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.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
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!
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
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!
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!
Thursday, July 2, 2009
A Breather
Finally there's some time to blog about the past 3 days as the current phase has been submitted.
1 July
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
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
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