
Among BitSummit's attendees, one of the bigger success stories was Daisuke Amaya. His self-made freeware game Cave Story became a sensation that was later ported to a variety of platforms. He was at BitSummit promoting his new action game Gero Blaster, an iOS shooter due out this spring.
"I never thought I would see an event like this in Japan", Amaya said. "It makes me happy." He said he had attended independent game events in the United States, but always assumed Japanese people were "too quiet" to have such a gathering. Amaya himself is rather soft-spoken; he looked as if he had to be coaxed on stage to present the debut trailer for Gero Blaster.
Despite being one of the very few established names in the Japanese indie scene, Amaya wasn't counting on past performance to guarantee future results. "I didn't ask anyone to translate Cave Story into English, a fan approached me," he said. "Same goes for the ports; a publisher came to me. It wasn't all up to me, I had help."
"If I succeed in selling this iPhone game by myself, I will feel relieved," Amaya said. "I don't know how far I can get on my own."
If there was a takeaway to be had from BitSummit, it's that Amaya and his fellow indies don't have to be on their own anymore.
