New Game!! – Episode 3 – Aoba’s Worries and Nene Shows Her Game Development Progress

Now that Hazuki approved Aoba’s and Kou’s character designs, it’s time for the initial prototyping.

In the beginning of the episode, Hifumi decides to go clothes shopping. As expected, she looks great in the outfits she tried on. When she is about to buy them, a sales woman comes up. She becomes frightened that she gives the clothes to her and leaves the store. I guess she still has a long way before she becomes more open.

The next day, Aoba works with Kou to finalize the character design for Peco. After Aoba finished her meeting with Kou, she saw that Hifumi is working on a test model. She made a character model using one of Aoba’s design. Kou comes over and Hifumi suggests adding fur. Aoba decides to help out without having experience in 3D modeling.

I have to admit that while having fur is nice, there is a drawback. If you played video games before, tessellation is used for things like fur, hair, and grass to make it look realistic. Of course, it can Impact performance. This is true with NVidia video cards doing better at rendering these things compared to AMD video cards.  It only gets worse from there when console hardware is involved. When Yun mentions the performance impact with multiple bears on the field, realistic fur is out of the question.

In short, they decided on using textures. Sadly, Aoba feels down since she can’t contribute anything. Thankfully, Hifumi realizes how Aoba feels and cheers her up by taking her out to lunch. Aoba then shares her problems due to lack of 3D character modeling experience.

To me, she shouldn’t become worried since everyone has been there when he or she just started their job. Nobody gains a lot of experience overnight, even after working for one year. It takes time. Thankfully, Aoba is willing to learn more so she can help out next time.

Meanwhile, Umiko works on her prototypes while Kou is watching. Yes, it crashes when the bear is about to burn the other bear. Nene is also working on the fire-breathing too and her game crashed. Thankfully, Nene and Umiko manages to fix their own games so it would work.

Either way, it seems that Nene impressed her classmate that she asks her if she want to apply for a part-time job. It’s obvious that Nene doesn’t want to since she has a game to work on. Either way, she is determined to impress Umiko with her game.

Eventually, Umiko meets Nene at college. She notices how worn out the programing books Nene used. It seems that Nene wanted Umiko to come to show her game development progress. Nene impressed Umiko on how she managed to make the dragon spit flame out of its mouth and the character receives damage. Still, it seems that overall performance and collusion detection still need improvement. At least she told Nene about Aboa’s achievement of winning the character competition with Kou’s help.

Overall, it’s yet another fun episode. We find out that Hazuki blames herself for not doing a good job in employee retention a long time ago. It’s funny how she will only take employees that are cute enough and tolerate their failures. It’s probably not the best business practice. Then again. It’s not surprising since she likes having cute girls work under her. Aside from that, Umiko becomes more open towards having Hazuki feeding her. It’s obvious that Nene is finally rubbing on her. Don’t worry, she didn’t tell anyone what happened. ¶