August has come, and there are only two more weeks to go until I return to Singapore. Two more days until my birthday. As for why I haven’t blogged for so long, I have only this to say: games eat up my life. I seriously have to practise staying away from games which are addictive. I tend to go overboard on those. And I’m also suffering from caffeine withdrawal at the moment. Just realised that most of the soft drinks that are supplied to our game lab have caffeine in them. Today was the first day I didn’t drink any of those, and I’m feeling sooo tired and not energetic at all.
Must… survive. Must… overcome addiction.
Thankfully, work is keeping me busy – I’ve realised something about my job. To a large extent, my training at NUS has prepared me well for game design and testing, but my current game designer and test lead don’t have the same training that I did. I must make a conscious effort to mentor them, and I’ve found that walking them through the process by doing it with them the first time has been very helpful. Too bad I only really became aware of this near the end of the project, instead of at the beginning. I could have made my tester and designer a lot more productive if I had gone through it with them at the start, instead of just telling them to do it and assuming they would know what to do. The job of a producer is to mentor and help the less experienced ones on the team perform their jobs better. I’ve got to stop thinking that training others takes away time from my real duties, and view it as one of my real duties. Something to keep in mind for the future, when the next semester brings in a whole group of freshmen into the NUS Games Development Group.
From what I hear, we already have somewhere around 70 signups. That’s about 3 times our current number of members. How am I going to cope with 300% growth in membership?
