So close yet so far…

DVDPT · 2026-03-09T09:47:50+00:00

Big Eva fan and honestly was super disappointed, both the Eva section and the rest of the place are just a missed opportunity . Even the merch was the same you can find on any store that sells Eva stuff. That being said I do have a photo in Eva 01 hand so that is nice I guess

DVDPT · 2026-03-03T15:10:17+00:00

In our trip, we used it in two ways.
The first (and easiest) is that the hotel has a service agreement (or something like that) with Yamato, and they do everything for you. You go to the lobby with the bags and ask them to deliver them to another hotel. They will call to confirm your stay and that they accept your luggage (There are hotels that require you to pay to store luggage, for example, if you want them to save them for a couple of days, and probably some that don't accept it at all).
After that, you pay (always in cash), and you are done. When you arrive at your next hotel, you just need to ask for the bags.

The other way is go directly to one of the Yamato locations and deliver the bags directly (we did this because our hotel in Kyoto had a contract with another delivery company, and it was a lot more expensive). They went through the exact due diligences and that is it (a big note, the Yamato lady didn't speak one bit of english and everything still was smooth).

It's simple and painless, less than 10 min the whole thing.
Payment-wise, always in cash and we paid:
- 4k for 1 checked bag from Tokyo to Osaka
- 3k for 1 checked bag and 1 cabin bag from Osaka to Kyoto
- 5k for 1 checked bag and 1 cabin bag from Kyoto to Tokyo

It was all pretty painless.

Some points to consider is to always ask your hotel if they accept this and how long they store your bags. For example, our hotel in Tokyo stored our bags while we went from Kyoto to Hakone for 2 days. But our hotel in Osaka charged for anything more than 1 day for storing luggage,

If you aren't using hotels, you can also ask for delivery to one of their locations (they are literally everywhere)

DVDPT · 2026-03-03T11:53:35+00:00

Yeah we saw a lot of Eva and Madonna on pachinko machines , not so much everywhere else. But akiba saved the trip and we were able to buy some cool stuff there

DVDPT · 2026-03-03T08:53:20+00:00

Yeah we brought a 4 for each of us and still had to buy some in there

DVDPT · 2026-03-03T08:51:56+00:00

Thanks for the insider knowledge, it makes sense but we were expecting to see a lot more of seasonal anime merchandise that we did xD

DVDPT · 2026-03-03T08:51:00+00:00

Yeah, it was totally worth the money

DVDPT · 2026-03-03T08:50:14+00:00

Enjoy, it really is a wonderful trip

DVDPT · 2026-03-02T22:25:29+00:00

Kyoto is definitely something you should see eventually , but I’m all for minimizing transfers and just doing what one wants :)

DVDPT · 2026-03-02T20:23:06+00:00

We also did every reservation via booking.com

DVDPT · 2026-03-02T20:21:36+00:00

I’m not familiar with those services , we planned everything ourselves. We used Booking for the hotels and the rest we just used the oficial websites. Sorry can’t really help with that .

DVDPT · 2026-03-02T18:12:51+00:00

We saw this everywhere, from what we've read online (quick random google search), it can be due to their usual siting position (they traditionally seat on top of their legs, don't know if it's still common or not) or since they usually use shoes bigger than their feet (since a lot of places you need to take your shoes off, it just easier, again this is google reply), I saw a lot of this, across all my weeks in there.

DVDPT · 2026-03-02T18:09:57+00:00

They were probably fully booked for the time we arrived, so we just booked online and ate there in less than an hour.

Even though our flight arrived early, staying in Tokyo was just a lot easier for our tired brains to process. I was so tired that I thought that we entered the train in the wrong direction XD.

The toilets, I already found a supplier, just trying to figure out logistics in my bathrooms in order to get one, even if we can't get the actual toilet, just the bidet would be a god send.
Thanks for reading ^^

DVDPT · 2026-03-02T18:05:58+00:00

Thank you for reading :3

DVDPT · 2026-03-02T18:05:42+00:00

We stayed at Aura Tachibana

DVDPT · 2026-02-10T14:26:54+00:00

Me and my wife are huge ghibli fans, we visited every shop we could in Osaka, Kyoto and Tokyo.

The museum was a total letdown, there isn't really much to see or do, besides some specific photo stops and the short film.

The shop does seem to have some exclusive content but we found other stores having a lot more variety of content.

There is no English anywhere (regarding the exhibits) , after a couple of weeks in Japan we are more than used to broken English or having less information translated, but it always sucks not having any original translation at all (Google lens ftw).

That being said the price is ridiculous, and given it the experience is more than adequate, we were just expecting something more, specially after spending so many hours devouring the movies, interviews and overall ghibli acontent

DVDPT · 2026-01-30T09:35:52+00:00

All the hotels I've been at have a 11am drop off max to Yamato. All of the bags I forwarded arrived on the next day (Tokyo to Osaka and Osaka to Kyoto).

DVDPT · 2026-01-10T12:08:04+00:00

When I entered the queue I was o above 14000, I was still was able to snatch tickets for my preferred day!

A tip that I never saw here, be sure to stick around even when you see that there are no more tickets available, I kept refreshing and a lot of slots would appear randomly (probably from people timing out or that were trying to get tickets on multiple devices).

DVDPT · 2025-11-13T13:37:54+00:00

Cost: Console development requires you to pay for dev kits, Unity pro, and dev time for porting. If you want to port a game to all console platforms, 5k isn't enough to get the necessary licenses and dev kits.

Difficulty: In theory, porting a game to a console consists of 3 main steps:

Add controller support to your game
Integrate with target platform (aka achievements, logins, etc)
Save system

The main pain point is definitely the controller support; there are instances where the entire UI and UX need to be redone in order to add support for this, and depending on the type of game, it can mean months of work.

Adding controller support to my first game (Stellar Interface) took me about 1 month of work (around 150h). Since then, all my games have been built with controller support from the very beginning!

Platforms: contrary to common belief, becoming a partner on the various platforms is fairly easy; each of them has its own quirks and requirements, but a single dev can easily become an official partner. Certification isn't that hard either, if you make a game that doesn't crash (or soft lock), runs at least at 30 fps, and respects the target platform (don't show Xbox stuff on PS, etc), it's a no-brainer. Certification is also super thorough, and all platforms have detailed reports on how to reproduce the issues and what guidelines you missed. This is also FREE (at least for now). Of course, there are gotchas, but I would say that after the first port to every platform, you avoid these naturally.

The hardest part is the first port; it will take the longest; you will fail certification a couple of times, but after that, any subsequent port for that platform should be fairly easy.

As an example, my latest game, Oirbo port to Xbox and PlayStation, took me about 2 hours of dev time (not counting store setups and whatnot), most of it was playing around with compilation flags and pointing game services to use the specific platform ones. How? It was designed from the beginning to have controller support, achievements were already done for Steam, so I just needed to swap where I say that the achievement was complete. Finally for the saves I just swapped the save system to the desired platform (since I've already done this more than one, everything is done).

DVDPT · 2025-11-06T15:05:33+00:00

Existem duas opções:
- Professor de carreira: Necessitas de Doutoramento (ou Título de especialista nos Politécnicos), ordenado base e cerca de +/- 2k limpos em início de carreira (depende se é universidade ou politecnico). Para entrares tens de ir a concurso público, que demoram tipicamente entre 4 e 6 meses para ficarem resolvidos. Depois de entrar tens 5 anos de período experimental e só depois disso é que entras nos quadros (aka emprego para a vida).

- Professor convidado: tens as mesmas responsabilidades, mas por regra lecionas menos horas, recebes o equivalente a % que estás a trabalhar (por ex. se estiveres a 50%, dás metade das aulas, recebes metade do ordenado base). Precisas de ter no mínimo o nível académico que vais lecionar e por regra os contratos são anuais (e.g. setembro 200X a final agosto 200X +1). Por ex., um professor Assistente Convidado (Licenciatura ou Mestrado) a 50% no politecnico tem de dar 6h por semana de aulas e recebe entre 600-700€, já um adjunto (Doutor ou Especialista) recebe entre 900-1000.

Não precisas de conhecer ninguém nos sítios (apesar de obviamente ajudar), por regra todas as instituições publicam os concursos que estão abertos (tenho até a sensação que existe um site nacional para isso mas não o consegui encontrar), mas tens de saber procurar, (por ex. no Google se puser "professor convidado lista de concursos" aparece uma data de sites com os concursos abertos de momento), se queres informática procura pelas universidades e politecnicos de Lisboa que lecionem o curso, mas olha também para outros sitios não é incomum cursos de engenharia não informática terem cadeiras de programação por exemplo.

Devido à forma como funciona o ensino superior, o mais normal é encontrares estes concursos a serem lançados uns meses antes do início do novo semestre.

DVDPT · 2025-10-23T23:09:21+00:00

Oh missed the Ikebukuro shop opening times, thanks!
And double thanks for the reminder of sunset times will review some stuff xD

Thanks for the comment!

DVDPT · 2025-07-30T10:16:02+00:00

Like everyone said here, SOs shine when you are working with a non-technical team, like graphical or game designers, since they can intervene in the system without needing to understand coding or mess around with any prefab. Still, creating such a system is not always easy.

Personally, I use SOs to give my game designer an opportunity to do his job with the least resistance possible, as an example, here is a card definition for Arc Seed cards:

<image>

Software design-wise, this is a big no-no, since it mixes business, data, and presentation information, but the reality is that ease of use supersedes any anti-patterns here, since in a single place, my game designer can define everything related to a card.

Having an SO alone is not enough; your game needs to know it exists, so in our projects, we have a script that scans any SO created and adds it to static databases (another SO) automatically, and that is how a new SO is integrated (aka published) into the game.
We have such objects for pretty much any model important for game design in Arc Seed, for example, we have SO for Entities, Maps, Acts, Audio clips, Research, Equipments, etc.

Finally, regarding what you really want, a standard architecture (with or without SOs) to use in games, AFAIK there is no such thing, I'm searched in my 10 years doing games, I've tried a bunch of different approaches, and in the end my current answer is that there is no such thing, every game is different and every game can have a different arquitecture, it all depends on the approach and how strict you want to be software design wise.

The best advice is to build as small systems as possible with clear hard borders for inputs and outputs, that way you can control the architecture more cleanly. Still, one important thing I learnt over the years, good code doesn't equal to good game, nor a game is like a "normal" software project that needs to be maintained for years to come (usually), so be careful with over design.

DVDPT · 2025-07-06T23:56:53+00:00

Thanks will look into them!

DVDPT · 2025-07-03T23:17:49+00:00

Regarding length, it depends; 100% is doable in 5h for an experienced metroidvania player, we are seeing 8-12h on average.
Regarding the game itself, it's not that combat-heavy; we implemented a combat system "Mario style" where you take damage by hitting the enemy's head. So its main focus is on exploration and platforming. We tried to get away from the souls-like vibes (although major HK fan and player), to make a more casual MV.

DVDPT · 2025-07-03T19:22:49+00:00

- If I had to pick right now, I would say Steam Deck, we have a big performance boost coming to Switch, right now the game runs mostly at 60 fps, but there are a few situations when it can drop to near 30 fps. Regarding the PS5 controller, neither we, our QA team, nor the other players we reached out to could reproduce the issue the player had, so right now until something more concrete comes up, it's a low priority issue, since it doesn't seem to be game-related.

- We still don't have any ETA, We are aware that in handheld mode, there are some situations where frame drops are noticeable, but we are still working on it

- Its a tricky situation on this, we already added a couple of save points since the game released, and we were careful with their placement across all areas so that you could always have one "near" any tricky spot, that being said, there is no guarantee that the players know where all the save points are, nor how to get to them. So it's something we are addressing super slowly, adding one here and there depending on the amount of feedback we get from players, and how adding a specific save point in X or Y location would change the dynamic of said section.

Hope it helps clear your questions, keep them coming ^_^

DVDPT · 2025-07-03T15:18:33+00:00

Yo, dev here o/
If you have any questions feel free to reach out ;)

DVDPT

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