Organizationally, though, Nakazato said it was tough to establish a "team culture." The team grew rapidly, from 10 up to 150, and most team members were seasoned professionals. He seemed to mean that it was tough to mold everyone to play FeelPlus' way; from the rest of his talk, we imagine that was exacerbated by using a Western engine that wasn't ideal for JRPG development, as well as having to cater to Microsoft's publication standards. Some people didn't "make it" as the team grew, and "various management issues had to be resolved" as well. Ominious!
Localization: The best thing they did here was use a global infrastructure that allowed for simultaneous localization into nine languages. Each region got tools that let them check localized assets before sending them to FeelPlus. Nakazato pointed out that "many last-minute changes" still caused problems, but left it at that.
Tuning and Testing: The first good point here was the database. A global bug-tracking database was used, with reports in English coming into Microsoft's MGSA Japanese studio. They would translate the bug reports into Japanese for FeelPlus. This is just another example of Nakazato's sincere appreciation for the production services that Microsoft provides; maybe MS should consider an EA Partners style service? He also gave the nod to priority management. Each bug was classified as P1, P2 and P3, and even if a (simple) P3 bug passed a programmer's desk, the big P1 bugs got done first. This kept the project on track, and also prevented someone "fixing" a bug and causing more downstream. Once again, we saw last-minute changes as the sole occupant of the "bad" list.
In conclusion, Nakazato apologized for not actually talking about cross-cultural issues. He summarized that the project team grew too fast, that the new team, new platform, and new middleware made the project challenging, that Microsoft's production support was excellent, and that the "endgame process" -- localization and QA -- went really well. We'll admit we really wanted to hear about cross-cultural development, but Nakazato gave one of the best high-level game post-mortems that we've witnessed. We didn't feel short-changed.
