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!