Marc CellucciOverview
In 2017, as an experiment to see if articles on LinkedIn would gain any traction, I made a four-part series about app development in Japan.
I honestly don’t like LinkedIn very much. It’s the SNS for boring people. Theres a great subreddit that basically sums up a lot of what I hate about it. That said, I can’t deny that it’s a good networking tool, and I’ve gotten several side-quests from it, so there ya go.
Part the First: Brave New World
I just recently celebrated (by working late and forgetting about it) the nine year anniversary of my company’s founding. Mission One was one of the first development companies in Japan to embrace smartphones, and as someone who was there on the raggedy edge of it all, I want to write a few articles on smartphone app development in Japan, from prehistory until now.
But first, let’s explore the big bang of it all — why I decided to press the reset button on life (yet again), lay it on the line (Triumph style), and start my own company.
You see, I was a man who had already realized my childhood dream — to become a video game developer in Japan. How cool is that? Well, the truth is, not very. The fantasy of creating digital worlds was soon perforated by the machine gun of reality, and my lofty title of Assistant Producer at SEGA meant that I wasn’t making the games, but making the paperwork that made the games. At SEGA, paperwork was an Olympian mountain, with me as Sisyphus. The grid lines on Excel sheets began to look like prison bars. I had to break free.
When I decided to slam my hands on the table, flip it over, and storm out, I figured I’d fall back on one of my two main skills: Japanese language ability, or singing for my supper. I formed Mission One with the idea that I’d focus on localization, and try to transition into development when the Fates allowed.
Then, one of the Fates stepped in, wearing a black mock turtleneck and some New Balances. I saw the now iconic unveiling of the iPhone, and in a moment of prescience, said to myself, “I think that thing might go somewhere.” (A regular Nostradamus, I know.) At that point, I decided to enter the brave new world of smartphone app development.
There were very few like minds in Japan at the time. It’s easy to forget now, but at the time, Japan was ruled by “gala-kei,” meaning “Galapagos phones,” in reference to the phones being islands unto themselves. We’re talking straight up feature phones here, which were 100-percent proprietary pieces of hardware, with layers and layers of kludgy software on top. This was the status quo, and it gave the carriers here fistfuls upon fistfuls of yen.
You see, the carriers were making money off the throwaway hardware, the largely subscription-based software, and locking people into contracts. So I guess not much has changed…
The iPhone had a lot going against it here in Japan. It was foreign. It was expensive. It was only available via Softbank, which was the third-string runt of the carriers. It didn’t have the hardware keypad, the foldability, the replaceable battery (cough), and other features that people were accustomed to. A lot of people had doubts about it taking off in Japan at all.
However, Kreskin that I am, I knew it would take off here, because I had a chance to touch the thing. There are certain products you know will be a hit the first time you see them. Pac-Man. The Walkman. The Nintendo Entertainment System. The Web Browser. Spanx. The list goes on. The iPhone gave me that same kind of buzz the first time I held it.
So it was a brave new world, the Wild Wild West, and I was determined to carve me out a nice plot of land. Only one thing to figure out…
How exactly do you make an iPhone app, anyway?
On the next episode: SEE! A young man on a quest for glory! FEEL! The pain of gut-wrenching, wallet-busting failure! MARVEL! As a phoenix rises from the ashes!
Part the Second: From Dumb to Smart
Serendipity is a strange thing, since you can’t go out looking for it, and can’t predict when it will happen. You just have to be out there, doing things, and it’ll come your way from time to time.
In this case, when I was ready to turn my newborn company into a smartphone dev house, a particularly potent strain of “the dip” would come my way.
A bit of background — I moved around a lot in my childhood, to the tune of 10 schools in 12 years. So what are the odds that I would run into an old friend from a middle school I went to in Texas, and he would be a programmer, here in Tokyo, and would be interested in doing this game with me? It was meant to be.
So I had my programmer, found a good artist, had a pocketful of borrowed money, and was ready to go and make a game. Then I had my first, fateful revelation. And by revelation, I mean expensive bout of green shortsightedness.
You see, I thought that being in Japan for years gave me an insight on how the Japanese mind worked, and what they wanted to do in their leisure time, especially on their new iPhones. So instead of making a game that was in my wheelhouse, I decided to make… pachinko.
If you don’t know what pachinko is, imagine if Plinko and a slot machine had a baby, that came loudly beeping and clanging into the world, accompanied with seizure-inducing lights and anime-style characters. It’s basically a slot machine on Red Bull and vodka. People here love it, and there are parlors everywhere, with lines out the door in the morning. (People don’t even seem to care that a lot of the money goes to North Korea, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)
Pachinko on the iPhone — how could it lose? I spent a lot of time researching pachinko, and eventually found a basic pachinko board layout that I would, er, pay tribute to, and set upon making the game. We churned out hyper-cute art, tools, physics, and music (from my good friend Norihiko Hibino of Metal Gear Solid fame), and a few months later, Sho Chiku Bai was complete and in the App Store.
All I had to do now was wait until the yen started rolling in, and I could go on to making something that I would enjoy more, like a puzzle/shooter/RPG/sim or something.
But the money never came. The downloads of the Lite version were solid, but they didn’t translate into a whole lot of sales. It was my first big failure, and left me staring at the ruddy face of real bankruptcy. With almost nothing left, it looked like I’d have to invest the rest of my money in antacids and black suits, and crawl back to the Japanese corporate world.
In order to turn that frown upside down, the first step was analyzing where I screwed up. There are plenty of reasons that Sho Chiku Bai failed, and I believe that those reasons still apply to modern app development:
1. Go With What You Know
I knew little about pachinko, so I just copied something else out there, thought the novelty of the new platform would be enough, and rolled the dice. Snake eyes. Do things in an area you know, or at least you are passionate enough about to learn.
2. Know Your Target Users and Platforms
One thing I failed to realize about pachinko is that it’s a game you sit for hours and play, while a mobile game is something you play for a couple of minutes while being squeezed into a rush hour train. (Greetings from Tokyo!) A quick-play platform and a slow-burn gambling game were not a good match at all.
3. Have the Right Intentions
I thought making a pachinko game would be a surefire way to make giant stacks of yen. Instead of focusing on the product as something that would benefit society, or at least entertain it properly, I went chasing after what I thought would be easy money. That’s really not the way to go about it, it turns out.
4. Don’t Work With Friends (unless you pay ’em)
Not carving stone tablets here, and no knock on my friend who helped with Sho Chiku Bai, but when someone’s livelihood isn’t on the line (as in a revenue-share project), you will not get their full attention, at least not for long. Life gets in the way. If you want something made, you need to set a clear goal with a deadline, create an environment to make it happen, and then pay people to do the job. This makes the relationship clear-cut, and gets the project done.
5. Be Water, My Friend
This is perhaps the most important lesson (thank you, Master Bruce). At first, I was determined that my company would be a creator of original games. But it didn’t work out at that time. So I had to reshape my company and goals in order to make it “become the cup” that I could drink out of.
So here’s where serendipity came into play again. By completing a real, full-featured product in the nascent app development market, I had inadvertently found a path to success. Having made that app was proof that I could make apps for other people. I was then able to be like water, and position my company as a provider of app development services. Nine years later I’m still doing it, and I haven’t had to buy a single black suit.
So, who wanted an app made? Turns out, a wide variety of people and companies, across a range of fields I could have never imagined. Now the fun was to begin.
On the next episode of ADiJALS: WITNESS! A company metamorphosize! FEEL! The pain of being beholden to the customer’s whims! LAUGH! As our hero gets bites taken out of him by Apple!
Part the Third: Apple Bites Man
The early days of the App Store were glorious. It was a pretty much open game, and if you could put out an app that was even just a little interesting, you could get some downloads. It was the age of beer drinking apps, fart noise makers, “I Am Rich,” and more classic apps that you don’t use anymore. If you had a new idea and could put it out quickly, you had a real shot at some good download counts.
However, there was often one thing that would stand in your way — Apple. The enabler of all this would often be the one to withhold your fix.
An important note — this is not a knock on Apple products, as they make some undeniably good stuff. My first plunge into the Apple ecosystem was back in the early 2000s, when I decided to buy one of them white Macbooks. I was in love with it first smell — that mechanical / chemical mélange of brand new, freshly-unboxed Apple hardware. It was like soft Corinthian leather to me. Then once I started using it, I was sold. Ease of use, check. Design that was higher than me, check. The feeling of being a part of something, check. Paying for it, bounced check (rim shot).
All of a sudden, my iRiver became an iPod. My Logitech mouse became one of those white ones with the nipple on it. Winamp became iTunes (still regret that). I was all-in on Apple as a consumer.
The sweet turned to sour when I started developing for their platform. Remember Steve Ballmer’s beautiful, sweaty rant about developers, developers, developers? Apple seems to take the stance that you should be honored to develop for their platform, and need to prove your worth by jumping through a series of flaming hoops.
Here are some of the problems I’ve dealt with over the years, some of which are still problems to this day:
Will We Get Approved?
There’s rarely a client of ours that doesn’t worry about this. Since regulations are quite nebulous, there’s no telling if an app will get approved or not until after you spend the money to make it. I have seen people at very huge, powerful companies get seriously worried if the Apple would approve their app, and have had potential projects cancelled because of it.
The regulations are a bit clearer now, but it’s still something of a roll of the dice. You just have to hope the Apple Overlords will smile upon you.
When Will We Get Approved?
It used to take an average of two weeks for the approval process to happen, and if you got rejected, it was back to the end of the line for you, little dev boy, as it would take another two weeks for your resubmitted app to get looked at.
This would of course affect dev schedules big time. Clients want to release on a certain date, and if you have to factor in a long approval process (and potential rejections), they want to take it out of your dev time. This made for lots of late nights and caffeine consumption.
Thankfully, Apple is much faster now. I thank competition from Android for this.
The Arcane Art of Provisioning
Getting an app to run on test hardware, a process called provisioning, is an arcane rite, requiring the stars to be in alignment, as well as the sacrifice of small animals and first-born children. Apple loves to change the process from time to time, just to keep people like me from getting too comfortable.
The Rules Have Changed
There used to be a lot of apps featuring female models, everything from fashion photography to, well, not so fashionable stuff. Then one day, all of a sudden, Apple decided to ban that, and remove all of those kinds of apps from the store. Surprise! Of course, we were working on a couple of those apps at the time, and those projects got cancelled.
But There Are Other Silly Apps, Why Won’t You Approve Mine?
We once came up with the perfect silly app idea — iKancho. In Japan, kancho is a prank that kids play on people, where they put their hands together, extend their index fingers, and forcefully poke someone else’s butt. Just Google it and you’ll see what I mean.
So we made an app where you hold your iPhone with your fingers extended, and kancho a “boss” character on the screen. It was done in a very cartoonish, innocent style, and was simply meant to get a laugh out of people.
Apple rejected it for content reasons. This one I had to fight. So after several e-mails and phone calls with Apple, it turned out that Apple of Japan were the ones rejecting it, and while the very kind person on the phone sympathized with my plight, there would be no kancho apps on the Store.
As an aside, they approved our Tanning Bed ‘Simulator’, but not poor iKancho. There is no justice in the world.
You Rejected Me For What?
The absolutely #1 big problem, to this day, is randomly getting rejected for no apparent reason. I’ll give an example. A client recently hired us to do an AR project based on Doraemon, which is a huge character here. After we finished the app, the client realized they didn’t have an Apple Developer Account (not a rare occurrence, even though I tell them about it from the start), and asked Mission One to publish it.
Apple approved our Doraemon app, it was up on the Store, and everything was good. Then we fixed a few bugs, submitted an update — and Apple rejected us, saying we didn’t own the rights to Doraemon, even though they had approved the app before.
Bunk rejections come in many flavors — saying you are using a private API that you’re not, you don’t have enough ‘content’ in your app, they don’t like your interface, and so on.
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So what’s the point of this rant? Over nine years, things haven’t gotten all that much better. It can still be a struggle to get an app approved, and it’s something that both clients and developers need to always keep in mind. And as such, Apple went from my favorite company, to… well, I’m writing this on a Surface now, you dig?
On the next episode of ADiJALS: BREATHE EASY! As your humble author gets back on track, and talks about app development in Japan. BEHOLD! A wide variety of successes and failures! FEEL! The growing pains as a company becomes more service oriented!
Part the Fourth: The Art of the Crunch
I am currently deep in the throes of that time-honored tradition in software development — “crunch time.” It’s where you have to fit three months’ worth of work into less than one. My team and I are in the midst of churning stuff out at lightning speed, cutting corners where we can, and turning what’s left of our hair as gray as possible.
In times like these, I remind myself that it could be worse. I remember horror stories of places like EA back in the ’90s, where they basically chained you to your desk, gave you an IV drip of Mountain Dew, and arranged for divorce lawyers if the need arose. I invite you to read Sheri Graner Ray’s harrowing account of the crunch on Ultima VIII — “10 months of mandatory 12 hour minimum days, 7 days a week. Only in the last month or two did they start to give us a Sunday off every other week or so.. so we could do laundry.” Making games is fun!
Crunch time in Japan is not dissimilar. They don’t bring it to you with an iron fist, but it’s subtly implied there is a grind that you will become a slave to. Some companies incorporate the concept from early on, by offering bento boxes at your desk, a dedicated room for sleeping, a shower room, and the like. I’ve seen sleeping bags under desks, haggard faces in the morning, and the wafting aroma of unwashed game developers. (Yes, it gets so bad it actually becomes visible.)
I was lucky enough to avoid crunch during my time at Sega, and left before I’d ever have to deal with it. However, with the hundreds of projects I’ve done since starting my company, there have been a few times that necessitated some hardcore crunch. Some of those are particularly long and painful stories, best left for my memoirs. (We’re talking sleepless nights, calls at 4 a.m., servers imploding, lost money, and the longest day of my life — a 52 hour one.)
Right now I’m at the phase, as a project manager, where most things are out of my hands, and there’s not much I can do but oversee the debugging and help the team where I can, with sexy stuff like testing builds, reviewing git logs, and doing data entry. (Again, making games is fun!)
As a producer and employer, there’s nothing worse than asking your team to do crunch time. You know that you are taking their work-life balance away from them, and asking them to forsake all the things they enjoy in order to create a piece of software. No lives hang in the balance, but livelihoods do, so you gotta do it.
In my experience, there are several ways to effectively manage the crunch, and keep your team from going insane in the process:
• Ensure the team gets as much rest as possible. Taking time to get some shuteye is a good way to keep the mind fresh and to avoid careless mistakes.
• Provide clear direction. Make sure priorities are clear, and eyes are always on the prize.
• Filter out noise from the client / publisher. The 11th hour is when clients like to come in and ask for random changes. If at all possible don’t let them, and definitely don’t complain about this stuff to your team. Shield them from it.
• Be there for your team at all times. If your team is working, you need to be there as well, and offer any support you can.
• Go easy on the pep talks. There’s a fine line between encouraging and annoying, and you don’t want to get to the point where you might step over it.
• Be ready for curveballs. People get sick, have family emergencies, have bad days, etc. Deal with it flexibly, without adding any more pressure or drama.
• Give your team a break afterwards. Including yourself.
As a side note, here are some of the random things that cross your mind during crunch. (Please give me an amen if you’ve been there.)
• “After this is done, I’m finally going to get on a workout program. This software developer physique has got to go…”
• “Maybe this line of work isn’t for me. Any cushy ex-pat jobs out there, where I can just go to dinner parties and such?”
• “Excel sheets kind of look like prison bars, don’t they?”
• “Does any of this matter, anyway? And what really does? Oh no, am I having an existential crisis?!?”
• “I know I can make this copy funnier, but I just don’t… feel… funny.”
• “I wonder what percent more efficient I’d be if I had a fourth monitor…”
I am so proud of my crew. We were given 7 months to make a game that should take at least a year, and they have come through like the elite team they are. I am truly blessed, and really hope this game does well, so we can keep this thing going, and reap the benefits.
That’s why you do this sort of thing, right?
On the next episode of ADiJALS: SEE! If your humble author survives this latest round of crunch. FEEL! Either the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat (results pending). WITNESS! As we get back on track and talk about the history of smartphone app development in Japan.
