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!