Today is the only day on which I can write my annual reflection, so I am taking the opportunity to review this year’s progress and next year’s plans.

Things I accomplished

Attended a Japanese language school
Passed JLPT N2 (I passed N3 in July 2023)
Created, published, and began selling a toon-rendering shader plugin
Developed an FF9 shader mod
Shader-related side projects (SSR, a Hi-Fi Rush-inspired modification to Unity’s deferred-rendering pipeline, a GPU path tracer, and probe-based GI)
Studied the Unity 6 RenderGraph API
Found a job in Japan (starting in 2025)

Things I did not accomplish

JLPT N1 (the results are not out yet, but I probably did not pass)
Speaking Japanese fluently, expanding my vocabulary, and learning more programming terminology
I did not play enough games seriously (the ones I completed seriously were FF9, Unicorn Overlord, Tales of Arise, Tactics Ogre, and Ys VIII)
I am still terrible at Python

Impressions of Japan

After arriving in Japan, I became acutely aware of the gap between Taiwan and other countries. Although the yen has depreciated to the point where the salaries of ordinary Japanese office workers are now close to those in Taiwan, the gap in resources is still enormous. For entertainment, culture, and learning, Japan has far richer resources than Taiwan, both physical and online. For example, when I was in Taiwan and wanted to search for technical articles about Unity, game engines, or rendering, I often had to rely on Chinese websites such as Zhihu to find material that went deep enough. Japan also has a huge amount of online material in these areas—there are simply enough people competing to produce it. (I can only understand less than 30% of it right now, so I often have to look for an English explanation afterward.) There are also many large bookstores specializing in technical books, and buying books (as well as standing around reading manga) is a popular pastime.

💡 The weather in Japan is also much better than in Taiwan… at least it does not rain as often.

The result of this natural resource advantage is that Japanese engineers are, on average, stronger in game-engine technology than Taiwanese engineers. By “stronger,” I do not mean coding ability; I mean that more people understand the know-how of specific fields, such as rendering.

💡 Taiwan also has many people who are excellent at coding and problem solving.

About 2024

I feel that my progress in both Japanese and programming fell somewhat short of my ideal, especially after comparing myself with other experts. But if I compare myself only with who I was before, I am still improving day by day. Every day I am a little better than the day before, and I think that is the most important thing.

About 2025

I am currently dealing with all the practical details of moving from Osaka to Tokyo. In addition to focusing on work in 2025, I have a few extra projects I would like to take on:

Buy a PS5 and an impressive projector, then play FF7: Rebirth and Astro Bot
Pass JLPT N1
Continue strengthening my C# skills and study the source code of projects such as UniTask and R3
Write a DirectX renderer and strengthen my C++ fundamentals
Create Blender add-ons in Python
Research practical AI tools and workflows for game development
Publish blog posts more frequently to force myself to write down what I learn