Final Post

6 August

Last day of work!

Everyone did their final piece of work and we got ourselves a meeting with our Product Owner. Because the Product Owner could not attend the Post-Mortem tomorrow, he wanted us to show him how we are going to present the game tomorrow and use it as a rehearsal. After the internal presentation, the Product Owner shwoed as what we could have done better but somehow the team disagrees and showed concerns of time constraints, design issues etc. But no matter, the team felt that we did a good job making such a well polished game in these 2 months.

Hurray team RUNDOWN!

The ALL-STARS poster is out! It looks really nice, but it will only be shown when we are back!

5 August

All 6 Teams are Gold! We are ready to ship our games at the end of this summer! The artists from all teams gathered to discuss on a secret mission and are working to make the ALL-STARS poster for this Summer 2009 bunch of games. Stay Tuned!

4 August

More testing and certifying! Today was as busy as yesterday and we got 4 out of 6 games Gold today so that leaves 2 more to go!

Sound bug, Menu bug, Loading Speed, Network problems?!

3 August

Code is frozen and nothing should be implemented and ready for all Release Candidates for all teams to be certified as Gold. This is probably the busiest week for the QA Leads to play through every single detail in the respective QA Checklist to certify the Release Candidate and feedback to the team whether they need to be certified with the QA Mentor or have to remake the Release Candidate because of bugs and other issues such as technical problems. The QA Leads have tested 3 out of 6 games so far and all of them were Gold today. However, 2 of the 3 teams want to Release another improved version to test so we are back to 5 games to test. Being a QA Lead is not easy at this stage as you have to refresh yourself to know what is going on and what to expect as you cannot assume that everytime the team submits a Candidate it is the same one and must try to repoduce the steps for the bug which were previously recorded. Testing out conditions and ways to reproduce a bug that you never expect would seem like finding a lost piece of puzzle before the puzzle is complete.

Final UPDATES?

Day 46 – 23th July Thursday
Well today we successfully get our Achievements feature in, well the day before I still thinking if it was a good decision to make for the team to try out this new feature just a day before feature freeze. But as there was no downside in making this decision, I therefore pushed my programmers hard on the last day to get this feature in. And I believed this decision caused the game to have more replay ability value. I am glad to make this good decision promptly if not this feature will not be in at all. After feature freeze is our weekly testing session, most games have changed quite a lot from the previous milestones. All our games are getting shaped up and ready for bug fixing and polishing.

Day 47 – 24th July Friday
As usual, I started the morning with our daily stand up and presented in the weekly team presentation. After that, I let the team rest for a few hours as they did a good job in this milestone. I then had sprint planning meeting for bugs fixing and polishing week. Also our product owners came and praised us for the great job!

Day 50 – 27th July Monday
Well today, I monitor my programmers in bug fixing and also if there are new bugs found, I will then prioritize them in order of our current bug list. Also the art team is polishing their assets for better deliverable assets. The day passed quickly. And Bruce from Singapore Game Lab is here for this week and Chor Guan will be arriving tomorrow.

Day 51 – 28th July Tuesday
Chor Guan arrived! Everyone was so ‘concern’ about her arrival, but not sure of the exact reasons too. I went for my producer meeting in the noon, then spent the rest of the day QA the game.

Day 52 – 29th July Wednesday
Well today I was basically making everyone on their toes as open house and RC0 milestone due are tomorrow, thus I pushing my team harder than usual. As the day went by, the bugs list are dropping faster, I then felt kind of relived when the bug lists are left with minor fixing or those that are not worth the time to fix. End the day with only a few bugs left and finished all art tasks. Yippy.

Day 53 – 30th July Thursday
OPEN HOUSE TODAY! The whole Gambit is excited about evening open house. My programmers finish fixing all known bugs at 4pm and just now the catered lunch came. My teams had dinner together and chat till 5.30pm. We then prepared our room for the open house. 6pm knocked, we had people from game industry, their family members, strangers etc for testing. My team including me had a great deal of laughter watching people playing our game. In the end, quite a lot of them liked our game and one even asked us for poster to remember our game. Well after 8pm, I shoved the team back to rest as we had a tired day.

Day 54 – 31th July Friday
Well as everyone was so tired from yesterday and there was not a need for sprint meeting, basically I asked the team to QA the game to find ship-stopping bugs. Our product owners came with one of her student to get more information to continue working on the game. And they were very pleased with the final product and enjoyed playing themselves. The day ended earlier as everyone had a late night last night.

Day 57 – 2nd August Monday
Today we had our branding and marketing lectures in the morning. Also producer has to prepare all the necessary documents and finish the TLO forms. Also started on my marketing materials, I first start on website as I am more familiar with. The artists start on their posters while the rest QA the game.

Day 58 – 3rd August Tuesday
We had 2 of our posters up and most of our marketing materials ready, our first trailer mockup are done. Actually we are kind of ahead compared to other teams. Also my artist Ben did up other team posters for fun, which Chor Guan commented that we are ‘SO’ free.

Day 59 – 4th August Wednesday
Most of the marketing materials are done! Most of the people here are slacking and playing games in office already. And the artists are planning to do an ALLSTAR poster for this year program. All are looking forward to this poster.

Day 60 – 5th August Thursday
Last Day of official stay in the office, today most teams spend time clearing up the room and taking photos. Also GAMBIT ALLSTAR poster is up. IT IS SUPER SUPER NICE. Everyone liked the poster and we getting a super sized printed tomorrow. In the evening, I went back to pack my room and found out I need an extra bag! Now going around asking for spaces!

That's all for July!

31 July

Team presentations and a little bit of touch-ups, soon enough everyone headed home to get some rest for the intense of the past week.

30 July

The open house was pretty successful and we were about to decide whether to keep it in or not as players did not seem to be bothered by it so we implemented a switch for the feature to be on of off depending on the preference of the player. This idea had also made me realised that it is not whether to put it in or not, as long as it doesn't break the game, a feature could be switched on or off for the liking and not necessary be removing it out of the game completely. This should be a lesson learnt of not throwing away things that may seem harmful but useful sometime later. I hope.

29 July

The "conflict" carries on between the Product Owner and the team. Like both sides of the coin, both sides were reluctant to let go thus they asked for 2 versions of the game for the open house testing initially. But there was an additional testing session today which had included new players such as Bruce (Lead Programmer of Carneyvale Showtime) and Chor Guan (Executive Director of MDA). Bruce had a chance on the full game and as a new player, he did not find the new feature the product owner as a problem. Instead, he felt that that feature was pretty useful. I gave that feedback bac kto the team and convinced that it would be more efficient to leave the new feature in for the open house and then decide to take it out or not. Although I feel that this may "waste" our chance for a huge crowd of fresh players, but it is our only chance that we could get this feature in or not. so we shall just wait for tomorrow's results!

28 July

The QA Team did not like the new feature as well and there are the other stuff that we are afraid to implement because it would either introduce bugs in the game of make the game really not fun at all. Thus, we have to wait till tomorrow when we decided to use it or not for the open testing. As the QA Lead, although personally I feel the same way as the team, I am the only person who should take the neutral stand and not decide on what to go for and what not, everything has to be proven as theory may not match practice. We will just have to wait for more playtest even though the QA Team dislike the new feature but they are too experienced with the game to give sufficient feedback to change the decision and the design of the game.

27 July

Everyone in the team doesn't like the new feature the product owner wanted us to present and we could not do anything until the playtest tomorrow but to polish up all the other stuff which we initially intended to do, no more placeholder assets, it's all going for gold this time, no more fooling around.

24 July

Yet again, we passed the milestone! But the road ahead for the team is a rocky one for the pilishing and implementing what the product owner wants. Let's do this!

23 July

We just submitted the Milestone for Beta and will not know the result until tomorrow. Today was the meeting with our Product owner and there are new things that he wanted in the game which may cause the game to be not fun anymore but we have to implement it because he has the final say although. So we shall see...

22 July

Tomorrow will be the end of BEta and the team is still not up there yet and YES! we got our title and will be using it while the artist figure out how to change the game logo according to the new title. The QA checklist has increased again and there are new bugs that should be fixed. The list of features that are not implemented are still not in! The conssequence we may have to face is the failure of the milestone.

21 July

Today is the QA meeting again and there was something that the team wanted to test out again and it did went well so we decided to keep the feature! We still have our title to work on and the Artists and Programmers are really really at thier tip to make out these features for the milestone!

Open House!!!

Day 37 – 39 – 14th – 16th July Tuesday – Thursday

Well I kind of pushed my team into a very tight schedule as we planned to get most of our features and art assets in for open house testing so that we can receive feedbacks from external testers. So before open house, I was basically breathing down the back of my programmers and artists. Well I felt worried that I might stressed my team out but thank god nothing major happened. I was happy with the build that was released for open house focus testing. Good job team!

And Thursday was open house, free food and enjoyment time! Basically after most teams were trying to fix as many bugs as possible in the noon and builds were checked in at 4.30pm as our catered dinner arrived. As usual, some programmers ate on their keyboards to rush to finish the build; luckily none of my team did that. We finished what we planned, so we had our dinner together and preparing the room for open testers. At 6pm, Gambit Game Lab was opened to public for testing session, well to sum up; it was a wonderful and great session. You can basically see kids or adults reactions while playing our games. And our team felt great when one of the testers rejected a call just to continue to play our game, a sense of achievement! Even pets came to play test! The open house session ended at 8pm, we collected quite a lot of feedbacks. As the team was tired, I ended the day straight after that.

Day 40 – 17th July Friday

Well after a long week of stress work, I let my team rest for today. I just conducted small casual meetings to go through feedbacks from the open house. After that I re-estimated the sprint and ended the day at 4pm. A quick day with just meeting!

Day 43 – 20th July Monday

After a good rest over the weekend, today I planned to get most features in so that we had more time for bug fixing and play testing. My programmers basically spent the day trying to get the remaining features in.

Day 44 – 21th July Tuesday

Today, my programmers’ tasks list was almost finished. Yippy! I had a usual producer meeting in the afternoon, but this time we had Dominic, Assistant Producer of MDA with us. He is here for a week to ‘dig’ information and to check on us to see how we are coping here. And the producers were reminded about the post events after our trip back, like Media Day, Industry Day, and GCA. Gosh, trying hard to manage that as I still have modules to finish while preparing for those!

Day 45 – 22th July Wednesday

Well today my team thought of achievement feature and I gave the green light to go ahead to try as it bring no harms in trying. As if it could not be completed by tomorrow, we can just cut it. But this brings a small debate in the team as this achievement may bring in game replay ability but might cause the change in game play for players. Pros and Cons, but I weighted more pros then cons, so gogogo. Push my programmers again after they thought they can relax a bit.

Major update

20 July

We were told that we could use our current title because it would be pretty weird, so we had to change it but the team had not decided how are we going to change it such that it links to the story and would be a nice name to brand later on. We consulted staff but the team just didn't feel it was there. Something must be done!

17 July

After the Open House session, the team had decided to try out something new that was suggested by some of the testers. We have to get this feature in to test out whether it works before moving on into production for Beta, we needed to confirmed whether this would add more difficulty to the game as the game progresses as our game have to be in such a way it should be really hard at the end.

16 July

Open House Session! There were more people turned up than expected. Our team compiled a total of 60 survey forms and there were really interesting experiences. Let me share with you one of them. There was this girl pretty young with big round eyes and wearing a cap. She came to our team wanting to play the game but our game was so hard, she kept losing. When asked to fill in the survey form, she angrily wrote "This sucks" on the form, pass it back to one of the team members and stormed off. The cool thing is she came back afer awhile! How cool isit that your game is fun enough for people to say it suck because of the difficulty but still back to try to beat the game!

The team had fun observing these people from Open House but it would mean work for me tomorrow to show the statistics for today's session. I bet the other teams had fun too!

15 July

I compiled a list of questions and draft them out to a questionnaire to ask about specific questions regarding our game to test what the player would experience throughout the short amount of time they would spent in the game. The QA checklist was modified because after checking with the designer, there was some parts that had to be changed.

14 July

The team had decided what we want to test for the upcoming Open House testing on Thursday where people from the public would come to test our game and we would definitely want the feedback on whether the game works well with the requirements of what the product owner wanted. The team is currently working on everything that we need for both Beta and Open House.

13 July

Today we locked down the stuff we wanted to do and what not to to cut or add features for Beta and have feature freeze until any situation had to be addressed. The team performed a round of discussion of which is the many feature that we had to work on before moving to others while others who do not participate in the current feature could do the following one and so on. The features had been draft out but I felt that it was not detailed enough and we may have a roolback on the feature during later stages of production so we had to split that feature intto two parts and work on each of them. The learning process today was that features may not be always going in a linear motion where all the features can be done one after another as some features interlink with others, so it has to be tested whether it works before moving on to other features which do not join the chain.

10 July

After the milestone, the teams have their current build presented to everyone in the lab to show progression and the usability of the game. Supposedly after the presentation there was a session to be held with the product owners but our product owner could not make it so the producer encourage we would take work a little slowly for today because we burned most of our fuel yesterday by rushing out the milestone, a light day to work.

Today was also when we review on the milestone to see we passed the milestone. And... We did!

Surprisingly, it turned out well although it was mentioned that our team decied to fail the milestone. THis turn of events actually made the team really happy and moved on into the production of Beta.

9 July

Many things that happened today.

There was open testing and we got valuable feedback on whetehr to get down this new feature or not, the team was able to submit the build for the milestone and at the same time, the meeting among QA Leads have made me see the progression of other teams which had significant changes due to the usability of the game.

8 July

Today was a really busy day to rush out and test out the new gameplay feature, it has been decided that we should keep it and we are currently busy to rush out the requirements needed to pass the milestone coming tomorrow!

6 July

The team came to a decision that we prepare to fail for the current milestone because there is the new gameplay feature to test out before going into the usability of the game. It is important that although there is the milestone to cover, the gameplay feature has to be tested and proven to be working before moving on. The priority rule should come first to what is more important doing now rather than meeting the milestone for the sake of it.

2 July

Feedbacks were flowing through to our game and there is going to be a new design coming up because the current one was not really quite there yet. Sometimes we have to learn to let go of the current concept although working on t for so long, to try a new approach and look for new alternatives looking and learning from previous mistakes and using the stable mechanics to work for the new design from the previous design.

Can't wait for July 4th fireworks!

Updates!

Day 25 – 2nd July Thursday

Today is the weekly internal testing session again; we received quite a few feedbacks and comments about our game. Also we get to our 3 product owners; they are finally backed in Boston! We received a number of suggestions and feedbacks from them and I had to change my backlog a bit to suit their needs. Thus in the end, I didn’t hold a successful sprint planning meeting on Thursday which had to be continue on Monday. Holiday ahead!

Day 26 – 28 – 3th July – 5th July Friday – Sunday

Well we had a long weekends and a great spectacular fireworks performance by the Charles River. The fireworks are just right in front of us! Basically we spent most of the days lazing around the dorm or in office playing games.

Day 29 – 6th July Monday

Today, I continued with my sprint planning meeting with the team and then assigned tasks for them to start on while I continued to work with the backlog. I did up the scrum board by late day and aided in testing the games.

Day 30 & 31 – 7th & 8th July Tuesday – Wednesday

Well, a lot of art tasks are being pushed back as the art tasks are not well planned for this sprint, a mistake on mine and Andrew end. Also my ‘that’ artist came back with more serious problem, doing personal work during office hours. Also most of the art tasks were pushed back resulted from the long time took to complete a task. I spend most of these two days having meeting with Philip, Jason and Andrew on how to handle this problem. I felt that since is already midway to this project, no point in sending that artist back to Singapore. I would rather have little work done than none. I am working closely with Jason to find ways to ‘mature’ my artist.

Day 32 – 9th July Thursday

Well our milestone was due today and I realized that this sprint was not a well planned sprint due to changes from product owners and also short time frame of this sprint. Our milestone build had failed in certain checklist! But most of them are still placeholder art, so my team is not lagging behind! We had weekly testing session again and some of my team mates found that other teams’ games are doing well in terms of arts assets or gameplay wise. I encouraged them as our team has to handle python AI codes which are huge components to handle, so we are still on track. I started to prioritize my backlog to prepare for tomorrow sprint meeting.

Day 33 – 10th July Friday

At the start of the day, I presented our milestone build to the game lab and then started a bit on our milestone planning while waiting for our product owners. Our product owners (Pwners) arrived at 11am and then we started our review session with them. They were quite pleased with our performance and the short meeting is over. Our group had a slightly early lunch before proceeding with the sprint meeting. Well for this sprint, I went for another approach, I split the group into 2 sections; programmers as a section and others as a section. As the programmers are able to handle their estimate well, I left Alec, my programmer in charge, to take care of the programmers’ estimation. I then work with artists, designer and my audio guy with the rest of the estimations. It went better than I expected, tasks are very detailed. Hurray! A great approach! Well the meeting lasted the whole day and I stay back in office after work to finish up prioritizes the tasks so the team can start work when they come in on Monday. I filled the scrum board with lots of tasks as this sprint is a longer sprint with tighter schedules. After finishing with my scrum board, I headed back to dorm for sleep! Tired after a long day.

Day 34 & 35 – 11th & 12th July Saturday – Sunday

Wee, I went with a big group of 19 people to Niagara Fall. Although the trip was expensive and took long hours of travel, but I felt is worth the trip. The feeling is different when you board the ship and travel just beside the fall itself and letting the water pour on you. A great but expensive trip as we kind of being ripped off with the package price!

Day 36 – 13th July Monday

Today is an intensive day for me; I woke up late as not feeling well. I rushed to office to hold the scrum meeting, after that I tried to monitor the artists’ progress every hour or so as to time box the tasks. But as I was busy with work, after lunch, I only check them every 2 – 3 hours! During lunch hour, I wanted to see doctor but there was a surprising long queue. Decided to see doctor tomorrow! After lunch hour, I continued with some coding and then helped my audio guy to convert his audio asset each into a swf file and embed into the project. I ate a late lunch after that and then continue to debug the game and filed bugs for programmers to fix. After work, Kenny and I took BSCG test. I headed back to dorm to rest while Kenny stayed in office. Well a tight week ahead as to prepare our game for open house testing!

A Breather

Finally there's some time to blog about the past 3 days as the current phase has been submitted.

1 July

Today was pretty rush with the work as alot of stuff are not done and time has to be managed properly but when some miracles do happen, you find yourself in a very good situation to need that minor miracle to fix the whole puzzle. Although I don't encourage hoping for miracles or hoping for things to happen because people do say that doing is better than hoping. At some point, if hope is your only option then hope. It is like saying if you think you lose, you already lost, if you think you win, you're most likely to win.

30 June

Work Work Work. Things seem to be better from previously and it's taking shape but there's still alot to do before submitting tomorrow. It really is an experience to see people climbing to reach the checkpoint and working despite the limitations or rules they are bounded by. This would show that determination has a higher priority over rules if it is, in the end, beneficial.

29 June

There's really nothing to talk about today but we sort out some stuff and when the team actually hits a rock, I feel it's everyone's responsibility to voice out and clear the air. At least that's what I think I'd do.