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.

Nuclear Reactor Plant Visit!

Day 23 – 30th June Tuesday

Well today I spent most of the morning breaking the game and did some small code changes. I had a producer meeting and then continue to break the game. Also aid my team towards the milestone.

Day 24 – 1st July Wednesday

Today my group successful submitted our First Playable. Well my team is on track and we actually had the afternoon to resolve minor bugs. Great job team. After that I had a quick producer meeting with Philip on tomorrow presentation. Basically tomorrow we will be having a 10 min presentation to the whole group on our game play. After work a small group of us went to MIT nuclear reactor plant. We were given a talk on how the plant operates and after that we had a quick tour around the plant. As it is a live radioactive nuclear plant, we went only to a few places as most places are not safe for us to enter. Quite an interesting tour as such tour you can never have it again. Also the safe precaution are well taken care of, we were given a radioactive detector to carry around as if the indicator on the detector goes above normal. Our tour will be stopped and after the tour, we were given full scan for radioactive level. Well after tomorrow is a long weekends as Saturday is Independent Day, so Friday is a public holiday. Whee

Updates!

Day 15 – 22th June

Well today my group works towards on our next milestone, The First Runnable. I held a long long meeting for sprint estimation planning which last 3 hours and we still have a part to finish tomorrow. For the estimation planning, basically our group will go through the backlog I had come up with and the respective roles will give an estimated time to finish each task. Spend the most doing estimated planning and sprint tasks up while the rest of the group works on the remaining tasks for the milestone.

Day 16 – 23th June

Today I had weekly producer meeting and nothing for me to share to other producers as my group is doing fine. I then continue to work on the sprint list and backlog for an hour or so. After that I helped my QA with bug testing and assist my group in completing the milestone.

Day 17 – 24th June, Day 18 – 25th June & Day 19 – 26th June

Well, day passes well with nothing much happen. My group submitted our release build for the First Runnable milestone task and started to work on the next milestone: The First Playable. Which needs the game to be running with our core mechanics, my team is progressing quite on track and hopefully I won’t have to cut down features. And on Friday evening, 8 of us, Don; Kenji; Fu Er; Chang You; Jeff; Ben; Jet; and I are going to New York for a short trip over the weekends. Looking forward to New York. New York here I come!

Day 22 – 29th June

New York is FUN! On Friday night, after work, we rushed back to the dorm to take our bags before heading to Chinatown for dinner. We kind of had a rush dinner as we were rushing for our 8pm coach. We reached the bus terminal at 7.45pm but received a bad news. We had to check in 30 mins before 8pm and the bus was fully packed and just left. Well no choice, we stood in the queue for 45 mins for the next bus. We arrived in New York and settled ourselves in our hostel at around 2 plus a.m.! For the 2 days activities, mainly we went sightseeing like went up the Empire State Building; explored Chinatown and Little Italy; went to Wall Street, etc. 8 of us basically walked till our legs were calling for help before is time to go back to Boston. Well I find New York night life much much active than in Boston, could say because we lived in Times Square. But the street of Times Square at around 2am was still crowded.

Well dragged my aching and tired body to work! Today as usually, started with scrum meeting and then we had a half an hour talk on UI design. After that, I went around the group for second round of estimation planning to check if the tasks are able to complete for this coming milestone. After that as I was free, I helped the programmers to do a splash screen and then tried to do multiple music insertions for our game. The splash screen was easy, I finished in 15 mins but I spent like 5 hours to try to do the music insertions but in the end it failed. What a day. After work we had our weekly guest speaker talks and then went to supermarket with a few to get our weekly dinner supplies. That’s all for today.

Week compilation!

June 26

Finally, we had our plans done up and ready to go, really excited for the weekend to go shopping again. There were really some problems to be addressed before moving on and I'm glad that we took the time to draft things out and put it down on paper so that our plans can continue. We should never be blocked by authority issues again. Target problems at matters not people.

A team should stick together.

June 25

The new milestone is really getting to people and something must be done. Although we were always taught that actions speak louder than words? but words can be used to follow up an action to bring the correct message across, that's really important.

June 24

New milstone! Happily passed the previous milestone!

There were 3 teenage testers coming down to test the game today and it was really comforting to know that our game had a positive feedback and looking forward to building to reach out to more positive feedbacks.

June 23

Fruits-buying day! Went down to east campus after to get my hands on fresh fruits from the weekly fruit sellers who would come by every Tuesday to sell fruits outside of east campus. I bought strawberries, raspberries and blueberries at a low cost of $8! They are fresh and sweet. After that, it was off to cook dinner with Snake, Rini and Broy. We had honey soy suace chicken, striy fry vegetables and rice. It was very filling and the after-effect of eating too much is wanting to sleep and growing fat!

We changed alot of stuff!

June 22

Monday blues. It was a very lazy day and no one wanted to get up. It was a nice day to sleep in with the cold weather so it was a good idea to have lamb curry rice during lunch. I have been eating the middle-east food truck which offers chicken, beef, lamb wraps or with rice and the beef is so tender it melts in your mouth. Lunch was my motivation today.

After work, there was a talk by Nick Monfort on "Understanding games on the platform". This is the link to his profile http://nickm.com/. Then, we had dinner and I played some games after and went to bed!

22 June 2009

i found my very first bug today, and the following bug right after. I tried to use my knowledge of Fogbugz and tried sending the bug report to programmer. It was resolved not too long after.

I cook a fried egg today and heat up some frozen food for dinner

23 June 2009

I collected few data and feedback for the current build. Though most of the problems are already known to most of us.

I cooked another fried egg today, however i accidentally poured too much chilly powder and ended up choking a lot of people


24 June 2009

I gather everyone's file today and send it to Perforce. Marleigh and our producer do a last check before approval. We used the sprint card for first time, honestly it wasted a lot of precious time. I skip the last part of sprint backlog as Rik taught me how to use the build machine for the first time. he was still unsure about few stuffs and then will teach the QAs 1 by 1 soon.

Ate free fried rice given by GOOGLE today and watch Shoot Em Up at night, it was a very cool show though with weak story.

25 June 2009

Alright, after the QA meetingwe pass the first milestone... I discussed of what questions I have to put for the open testing with everyone. I also print some questionnaire for the open testing. Rik taught me how to use the build machine today. Open testing is postponed for Friday.

I ate the same pizza as usual and went home right away.

So for today...

Nothing much I guess. We decided on who should do what and how much time we should take up for each task to get the product completed in the most polished way. So yea, I took up the task as a modeler and a rigger and I would be doing that for the most part. Other than that, I was mostly involved in using the tools the programmers created to bring the art assets back and forth in the pipeline to test the algorithm that MIT previously created. Other than that, I drank two cups of hot chocolate today..

After coming back to the dorm, I watched Shoot 'em Up with my friends on the fifth floor. After that, I came back to the dorm to do my packing for my Dallas trip, which I'm looking forward to so much. At least I wouldn't have to blog anything on those two days...

Well, that's all for now. Nothing interesting happened today...

Last day of the week!

June 19

We got the green light to move on into development! It was really exciting to wait for the results and no one failed. The judges showed us some really important points to consider and it should not be overlooked or ignored. The lesson learnt here is to sometimes step back and see from a point of view of others to know what's really the problem, which in this case applies to me the most as Quality Assurance Lead to look at the game from different perspectives.

Oh.. and since I did not blog previously much which is kind of like not acceptable, I thought I'd write something small anyways for the sake of it..

I'm leaving for Texas this Friday. To see my sister and her family. They've been living there for like 6 years now and they just moved house recently. Well, not out of Texas, just another neighborhood or something. So yea.. I'm pretty excited to see them, especially my one year old nephew. The last time I saw him, he was about 8 months I think. Back then, he was only crawling. Now he can walk and run, so I guess it should be fun.

The sad thing is that I'm going there only for a weekend. I'll be back on Sunday night. Oh well..

I really don't know what else to say. I guess I'll type random stuff here as soon as I come up with it.

Okay..

So I was told that I HAVE TO blog on a daily basis, even though I practically don't do anything after work and that I'm not allowed to talk about work. So I'll do what I can I guess. Here goes...

So today, the programmers in my team developed awesome tools for the artists. Again, I guess I can't talk about it. It was basically to make the pipeline better, and I felt as if I was in a company like ILM where the technical director makes custom tools for the CG department to work through the pipeline. Now I really feel that I'm working professionally.

I was tasked to create a few 3D low-poly game-compatible models so I did that. And then my fellow artist, Yue Li, came over and helped me and taught me on how game models should be modeled. The approach is entirely different as opposed to that of modeling for high-quality rendering purposes. I guess it took me a while to understand that technique of modeling through triangles. It will take me some time to master it, but I will definitely do it.

What else happened today... hmm... lets see... oh yea, I drank hot chocolate with lots of cocoa powder and three packets of sugar. It was sweet, but just the way I like it.

Other than that, for a lack of better things to say, I tried showering in a different showering room today, which was kind of small. The good thing was that the water pressure was really high and I enjoyed it. The bad thing was that it was very small and even though I used plastic bags, my towel and clothes got wet. Oh well, there's always compromise in everything.

To conclude, I love the weather here. It always rains and people say its gloomy, I say its awesome. The rain is different here. Small and tiny raindrops which really makes you shiver in a different way. Nice..

Hello..

So here's my third or so weekly post.

Work has been going pretty fine I guess. There's nothing much I can say to that, except for the fact that I'm getting to know my team members really well - personally as well as professionally. I guess its really fun to work with these great guys. So much of sharing of skills and expertise. Nice..

So anyway, I went quite a bit of sightseeing. I went to for a whale watch cruise yesterday. But the weather was stormy, so after going out into the sea for like 40 minutes, we turned back because a lot of people were puking as they were sea sick. But let me tell you something. That boat ride was simply AWESOME!!!!!!!!! I swear it man. Never in my life have I encountered such a thrilling moment. Due to the stormy weather, the sea was really choppy and rough and the ferry was travelling at an awesomely high speed. I went outside at the front of the ship - and my goodness, it was so damn windy. I literally couldn't stand still, even after holding onto a railing or something. It was so great. Afterwards, I went inside the sheltered area to sit down, and whoaaa... it was so awesome inside as well. All the passengers literally jumped off their seats as the boat rocked violently under the water. Seriously man, this was the most fun time of my life. Anyway, the sad thing is that we couldn't see any whales, so we turned back and got a free complimentary ticket. Oh well, at least I can look forward to going back again :D

And then after that, I went to watch Ice Age III in 3D. Another super awesome movie, especially when viewed in 3D. And then after that, I watched The Taking of Pelham 123. That was great too. Enjoyed it.

A couple of time, I went to Burger King, and found out one amazing thing. America totally rules man, in that vegetarians can easily survive here!!! There's so much food! At every single restaurant! I cant get enough of vegetarian food. And I don't mean by vegetables only as how some ignorant people might think that that's the only food vegetarians eat! I mean literally a lot of dishes which don't even look anything close to vegetables. This is one major problem I face in Singapore, and I find it to be so much better here. Anyway, so I realized that Burger King sold BK veggie meal (not just vegetables inside, mind you!) with a veggie patty! What's greater than that!

So today, a few of us gathered in the common kitchen for dinner, and I cooked pasta for everyone. My friend helped to cook omelet. Very awesome dinner, and very filling too.

That's it I guess. I don't do much in weekdays because its purely work and most of the times I'm tired, so I just return back to the dorm to rest or whatsoever.

Sunday

Day 14 – 21th June

Woke up late today and went shopping with a group of people. We went to Prudential Centre for lunch and after that most of the group headed to Game Stop to look for games. Xue Jin, Faizah and I went opposite to another shopping centre as I wished to check out prices for Coach and other brands. Well, not really much of a difference compared to Singapore as now there is GSS. 3 of us went back to Game Stop to regroup first before heading to Filene’s Basement, a shop recommended by Gene for cheap branded labels. However, I find the prices around the same price as in Singapore. After walking for awhile, the group split as Fu Er, Chang You, Jeff and I went to Harvard Square for some gift shops while the rest headed somewhere else. In the end, I bought a coin purse for my girlfriend and some interesting US money notes. I headed back to dorm to cook my dinner. I had bacon, eggs, sausages and fried rice for dinner. AND AFTER DINNER, I WAS LOCKED OUT OF MY ROOM FOR 1HOUR15MINUTES!!! I had to wait till master key came from another department. Going to turn in for an early night as work starts again! Looking forward to tomorrow as actual development is starting.

Weekends

Day 12 – 19th June

Friday! Weekends are coming! Well today as usual, I started the day off with scrum meeting and after that I decided to hold another brain storming session for more fiction ideas as we received some feedbacks about our current fiction being too common. Well, my artist started his / her mood swing again and started crying after her ‘married’ fiction idea was suddenly going to change again. Well, being a producer, I was busy the whole day cause of that artist, having a lot of urgent meetings with Philip, Andrew or Jason. Well, basically I think that the artist is quite stubborn to changes or rather hard to accept new changes. So all the staffs could only advise and encourage to a certain extent, so it will be up to that artist to mature. After this time of crying, some of the team members felt quite uncomfortable working with that artist and expressed their concern to me. Well, if this continuing, Gambit has no choice but to do the extreme way in order not to disturb the team in progression. Anyway I had Andrew and Philip telling me not to let this matter get me down as even experienced manager will encounter this. I had experienced that being a counselor is not an easy job. A lot more to learn or experience during this summer! Handling this matter already spent most of my day and I spend the last hour doing first phase of product backlog. After work, Jet treated me, Kenny, Ben and Snake for dinner at a Chinese restaurant! It was a nice dinner, thanks Mr Jet Lim. After dinner, we headed back to Shaw’s Super Market to buy ice cream back to office to eat while waiting for our trial online conference with our juniors back in TP. Well, during the conference, Kenny and I shared some of our experience here and also Ben and Snake also shared about the artists’ experience and some rough job scope. The conference lasted about an hour and started playing rock band in the office. Anyway, I hoped more of my juniors can come to Gambit next year as this attachment is VERY benefit in learning about game development and its process.

Day 13 – 20th June

Saturday, WEEKEND! Woot. I ended up sleeping till 11am as I meeting a few of the group here to go shop for my shoes! I needed a sport shoes to play basketball here. My jie jie, Fu Er; her bf, Chang You; my QA, Jeff; and Kenji accompanied me to find sport shoes. So nice of them! We started off with Urban Renewal at Harvard Ave but we decided to have lunch just opposite the shop. We ate nice beef noodle with FANASTIC jumbo pan fried soft shell crabs! Nice lunch, after that we headed to Urban Renewal, which is a 2nd hand shop with a lot interesting and cheap stuffs. I did not find my shoes there but Kenji bought a leather coat for only 15 bucks. After that we walked over to Everett Street to find the shop, New Balance. But apparently, the map on Google Map is not really accurate and we did not find the shop at first. However we saw AJ-WRIGHT which was another cheap shopping heaven. We spent a lot of time in there and we bought a lot of stuffs. 5 of us spent nearly $400 inside the shop where most items cost only $5-$20 per item. Imagined how many things we bought! So we carried bags and bags of shopping and decided to head back to dorm to put our things before going for dinner. Anyway we went to Shaw’s to get food to cook back at dorm. Kenji and I we bought fresh fish and French Fries to make fish and chip which was SUPER NICE. We watched Frequency while eating. Going shopping again tomorrow. Tada

After first milestone: Green Light Meeting :)

Day 9 - 16th June

Today I was faced with a hit from the role of producer. 1 of my artist, not mentioning names here, stressed out and started crying. The rough idea of what happened was that game idea the artists were working on was scraped off after the product owner thought that it might be too difficult to finish in the summer. That artist apparently was too ‘married’ to the game idea so much that he/she could not take it after I announced to scrape off the game idea after the scrum. He / She went to the toilet to cry and also cried in the office. This really put me into test on how to handle the situation; firstly I started to try to talk to her. But being stressed out and crying, no one in the world will listen at this point of time. I tried to give her some time to cry all out but when I felt the team morale was going down due to this incident. I seek for help, as my embed staff was in the meeting, I looked for my producer mentor, Rik for assistance. He immediately came over to help me even though he was discussing things with his own team. Thanks Rik! He talked to that artist and also with the help of the whole team encouragements. That artist finally stopped crying and tried to do some work. But that was not the end for me, as Rik and I felt that that artist was not really okay. And as my embed staff, Andrew had finish his meeting, the 3 of us held a mini urgent meeting in this office. Anyway, we felt that the best choice was to get Jason, Art mentor to talk to that artist. And this was I had been doing from morning till lunch. After lunch was producer meeting which helped me a lot as we had a lot of discussion about our team problems. Anyway, all producers’ meetings are to be kept confidential but I received a few tips to try aid the artist to overcome this tough period. However, most tips are not relevant to assist that artist due to that artist personalities and mindset. So is up to me to bring the team and that artist morale up up and up. ‘Welcome to the world’ Quoted to me by Andrew after the mini meeting. Hahaha. Anywhere did not do much work today as busy with team management after 2 meetings. Also learnt one important thing today, DO NOT get too attached with game ideas when brain storming. Learn how to think and trash them away if they are not useful even how brilliant your ideas are. So an advice to juniors or anyone if they are reading this blog, the first or second week of game development are the hardest as you will feel emotionally stressed out due to a lot factors. Don’t give yourselves so much stress! Hopefully I won’t get stressed out! Signed off.

Day 10 – 17th June

Today, my group was kind of rushing tasks for the green light meeting milestone tomorrow. I kicked off the day with the usual scrum meeting, and then assigned tasks for them to prepare for the green light meeting. That artist was feeling better but after some of that artist’s concept arts were given the thumb down to fit into our game idea. I sensed another crying session. OMG, I don’t want that as I am going to be busy monitoring the group progress for the milestone tomorrow. Luckily, it did not happen. Spent the rest of the day polishing up the idea for the green light meeting and the day passed by very fast. Nothing much happened today. Looking forward to green light meeting as I felt my group was almost done and prepared for the meeting.

Day 11 – 18th June

Well today my group was preparing for the green light meeting which was a milestone for us to present out idea to our the staffs in Gambit and also to the product idea. As the name suggested, it is the meeting which the staffs or the product owner will decide whether the idea is good enough to start development or ‘green’. If any group idea was given ‘red’, they have to re think of a better idea or fall back to backup plan if there is any. Luckily the 3 groups that presented today got a ‘green light’ which meant we are ready for production! Backtracked a bit, in the morning, there was a lecture on ‘Estimation’ by Philip. After the talk, I held the scrum meeting with my team and assigned roles to prepare for the green light meeting. Everyone was kind of excited and nervous at the same time for the green light meeting. Artists went ahead to sketch more concept arts; programmers continued with the prototyping; QA, designer and I polished the design document we had to present later. Time passed very fast today as we were actually rushing for time, and we presented the idea smoothly during the green light meeting. After the 20 minutes presentation, the staffs and the product owner went to a room to discuss about our idea, to give a ‘red’ or ‘green light’. Soon being the producer, I was called to the room to receive the comments and result of the discussion. Yes, tada green light! Our idea was commented for having a good level design and good fall back plans for the risks. So our idea was ready for production! Good job guys. But NO for me! I will be having more planning jobs in these upcoming days with my embed staff! Anywhere after the staffs left the room, I got my anxious group into the room to share the good news and share some feedbacks from the staffs. After that, as the day was ending, I decided to spend the rest of the time brain storming for team names. My group kind of decided on one, but will finalize tomorrow. Whee, one milestone over, 9 more to come. But I had learnt that my group was quite fast in finishing up tasks as the current main idea came up only 2 days ago. Well done guys. After work, 6 of us went for a basketball game to relax ourselves after a tired week. When is only the first official work week! After the game, I headed back to the dorm to prepare for dinner. To my surprise, my dorm mate cooked for me and left it in the fridge. Woot thanks for the dinner. I am happy that I had a good team and good dorm mates. Going dragged my tired body to bed. Bye!

Monday, 15 June 2009

Clara came by and commented on our project.

Philip brought us some games to try today. Our producer tried the GameCube ones while I tried the DS. The producer asked me to note the things and basic mechanics into notes. For today, I only tried out 2 games. However, the second games seems promising so I show it to our producer and he liked the mechanics. He motivate me to play mroe games now.


Tuesday, 16 June 2009

The game I tried today has a sort of point and click and able to alter the consequences of choices, whici is promising.

there were some sort of heated disussion and debate today where voice is being raised and all. It was quite scary actually, but I guess I had to get used to it since if 10 people are being squeezed in 1 tiny room and we had little chance to get a turn to talk where everyone keep interupting each other, this will happen.

Wednesday, 17 June 2009

Our designer was not feeling well today, so she went to doctor with Marleigh in the noon. She went back soon after.

Our programmer has finished making the digital mock up to show the mock up interface and the game mechanics of realtime. We showed it to the client and she seems satisfied. However we had to postpone our internal mock up as there are not enough preparation.

There were heated discussions again today... it was quite bad today as I did not manage to find correct time to butt in ( I just do not want to be rude, but apparently I think I need to be rude at times to get a turn to speak up). When i finally get my turn, I had waited 15 minutes and forgot half of the things I want to say. But since some of them apologised I was rather satisfied.

Playing those games for research appeared useful, I can use some of the mechanics to be applied for our games. Our producer seems satisfied and encouraged me to play more games.

As for dinner I got some Dunkin Donuts at Galleria, it was too bad we do not have time to shop there as last bus was leaving at 6.40 PM ( we finished dinner at around 6. 25 PM)

Thursday, 18 June 2009

There are some presentation about estimation today from Philip. Just a short lecture to teach us to manage time and to plan better and not to make empty promises/impossible plans.

Our writer finished with the mock up dialogue, so we decided to prototype it today. We discussed on the ways to present it for tomorrow. After some long discussion we decided to just test play it.

Our artist (arist not artists) shown us some promising concept art. The audio person also come with soothing melody which is very nice. I am quite happy that he is pleased with my comments that he think is pretty constructive.

I manage to actually teach one of the artists a very basic tutorial of flash.

We tested our prototype, i apparently seems playable in digital format but not presentable in paper format, so we will scrap that and just show our digital mock up for green light meeting. We will show our dialogue branch if they ask for it.

jet want us to make a second life account for Friday's second life convention meeting. So i used the office computer and borrowed my friend account to use.

there are nothing much today, i just went to buy some marvel comics and thats all.. oh.. and Kids Ben & Jerry ice cream cone for dinner.

Indeed we made had improvements and had meeting with our product owner today. I tested a game of another team and did not quite get what it was, they still have alot of play test to do before implementing a good one. There will be a conference tomorrow with the people from Singapore, I wonder what I should say.

Anyways, back to daily life on east campus, there was a barbecue on 7pm today as well as a movie on the food industry stuff and I initally wanted to go for the barbecue but as no one was there, I got up and got cooking with snake on pasta for dinner.

And then tragedy struck.
I got locked out of my room. Got to wait an hour for the locksmith to come around to open my door before I could be here blogging.

Feeling really sleepy these few days, maybe because of the cold weather. Signing off to sleep.
Night.

Freeze

Very cold today. It's hard to get out of bed this way but it is much better than Singapore with the hot and humid weather. Cold in summer not bad at all.

Progress with the development of the game with my development team is taking shape like a balloon half-blown. There are some loopholes though that may let the air out and re-blowing it again but that is part of prototyping and testing out the game which in this case, more important for me as the QA (Quality Assurance) Lead.

The weekly QA meeting is very helpful and I am in full support of these sessions where different opinions of the same role get to thresh out their problems and solutions. This acts as a third party point of view to check if something is actually good. Seeing things from different perspective always helps. Tomorrow shall be a more productive day than today!

Day 8

Day 8

Argh don’t feel like waking up for work today. Feeling tired and aching all over. Woke up early for breakfast and did some chatting over Skype and msn. As usual reached office at 9 and there was a prototyping lecture by 2 ex-interns from ‘Fire hose’. They show us some demos and different types of prototyping like, paper prototype; web prototype; wizard of the oz prototype, etc. After the talk, went back to our room to further improve on the game ideas we had. I started off with daily scrum meeting and then nailed down 5 ideas into 3 game mechanics. My group will work with 1 mechanic first before going to others as backup plans. However, our first idea hit a major drawback which at the end of the day. I decided to move on to idea 2 as we could not spend more time on idea 1 as Thursday is our Green Light Meeting Milestone. Throughout the day, I spent my time doing up task lists for the milestone sprint, and also improved on the scrum board. I decided to first start using our scrum board from tomorrow onwards to give the team a rough idea first before the actual development starts. And I hope my team can give a solid game idea out by tomorrow as we still have to work on idea 2 and idea 3. After the office hour, there was a talk by Marc Leblanc which I did not attend as went back to have a rest. After the talk, I went to the student center to look for my team as they having dinner there while trying to discuss more about the game idea. What a hardworking team I have, good team! After that I headed back to dorm for my dinner as my dorm mate cooked pasta for me. A nice dinner cooked by him. Thanks Kenji. Slacked off in my room doing administrative work for Garena for awhile and planning to sleep after this. Nights

Picture Gallery

Airport.

Dora at Terminal 3.



In the plane.



The sleepy angmohs.



Above the clouds, behind a window.



Touch down to Boston!



My room's the pink door.



Snake is cold and thirsty.



Snake, Me, Ben, Lidya.



Random statue outside the dorm.



On the grass outside the dorms squirrels and pigeons live happily.



Fooseball at the lounge.



Nice view.



Another nice view.



Sun set nice view.



Random nice building.



Yuanqin, Eunice.



Not M not R but the T.



Gay and Lesbian parade called Pride Parade.



Parade stuff.


Another random nice building.



Playing Rockband at a random department store.



Rini, Xuejin, Broy.



From a D.I.Y store.



There are really too many pictures to post!
Monday blues.

First Weekend

Day 6

Finally don’t have to wake up so early. Woke up at 10 to prepare to go for pride parade 09. A group of us went for the pride parade which was super interesting with a lot of unique things. It was a very long walk of parade with groups of people marching with what they wanted to show or present to the mass. There was like gay rights, lesbian rights etc. This kind of parade would never never be found in Singapore, so was very unique. I also received a few ‘gifts’ from this parade such as a blue ‘necklace’, a blue baseball toy and a few packs of condoms! The people handing out to us were keep saying, ‘Use condoms, play safe’ or ‘Go back and f*ck all you can with this condoms’. This type of culture or thinking was kind of different compared to Singapore and getting used to it. We walked quite long for the parade before proceeding to the movie, ‘UP’. Philip, US Executive Director for Gambit treated those who were interested to watch this show. The movie was very nice and funny, advised people to go watch it. Also one thing about US Movie Theater was that it is free seating and also when you come out of the movie, you would walk passed other movie halls without anyone guarding it. So you could purchase a ticket and then watch a whole day of movies, so is based on your integrity to walk out of the building after you finished your show. After the show, a small group of us went to explore Chinatown area, which was interesting. After Chinatown, we proceeded to Wharf which was a LONG LONG walk there. After that, we headed to Regina Pizza for dinner. It was the best pizza I ever tasted. Strong recommended for the best pizza in the world. Best of all, it cost USD $6.50 after tax and tips. What a nice dinner we had! After dinner, the small group of us went for ice cream which tasted so-so for me. On the way back to dorm, we wanted to get some beers or liquors to celebrate Eunice birthday. But liquors or spirits can only be bought at liquor stores, normal shops won’t sell it. So we only realized that after visiting 7-11, a big supermarket and a long long walk. So in the end, is home sweet home for the tired folks after walking like 5km or more! I went back, bath, play a few rounds of game and then knocked out on my dearest bed.


Day 7

Well, today I woke up like 11 plus to 12 noon. I ate a big bowl of sweet strawberries for a quick breakfast before heading to Prudential Center for lunch and some window shopping. After that, four of us, Don, Kenji, Ben and me went for some sightseeing before walking to Chinatown’s Penang for dinner! Dinner was great as tasted of Singapore’s dishes. After dinner, we went to a sex shop in Chinatown which has 2 storeys of magazines, videos, movies, toys, condoms, gifts, etc. Quite an interesting shop! The four of us bought a thong for Eunice for her birthday present and I bought tiny condoms, dick lollipops and another thong for gifts. Hahaha. Unique gifts for ‘unique’ friends. Headed back to dorm for an early night as there is work tomorrow. Well, Kenny, Broy, Snake gang bought a birthday cake for Eunice but somehow the cake WAS ‘STOLEN’ by people living here. Was quite disappointed with those inconsiderate people! No money buys cake then don’t eat lar! Turning in early. Night!

More photos updated:

Gambit 09 Pics

The perfect Sunday?

Something that just happened.

Today is Eunice's birthday(one of the friends from the programme) and we bought a cake for her yesterday, when we were back today it was gone. Not only that, Don (my producer in my development team) has his stuff eaten from the refrigerator too. Both were labelled. If we find out who did it, he's in for a ride.

The day started out by having brunch and headed out to The Coop (place that sells M.I.T merchandises) to get some jackets but it was closed on Sundays. So the few of us who went to The Coop waited for the others to come to head down to Andrew to see some stuff at "shopping centres" or rather big department stores. Andrew is 5 train stops from Kendall (the place we are staying).

The stores sold mostly stuff that you need such as entertainment, clothes, footwear, household and food. Some of the store names include Target, Marshall, Famous footwear and Old Navy. I didn't buy anything though but some of us got a good bargain.

Then we headed down to the Game Lab to have some fun and games. The day seemed happy but something like people being inconsiderate have to spoil the day.

First week in Cambridge

So one week has passed since my arrival here in Cambridge. It went really really super awesome. So lets see, we started on the first day with Charlie tour, which is basically a 90 min city tour around Cambridge and Boston. This was very very cool for me, because it was so different than Singapore. A completely new sight. Massachusetts is one of the oldest state in the United States and it was first founded by the British. Hence many of the buildings and streets were really really old and AWESOME! I love something with deep historical value.

So anyway, first day of work started. And it was pretty good actually. I love the working environment - each of the teams are given one room to themselves and each of us have one workstation to ourselves. Pretty cool. I enjoy working with my teammates. They're an awesome bunch of people. I learn so much from them. The first few days were brainstorming days, so we had to brainstorm on a variety of ideas for the actual game that we were going to make. For lunch, most of the time I bought Mexican food (burrittos) from food trucks. This was pretty cheap food. I guess I could do with that. Mexican food is really awesome. That's one thing I love about being here - there's not a problem at all for vegetarians. Be it Indian food, or Italian food, or fast food, or food courts, or simply sandwiches, I as a vegetarian has more than enough to eat, not just to survice through meals, but to eat properly as a form of luxury.

The weather here is pretty unpredictable. One moment, its nice and pleasant, the next moment, cold wind blows and it gets really really chilly. So what I do is carry a sweater with me all the time. Saves me in such troublesome times. But seriously, I like the weather here. True, sometimes it gets really cold when it rains. But I can live with that. I like this weather. I'm enjoying myself here. Awesome.

Mostly after work, we would all go out in a group and explore Boston area. It gets pretty fun, but sometimes I get tired so I don't really enjoy. A few times, some of them went shopping, but I returned to the dorm to rest. Guess I hadn't really gotten over my jetleg yet. Two days ago, on Friday, I went to visit my childhood friend and stayed over at his place. He stayed about an hour from where I lived so I took the subway down to the South Station, which is Boston's biggest station, and then I met my friend there. We took the commuter rail, which is different from the subway, and got of at the respective stop, after which my friend drove me from there. He lived in the suburbs, which is really awesome. It was so peaceful and quiet. I enjoyed my time there. There, I got to eat home-made food after like a week. The next day, which was a Saturday, I left for MIT dorm after breakfast. This time, I came back myself on the trains. And by doing this, I learnt a lot about getting myself around in Boston by train.

So on that day itself (Saturday), GAMBIT had organised a movie outing for us (Pixar's UP) so I went to watch that. It was an awesome movie - (DUH! It's Pixar!). Pixar movies never fail to put a smile on my face. I enjoyed myself. After that, we went to explore Chinatown, which was basically nothing much actually.

This morning, I met my sister's sister-in-law. And she took me to have lunch and then we went to watch a sterescopic 3D movie at the IMAX theatre. Then, she took me around Harvard square and we had good dinner there. I had a lot of fun today - basically the most fun in my one week here. I felt at home, being with a relative. I really appreciate the fact that my sister's sister-in-law took the time to bring me out the whole day and show me around.

So basically that's it. I need to wash my clothes, but apparently I procrastinated it. Hopefully I do it tomorrow. Bye for now.

Today all of the people involved in the summer programme went to watched an animation movie by PIXAR named "UP" sponsored by Philip, the Executive Director of the US Lab.

It is a story of the life of a guy named Carl who loved exploring while he was a kid and met this girl named Ellie who share the same interest. They eventually got married and all that was left behind was an unfulfilled promise made - the promise to get to Paradise Falls (some place where they wanted to explore which described as "a land lost in time"). So old man Carl decided to fly his house over to Paradise Falls as his house was built by Ellie and him (as though he was bringing Ellie along). The climax builds as there is the conflict while his time as Paradise Falls which I will not disclose, giving you the chance to find it out yourself by watching it. Trust me, it's an awesome animation movie such that PIXAR has outdone itself again.

After the movie, some of us went to chinatown to see what's in store and it was pretty much a mix of asian restaurants and stuff (not being entirely china).

Photos will be uploaded soon as soon as I get them from friends!

Friday, 12 June 2009

There was nothing i can tell today, basically it is a brainstorming session again, but we also used the opportunity to update Josh who had been missing for 2 days. Apparently, our games undergo several changes again... but it is necessary for this prototype...to basically simplify it for this 8weeks time span

I was given sort of homework for research, however some members asked me to do it on Monday as we should not work at home... I will see hwo it goes, i managed to upload my pics on facebook though

There will be UP movies tomorrow... oh btw the last night alarm was annoying... ruined my stamina and many others for the day

I also spent the whole day playing Rock band today haha...

heres the pics: HERE


hope it works...
Andreas MasOen

First Week ended for Office. Weekends COMING

Day 5

Well, basically a lot of us had not enough sleep. Why? CAUSE THE FREAKING SMOKE DETECTOR went off with no apparent reason at 4am. The whole building was evacuated to the opposite dorm for shelter from the rain. Well, I was still in the sleeping mode when I rushed down stairs and forget to take my jacket! Nice one, with shorts and thin shirt, I shivered all the way from building evacuation till back to my blanket. One US dorm mate mentioned this rarely happened here, so we must be ‘lucky’ enough to hit jackpot on day 5’s morning. However, I was rather impressed with the fire engines and police cars that arrived to our dorm in less than 10 minutes after the alarm went off. I believed most of us were scared or panicked when the alarm went off as basically there was pulse of alarms and the emergency lights in our room or doorway keep flashing. Quite an experience for a fresh start of the day. Back to the office, I was rather tired and also caught a cold due to the evacuation earlier on. But became much better towards the end of the day. So today, I started the team off with a daily scrum meeting, basically I asked the whole team 3 simple questions. “What did they had done yesterday”, “What they plan to do today” and lastly “Is there any problems faced”. After the daily scrum meeting, my team continued with improved prototyping, some concept sketches and I set up my scrum board. Cool all ready to start on development! I ended the day by asking the team to think over weekends on some final ideas to present on Monday before we decided to finalize a few for the green light meeting milestone which is next Thursday. After work, a few of us went to athletic center to play indoor basketball. It was fun; we did not really sweat much due to the temperature. We played till the athletic center closed which was 9pm and headed back to our dorm for dinner. Well, I cooked magi mee for dinner as was tired to cook other stuffs. Hmm, for this weekend, tomorrow; we will be going for a gay parade before heading for the movie ‘UP’. Looking forward to tomorrow, sleeping now as tired after sports. Night!

End of first working week

I just came back from basketball at the MIT athlete centre catered for MIT students with passes to enter. Some friends and I headed to the athlete centre after work to exercise a little after the really fatteningfood we've been having. The centre have quite a few indoor and outdoor basketball courts, swimming pools and a shooting range.

Today was pretty much talking about the ideas and concepts we have to face as well as setting up the "scrum-board" to work on our projects. It is really hard to get consents from people who have different ideas and preference but it might just work somehow.

I wonder if it's relevant but the lunch I had for the past two days were from food trucks which are basically trucks that stop at a certain area selling specific cuisines. The price and food quality is amazingly good. It costs less than 4USD to get a lamb curry with rice and vegetables, enough to feed a big-eater like me. Comparing this to the food court which sells an average of 6-10USD per meal where the quality is pretty much less than average, they are worlds apart.

The weekend is coming and there are places to explore and to shop, I will be updating on my weekends and hopefully to get my hands on some toys and candies.

- Kenny

Saturday, 6 June 2009

At last, it is the day of the flight. I was really excited as it was A380. We were supposed to assemble early at 9 PM to check in our luggage and collect our baording pass. Things went smoothly, except the fact that the clerk forgot to write the gate num ber for the flight.

At around 10 30, we said goodbye to our relatives and friends, and proceeded to waiting area. We were so excited, Neeraj took a lot of photos for the plane itself. The plane flight really excite me, though it was cramped and not as grant as I expected, the games, music and audio was far beyond my expectation.

The foods were incredibly delicious (we even get to choose our food). Most of the games are thsoe games that you have to pay outside. Some of the movies and musics are also rare. Neeraj was so excited that he kept on pestering me to take a walk around the flight. We did that, but apparently the range is quite limited as some areas are only for the business class or suites.

We arrived at London safely, however, some of us had to change the boarding pass again. The 7 hours wait was quite hellish experience for most of us.

To my disappointment, Virgin Atlantic was not as marvellous as I expected. The plane was quite dirty, the games are very old (imagine a 1999-2001 games?! Or playing the 1980s PONG?!!!). The movies are quite old, though luckily I watched a very good movie; “Hotel for Dogs”, I cried while watching it, it is a very good show. The most annoying part was that the entertainment system can only be used after 1-2 hours after boarding the plane (and after the super long advertisements...).

We reached Boston safely, though the Indonesians (and Pakistanis or thsoe with weird names) are arrested (yeah, including me...). We had to go through a secondary custom and after 1-2 hours of “interrogation” we were allowed to enter USA (for real this time). We took a cab to the campus. We were assigned a room each. My room was on the 5th floor (and there was no elevator). So, imagine carrying a 30 kg luggage (and 10 kg backpack) to the 5th floor. We were summoned to meet for dinner and debriefed short after.

Monday, 8 June 2009

We had a breakfast in the morning followed by a briefing and short welcome by Philip Tan. After that, each of the team are allowed to meet with their US counterparts. We were a bit awkward at first (due to cultural shock perhaps). Philip then distributed the city map and Charlie Cards (to take subway and bus; they were expensive, imagine US$2 per trip).

A security officer also gave us short lecture of keeping our safety in Boston. The trip was then followed by a short tour around the campus. Some of the destinations include the food truck, the medical centre, library, lobbies and the student centre.

We then returned to the campus to take our passport to produce our student MIT card.

In the afternoon, we had a 2 hours trolley ride around Boston. The purpose is for us to get a better knowledge of Boston, a short history and perhaps for us to have a better planning for our vacation and shopping areas. We were dismissed shortly after that trip.

There were board games session in the evening, but our group missed that as we have a team dinner session.

Tuesday, 9 June 2009

We started the day with a lecture. The purpose of the lecture is for social games and to make us bond together better. We are supposed to choose a franchinse games and took 20 pictures to describe our games to other audience. Best pictures win.

I can not really tell the games in great detail due to the contract but our team goes with Left 4 Dead. It was very fun and enjoyable experience though unfortunately our planning was very messy and we changed the game (and the initial idea) in the process.

Despite all that, our team still managed to clenche the 2nd position. The prize was a chance to choose a hat to ridicule our producer. Unfortunately we missed the chance to clench the best hat.

After all that, we went to the office. We were given sandwitches for lunch (it was not nice, I assure you). Everyone had to assemble according to their post (QA with QA, artist with artist, and so on). We were briefed about the expectation and the needs of reading the QA handbook. We alo exchanced contact before debriefed.

That was practically the end of our orientation. I made myself busy by trying one of the Rock Band games for 4 players. I was the vocalist (it was my 1st time really), though we did not manage to play for long I am quite impressed that I did not too badly.

We then immersed ourself with a board games session. I played a game I never play before in my life (I do not even know how to spell the game name even now). It was however quite fun and I manage to know other people better in the process.

After that, some of the team 2 members and I took subway for the first time in our life and we went to the next stop (I forgot the name) for dinner at Wendy’s. I tried that before in Indonesia but since most of us haven’t got the taste of it, we tried that.

We went back to the campus to meet with our producer and a kind soul from MIT campus to lead us to a supermart in Andrew (4 stops away). The place was huge (okay, huge as in collosal or humongous). There were various things and I buy myself a hat ( you can get it in Singapore but I was so tempted to get one).

Wednesday, 10 June 2009

We started the day with lectures. It started from a welcoming speech by various speakers to more serious stuffs like Initial Branding (a bit like copyright issue and intellectual property). It was then followed by a lecture by Brenda about serious game designing. It was quite interesting as she brough up a point where the games now are only improving polygons and pretty much nothing else.

After the lectures, we had sandwiches (again...) but this time the lunch session aws with the team. Shortly after the lunch, we get to meet our product owners. She gave us a short recap (and introduction for our USA counterpart) of the conversation games.

After that she asked each of us to share our experience about conversation. Everyone had a fair share, though I had to admit that I am one of the more quiet ones.

We brainstormed a bit of the narrative topics we could go with before we end the day. One of the more outstanding one was a story about ghost. I could not tell the story in great detail (contract...)

We were debriefed at 5 as no overtime is allowed. Our team decided to walk around Harvard square this time. We were finding place to eat before we finally settled at some Chinese restaurant.

After that, we got some ice cream and shop around the Harvard Neighbourhood. I can not resist to buy a book there which unfortunately I found from someone there that Singapore sell those (oh man...) We went back around 9 PM.

Thursday, 11 June 2009

We had a short lecture about brainstorming today, followed by various activities that were supposed to let our brain juice flowing. It was random team in the start and then with our own team for the second ones. We came up with some funny ones (can't tell in detail... as usual..)

We then brainstorm in our team again to have as many ideas as we could come up with and then narrow them down to 3-4 ideas before we present them to our product owners/client. This time I manage to participate better compared to yesterday.

Our product owner is pretty satisfied with one of the ideas. We then tried to prototype it with some toys and playdohs. However, it get messy and getting very complex and the discussion went on. There were some scenario changes though we still keep some of the mechanics. We discussed also on the looks and how it all started.

Jon, our audioman was a great guy. He took the initiative to contact our writer, Josh who was not in the country at the moment. Our discussion could not really go too far as our writer was not present. At around 4, most of us were exhausted and become pretty quiet. Our product owners understand and allowed us to leave earlier.

I played some free arcade games before i leave. I totally forgot how to unleash some of the moves (though I still had some share of wins and losses). After that, we went to Star market for some more shopping.

the stuffs are cheap there, imagine 10 pizzas doe US$10?! or 25 Cents Doritos?! We buy some frozen foods to eat at the campus. In the end, we bought too much and decided to keep ot for another day.

Andreas Mas'oen

that was pretty much all I could remember (and after trying to keep my mouth shut from telling too much work related stuffs I am not supposed to share).