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.