Yokotsuka: When the app was released there was no black-and-white layer. Many comic artists were eager to have it added and I was really happy for them when they got it and wrote back to us. Personally, I develop with the artist in mind, so it really is encouraging to me when I get requests and reactions.

Manga Perspective is a really interesting feature to me, personally. When we were implementing it there were a lot of subtle adjustments behind the scenes and it was a battle to get it good enough for release.

Inaba: This was personally a huge achievement for me because the animation feature was so difficult to create, from the initial planning to the actual development. I was in charge of the File object function, which was a huge challenge technologically. To be honest, at the beginning when it was first released we got a lot of flack and got a lot of opinions that were hard to hear. But, since then, in working with a lot of people and companies in the industry, we took on a lot of feedback and implemented it into updates of the app, to the point where it is now used by a number animation companies. Recently many people are trying out animating by themselves, which is a surprise to me. I think it’s interesting to see the methods they animate with and the way they capture expressions because they are different than commercial animation.

Shimada: Clip Studio Paint has a team of about 30 professional testers in-house who work closely with the development team to check all devices through a series of rigorous tests.

We have some testers who have a proverbial “god hand” and are masters of their jobs, skilled at rooting out critical bugs. Many bugs are almost impossible to find under normal test conditions and require a specific set of circumstances. Sometimes you find yourself wondering “How did they set this up to test that?” When these bugs are found they usually can be linked to a larger problem which really helps us all out.

Shinta: Campaigns involving food were made with the intent to cheer on creators. The rice campaign was inspired by the thought that creators should be eating foods that only require one hand. One-handed food = rice balls = rice.

The collaboration was something that I just thought we needed to try and go for. We got a lot of rejections for that because nobody knew what Clip Studio was. Nowadays it’s not just manga; games and animation production companies are using us more which helps pave the way for more opportunities.

Shinta: I would often do the shipping of the prizes to the winners and found that when I included a handwritten letter it would be met with joy and uploaded to social media. That surprised me.

Shinta: I want to try collaborations with different industries. We got the opportunity to make animations for a collaboration music video, which I think everyone enjoyed. I have my sights set on collaborations with fashion, architecture, automobiles, and other industries to show new, interesting ways that Clip Studio Paint can be used. (I have no connections to go on however...)

Shimada: Testing the APNG file compatible update was very fun for the testers. We enjoyed creating several original APNG following the LINE creation guidelines and uploaded it to the LINE simulator to check the colors and display. There was a time when it was super popular to release your own set of stickers so we received a lot of thanks from creators.

Yamazaki: We had to renew the interface to make sure that creators from all around the globe could use it smoothly on whatever device or operating system they had. Many users were writing that it was hard to search for materials by name so we created a way to search by Content ID. I think that adjusting the features like this really made me think this had become an international service.

Yamazaki: Many popular materials are popular all around the world. Saying that, Japan definitely leans towards black-and-while materials needed for manga while Korea and the West like brushes and color comic materials needed for Webtoon creation.

Recently more top ASSETS in the rankings are from overseas creators, so I think the service is becoming more international.

Joana: There were many, but I think that the particularly impressive ones were Wacom’s “Connected Ink” and Celsys’ “21-hour drawing party”. I acted as MC for an international 21-hour online drawing party where I could chat and draw with creators from many different countries. It was tough fighting back the urge to sleep during those 21 hours, but I got a lot of inspiration from the creators and it was a lot of fun, despite how difficult it was to execute.

Currently we do regular livestream events from the company. I am happy to do them because they provide some really exciting content for creators. Because we are doing this for the viewers overseas, there is always the issue of time difference. There’s nothing you can do about it resulting in either getting you up early or you staying up late!

Joana: I have to say that it called for a lot more translation. The most outstanding contest in recent years is one that we do yearly, the International Comic/Manga Schools Contest. This is a student contest with students from all over the world entering and submitting many really amazing works. The comics are amazing, but it is also amazing to see younger students enter as well. Translating while keeping the nuance of the work is a daunting task, but I find it an interesting challenge.

Nakazawa: Now that it’s the past I can say this but, before the English version was released we used machine translation and outsourced to respond to overseas users. Whenever we got an email in English I felt like the userbase really had gone international. After that we released Clip Studio Paint in more languages and the overseas userbase really exploded. Currently we have native speakers on the team who help us think about the cultural background element!

Nakazawa: We know that this is an international app with many creators who have deadlines so we work to support them so they can create without issue. Whenever a user writes in with a thank-you in any language we get to see that user as an individual who is cheering us on.

Inaba: Personally I love Apple products and had been researching the idea since the Apple Pencil was announced, before the project started in the company. It took about 3 months for the prototype to be made and within about a year we could run all features of the program on the iPad. Then it took about a year until the program was ready to be officially released.

Before the release I was taking it home to work on my own art as well. I would find bugs, test its usability, and try to improve upon it. The Edge keyboard came about because I found it was hard to do redo and undo.

Yokotsuka: It took about a month to get the feature to show results. Each morning we would check the output results and tinker with the parameters that seemed to be tripping the machine learning up and try again...It was a lot of trial and error. I was very moved when we were finally able to add it to the program.

Inaba: We actually didn’t need to change anything for the iPad version of Clip Studio Paint to operate on the iPhone. However that meant the iPad UI was just being reflected on the iPhone which didn’t seem usable. It was a battle to get the UI mobile-friendly. We want to have all features available even on mobile devices.

The desktop UI was converted to the current mobile UI but we plan to keep improving it so that it is more intuitive for a mobile device.

Shimada: Many features are added because of numerous requests from users. We contact users who requested the feature after it gets released in the app. Sometimes it’s trying to see what else everyone wants or what trends are developing. The test team, customer support team, and the development team also join forces to try and figure out the user’s point of view. When we released Webtoon features it was hard to gather information just in Japan so we had to find Korean Webtoon artists to interview, searched a lot online, and developed our plan based on that.

Inaba: I think the most interesting part was when the test team had to procure Galaxy devices from every country all at once to check how it worked. The best part of it being when we had about 70 devices, all just Galaxy.

The Android version development team was 4 people at first and we soon welcomed engineers who weren’t normally involved in Paint, even going to other branches of the group company. Ultimately, we had accumulated the most engineers in the history of Clip Studio Paint, all working on this project.

Shimada: In the past we just had to check how the app worked on Windows and Mac computers. When it ballooned to iPad, iPhone, Chromebook and Android tablets and smartphones, it meant that one tester would have to have a lot more devices. (Total value: about $8,000 USD!) On top of that there were 7 languages to test which was especially difficult for testers when the languages were first added. Thanks to the development team the way the app is constructed means there is little effect on each language’s text so we can check one language. It really helps.