U.C.C.W | Miracle Animation Studios Inc.

Philippine-Korea Creative Industry Cooperation Forum

19 02 2020

We were invited by The Philippine Department of Trade and Industry – Export Marketing Bureau (DTI-EMB) to attend a Business Matching Mission together with the Philippine Trade and Investment Center –Seoul, Korea and ASEAN-Korea Center (AKC). The forum entitled: Philippine-Korea Creative Industry Cooperation Forum, was held last February 6, 2020, from 9AM to 5PM at the Ballroom 1 Fairmont Hotel, Makati. Before the event, we were given a list of companies that will be participating and the B2B schedule sheet where we can schedule a meeting with them for 30 minutes. Since the B2B will start at 1:30 PM until 5:00 PM, we can only schedule 7 meetings from a total of 16 companies. (Originally there were 18 companies, but 2 begged off due to the corona-virus scare.)

The companies were from 3 industries, Animation, Game Development, and Web-toons.

We were able to set meetings with 5 animation companies, 1 game development company, and 1 web-toon company.

I brought along Jap Tolentino, our Game Designer, and Baron Dimaranan, IT expert, just in case technical questions are asked.

Jap, Baron, and Alstaire

During the event, Undersecretary Abdulgani M. Macatoman, DTI Philippines gave the welcome remarks. Plus there were some congratulatory remarks from the different ambassadors of both the Philippines and Korea. Then there was an official Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) signing between the Korea Animation Producers Association (KAPA) headed by Mr. Jn-kyu Nam, President and the Animation Council of the Philippines (ACPI) headed by Mr. Juan Miguel Del Rosario, President.

Alstaire with Mr. Juan Miguel del Rosario, President of ACPI, Mr. Rene de Guzman, Toon City and Mr. Rene Misa, Executive Director of ACPI.

MOA SigningAfter this there were 3 presentations, first entitled The Philippine Creative Economy by Mr. Senen M. Perlada, Director of DTI-EMB, he showed some infographics of the Philippine Creative Industry. The 2^nd presentation was by Mr. Juan Miguel Del Rosario, President of ACPI about the Business Opportunities in the Philippine Industry, more infographics and videos about the different studios here.

Alvin Juban GDAP Presentation

Presentation 3 was from Mr. Alvin Juban, President of the Game Developers Association of the Philippines (GDAP), instead of showing more infographics, he told everyone on how Ubisoft, a AAA Game Company from France, put up an office here in the Philippines. It was the liveliest of the presentations. The last presentation was from Mr. Miguel Matthew “Magoo” del Mundo, OIC and Acting President of SIKAP – Creative Content Creators Association of the Philippines, who talked about Doing Business in the Creative Content Industry.

Baron and Alstaire with Migs del Mundo, former Top Peg artist, and Magoo del Mundo’s brother.

The closing remarks were from Undersecretary Rowel S. Barba of the Department of Trade and Industry Philippines.

Alstaire with Lawrence Panganiban

A Networking Luncheon soon followed, I was able to talk to a guy named Lawrence Panganiban, who was representing the Cebu Chamber of Commerce. He was surprised that there was a creative industry in the Philippines, and he was so enthusiastic to be invited.

Next was the highlight of the event, the One on One Business Meetings. The Korean Companies were arranged in the function room with a table and provided an interpreter. We were able to add to our meetings because of some of our scheduled meetings were short, so we had time to talk to other companies that we did not schedule for.

Below are the companies we met with and the summary of each meeting.

For Animation:

Company Name: DPS

Representative: Jin-Kyu Nam

Position: President

Website: http://dpsani.com/eng/

Current Project: Hold on tight! – http://dpsani.com/bbs/board.php?bo_table=2_1_1e&wr_id=17

About Company: They needed help on an animation series, which look very much like Japanese Anime, they had 8 Episodes at 22 minutes each that were outsourced to China. I think they had to pull it out from China because of some misunderstandings. Their target deadline though was for the end of 2020. Out of all the meetings we had, he was the only one who was interested in visiting our studio. Which the representative of DTI said, was a positive note, it meant he was interested in us.

Company Name: Tak Toon Enterprises

Representative: Han Tae Sik

Position: Producer

Website: https://taktoon.modoo.at/

Current Project: The Curious World of Linda 36 episodes x 7 mins each – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg7VDKdvY2w , The Forks with Spiky Hands – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ej5AbbxnII&list=PL4_CUw2Br9c5uq5PrTC1xfu52aLwdSaSO

About Company: They have both 2D and 3D animation projects that need outsourcing. The different art styles, some were like cut out characters and some were full 3D, but their target audience were younger kids.

Jap, Alstaire and Mr. Nick Jo of Pictionary Art Factory

Company Name: Pictionary Art Factory

Representative: Nick Jo

Position: Director / CFO

Website: https://www.pictionary.tv/

Current Project: Aerover – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjVN8MGBuxs&feature=youtu.be

About Company: They needed help on Episodes of Aerover, a 2D action animation with 3D drone animation. They were willing to outsource from pre-production to post-production.

Company Name: RedRover Co., Ltd.

Representative: Won Chuil Hwang

Position: Head of Animation Business / Producer

Website: http://www.redrover.co.kr/en/home_en

Current Project: https://www.awn.com/news/pipeline-studios-toonbox-entertainment-developing-nut-job-tv-series

About Company: They are developing a Nut Job 2D animation TV Series based on the 3D Animated movie that came out in 2014. They said the movie was a hit, with a budget of 43 million USD, they made 120 million USD in the box office, but the sequel though was a flop though, maybe due to marketing. I told them that I was able to see the first movie, but I did not know there was a sequel. They wanted to do something with their IP so they are planning to make a 2D animated series like Tangled and Big Hero Six, which also started as 3D Animated movies.

Company Name: ANYZAC

Representative: Byungjun Lee

Position: CEO

Website: http://anyzac.com/

About Company: More of a 3D Animation studio, but has some 2D projects for outsourcing. Interested to outsource pre-production and 2D animation.

For Game Development:

Company Name: CSI Studio Co., Ltd.

Representative: Jack SHin (Jong-Soo)

Position: President

Website: https://www.neoseeker.com/animal-kingdom/

About the Company: A Game and Software company, has a personal project that he wants to outsource. He has an IP for a game that was created back in 2003. He said it was a good concept about the Animal Kingdom, but the game mechanics were poor. He wanted it to be updated and be relevant again. Baron was interested in giving him a proposal for the redesign.

For Web-Toons:

Company Name: D&C Media

Representative: Sunjoo Oh

Position: Rights Division / Division Manager

Website: http://www.dncmedia.co.kr/

About the Company: Produces webcomics. Looking for collaboration but don’t know what kind.

Baron was able to talk to them last year in the Asia-Eu Cartoon Connection 2019. Baron proposed to do a Portal here in the Philippines but he never heard back. Ms. Sunjoo Oh was surprised to hear of this, so she had Baron to send the proposal again, although she said that it wasn’t a top priority for their company.

Baron with Mr. Blue Company

Baron was also able to talk to Mr. Blue, a webtoon company. But he could not understand what they needed. They needed companies with cooperation experience with Korean companies. We believe they were looking for co-producers on some projects.

In my opinion, this was a great opportunity to showcase what our industry had to offer, unlike before when we had B2B meetings in Japan and Korea, this time we had an opportunity to invite them to our studios. Although, I can sense that most of the companies that attended, did not have a clue about what and how they will do business with us. Like what Mr. Alvin Juban said about Ubisoft, they don’t need us. They have people, backing by their government and many modern facilities and equipment. They were curious though on what we had to offer, they were also impressed by the products we showed, particularly our work on The Crop Circle Warriors game. But like Ubisoft, they saw a potential for collaboration, maybe if they need more manpower since they outsource to China. I also felt Korean animation looks close to Anime but was more targeted to the Western market, so I think we would be able to business with them in the future.

Text and Photos by: AlstaireA. Sarthou

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Categories : Animation, Crop Circles, Jobert Animation, Jobert Anime, Jobert Cartoon, Mobile games, Philippine Animation, Pinoy Animation, U.C.C.W, Ultimate, Uncategorized, warriors

Unreal Engine Masterclass 2018

17 12 2018

Last December 10, 2018, I was one of the attendees who attended the free Masterclass for Unreal Engine (the software we use for our ‘Crop Circle Warriors’ mobile game) at the College of St. Benilde. The said class was from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm. The master class was held by Chris Murphy, an evangelist for Epic Games and founder of Pub Games with over 10 years of experience with Unreal Engine.

Introductory Lessons on Unreal Engine

Project setup

Controller setup

Importing assets

Building materials

Creating character classes

Creating AI

Navigation

Blending animation

Spawning enemies

Maintaining game state and configuring in-game UI

Design principles

Blueprint debugging and performance optimization techniques.

All these techniques were used in our mobile game already.

Advanced Technical Art

Landscapes

Procedural foliage

Procedural spline tools

Particle effects

GPU particle effects

Material tesselation

material masking

world position effects

Screen space particle effects

Volumetric fog

The introductory lessons covered all the basics that are needed to create a simple 3D character that moves and followed by enemies in a small level. He taught us how to import animation assets, blending separate animations to create a new animation, create a basic state machine which dictates what animation will play depending on what button is pressed e.g. move forward, move backward, jump etc. All these techniques were used in our game already.

After the basics, we moved to the advanced part of the class which is technical art that covers shaders, visual effects, level creation tools like the use of spline to procedurally generate landscape paths and procedurally generate foliage. He also taught us the landscape tools and how to sculpt hills and cliffs.

The discussion on Landscapes, Procedural foilage (creating 3D plants easily), world position offset effects (how to manipulate objects in the overall landscape), volumetric fog (realistic fog that adapts to lights), were new to me and this knowledge can help us make our games much better. I will apply the new techniques I learned to the Crop Circle Warriors mobile game.

Unfortunately, I was not able to ask the questions I needed to ask due to the many participants in the auditorium who also had questions and took pictures with Mr. Murphy. Due to the same reason, I was not able to show the sample of our mobile to discuss the problems that I cannot solve by myself. They said they will be scheduling another Unreal Master Class soon, so maybe we will have another opportunity to show our game.

Words by: Jap Tolentino

Pictures from IGMA

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Categories : Animation, Anime, Crop Circles, Jobert, Jobert Animation, Jobert Anime, Jobert Cartoon, Miracle Animation Studios, mobile game, Mobile games, Philippine Animation, Pinoy Animation, Pinoy Anime, U.C.C.W, Uncategorized, warriors

Game Seminar at the College of St. Benilde

15 01 2018

We were invited by Ms. Gwendelyn Abacano Foster last week to a seminar at the College of St. Benilde (CSB), featuring Mr. Ian Garner. Ian Garner works with Another Indie, an independent game publisher from China, that has published multiple critically acclaimed and commercially successful games such as Lost Castle. This was another opportunity for us to learn, especially publishing our game to China, which we don’t have any idea on how to go about it.

Mr. Ian Garner

We also have a new contributor to the game – Faith Dimaranan. She’s a game development student at the Asia Pacific College. We really need someone, aside from Jap, with game knowledge and game logic to help us in other aspects of our mobile game. She is helping us in fixing the localization, achievements and optimizing the game.

Ms. Faith Dimaranan

Jap and Faith joined me at the seminar. We had trouble finding a parking space so we were a bit late when we got to the seminar. There were a few attendees, maybe about 20-30 people. Some were students and some developers. The topic was familiar, like finding a hook (selling point) of your game, and how to email publishers about your game. He also mentioned that developers should always attend events like ESGS and Gamecon because these are the places to get good feedback than having feedback from game testers. It is better to showcase your game to gamers and developers, because they have a better game sense, meaning they know what to look for in a game. He said that Google is not accessible to China, so we really need to have a local publisher in China to have our game published. We can email publishers directly and if our game catches their attention, they will publish it.

After the seminar, it was a good opportunity for us to show our game to Mr. Garner as well as to the other developers to get feedback. Unfortunately, a lot of people were having photo ops and were pitching their ideas as well. So we showed our games to 2 other people. Ian Christian Sevilla, who is a game developer, programmer and College Instructor at CSB. He also gave feedback last 2016 at ESGS. When he saw it he said it improved a lot, but he commented on the User Experience once again. He gave some feedback on fixing visuals for a better experience for the user. While playing, he commented that we fix the balance of the game. I thought he was referring to the balance of the playability of the characters. He meant the balance of the progression of the game. He said that the game should have a slow progression, we should teach the player what buttons to press first before making him fight monsters at once.

Mr. Ian Christian Sevilla (with backpack)

He gave us a link to how the Megaman game made players experience each ability at the start of the game.

Actually, it made sense, because he really had a hard time figuring the controls when he was playing the game. Faith and Jap immediately had ideas on how to fix this.

Kevin Brian Valmonte, a game developer, programmer and college instructor at CSB also tested our game. He said that the game looked good, and only needed to be polished. Instead of pressing a button to continue from a tutorial, why not just tap the screen to continue. He also said to fix the loading screen, there was a lot of dead space and we should remove the delay between screens. He also commented on the art, but that was just his preference and it wasn’t really that important.

We had good feedback here and Faith has volunteered on fixing the tutorial integration in the game. She is also optimizing the localization so it will be easier to add more languages later.

It is good that she has game programming knowledge and she figured out what part of the game needs to be fixed. We are now applying improvements from the feedback we gathered and Faith has committed to helping us optimize and polish the game.

Article and Pictures by Alstaire A. Sarthou