The Hermit Craps - On Games and Shanghai

Updates · 97 days ago

Whoa… where do I start?

So much have changed since the last time I updated this space.

For starters, I’m getting married on the 5th of July at Shanghai. The wedding service will be held at Heng Shan Community Church, feel free to drop by!

On the career front, Gameeel is being shut down, and I’m starting a new job on Monday.

I’ll go into details once I get a breather.

Comment [424]

Gameeel's New NEW Office · 218 days ago

This news is way overdue… Gameeel moved yet again… 2 and a half months ago on 8th of October.

We exchanged our old serene location for the bustling street of Tian Yao Qiao road. On the up side, we now have a wide selection of food, entertainment and convenience store choices, plus the nice feeling of having your own place. On the down side, we swapped the opera singings for construction noise. Yes, we moved right beside a construction site.

I would put up some pictures, but this place is really not too exciting. Plus according to one of the founders it has bad Feng Shui – many triangles in the room!

Now I’m going to eat KFC 3 days in a row because I can.

Comment [2]

Biking trip at Dian Shan Lake · 260 days ago

Last weekend a couple of us joined a biking trip to Dian Shan Lake. The trip was organized by Bodhi and introduced to us by Jason “the man” Tai.

Some of the highlights of the trip includes seeing cotton on a plant for the first time in my life (surreal!), cycling through rice/wheat fields, arguing whether we cycled through a rice field or a wheat field, and enduring calls of “lao wai, lao wai!” (clearly not directed at me, of course). It was also nice to cycle through the water towns (it was near Zhu Jia Jiao, a famous water town) that are bustling with normal village life – kids playing, people working on fields. Beats the touristy water towns such as Zhou Zhuang and Xi “Tom Cruise Shrine” Tang anytime.

My bottom hurts so bad after the trip, although the difficulty of the trip was only rated as “cruiser”. I may go for an “intermediate” some time in the future, when I put on some ass of steel.

The start.

Inhuman strength!

Nice trees and grass.

Taking a break.

Half of the biking group on the bridge.

Wingman Jason.

So is that a rice field or a wheat field?

I’m a big fan of Angelina Jolie. Joon is a bigger fan.

Ending the trip with a group photo. Joon, Lucy, Jason, is it just me, or the fourth person just looks annoyingly goofy?

Ducks made my day!

Comment

Loli's Last Day · 327 days ago

Yesterday was our intern Loli’s last day at Gameeel. He is going to further his studies at Jiao Tong University.

I never introduced this guy in the blog before. Why the nickname “Loli”? Simply put, he is a lolita lover.

Check out how Loli decorate our engineer room with nice Lolita themed posters. If you have a sharp eye, you may have spotted his similarly themed t-shirt too.

Some fun with Loli.

Team shoot. We are all going to miss this guy.

Comment [7]

GDC China Afterthoughts · 328 days ago

For the past 3 days I have been attending GDC China with kiki.

Day 1:
There wasn’t much going on on this day. There was a 9-5.30 full day tutorial on agile development methadologies, delivered by 3 Bioware guys. After sitting through the tutorial, we are both eager to give SCRUM a try. Some other attendees that we met had positive things to say about it too. We’ll definitely study deeper on the topic.

In the afternoon, a close friend and fellow GDC attendee was hospitalized and that cut my day a bit short.

At night, we attended a Mobile Monday meeting, which saw many attendees from GDC spilled over to that event.

Day 2:
Most of this day was spent networking, as we drift in and out from one track to another. We managed to sit down and listen to James Gwertzman(Popcap)‘s “Why you should be making casual games for the western market!”. Being a regular lurker on the IndieGamer forums, there wasn’t anything terribly informative, but seeing how a PopCap game(AstroPop) evolved over one year(!) from zero to final product was very interesting.

Day 3:
This is the day I spent the most time listening to tracks.

Erick Wujcik, no stranger to Shanghai game development scene(formerly Ubi creative director) gave a talk on “How to Cultivate Design Talents in China”. His speech delivery was good and nailed some solid points. Together with Richard(see below), they reinforced my belief that game designers’ tracks seldom disappoint.

Next up was Feng Zhu, a pretty famous guy in the CG world (he worked on Transformers and TMNT). No disrespect to him, but his presentation “Concept Design in Games & Film” was a total bore. All he did in the presentation was showing the audience art after art after art… for a total of 1 hour, and giving commentary as he do that. Artists may had enjoyed his talk though.

For us, Richard Rouse III‘s presentation, titled “Cinematic Game Design II: Storytelling” was the highlight of GDC. In the presentation, he listed out 9 storytelling techniques widely used in movies, and explain how it could be applied in video games. For each technique, he showed video clip examples, taken from both movies and video games employing that particular technique.

Conclusion:
There were plenty of aspects that the organizers can improve on(better networking area, wifi access, make sure air conditioners work, better food, more content), but being the very first GDC in China, I think it is a pretty good first attempt.

Comment [2]

The Proposal · 334 days ago

This happened some time ago…

I proposed. She accepted. Details here. And here. Involves trishaw and thunderstorm.

Comment [7]

Logos... What do you think? · 359 days ago

This is Gameeel’s current Logo, the same one displayed in our webpage and our business card.

I thought that the current logo is a bit too generic, and doesn’t look very exciting. A friend told me that he recalls seeing 3-4 “G with an arrow” style logos, just like our current one.

I thought that our logo should reflect these attributes: fun, creative, electrifying, unpredictable(in a good way).

So I enlisted cc’s friend’s company to help us with a brand new design, and they came up with these:

What do you think? We are not obligated to use any of the above, any more volunteers out there that is willing to design for us for free? * very subtle wink *

Comment [14]

First Payment in a Year · 376 days ago

This week, I received my first salary in a year. Thanks to this blog, I was able to pinpoint the exact date of my last employed day – 16 July 2006 – a few days to exactly one year.

The salary is a measly sum, but I couldn’t have gone this far without the massive support given to me by the people around me.

Special thanks go to cc’s parents, who allowed me to bunk and dine at their place for 2 years now – at the expense of turning their living room to my bedroom. Many people wondered how did I survive for so long, now you know the main reason.

Apart from being morally supportive, cc also didn’t mind me not being able to buy her pretty things for a long while. Oh, she also taken on the role of the breadwinner as my savings started to run dry.

My parents, themselves who had gone through turbulent times while my dad was bootstrapping for his business, encouraged me all the way and supported me to live my dreams.

Friends, thanks for not asking me to get a real job :D

I got to stop before this turns into a thank you speech for success, because we are still far from it.

My goal for the coming year is to deliver one kick ass game while being able to pay all bills.

Comment [9]

Vista Ready NOT · 379 days ago

My Dell laptop that I recently purchased came with a genuine Windows Vista Basic – and I just downgraded it to a one-eyed peg-legged version of Windows XP.

First, there were warnings of incompatible software, Tencent QQ Messenger being among the few, but they worked without a hitch anyway.

Then shit starts to happen. My webcam couldn’t work on Vista. Fine, I’ll just borrow someone else’s webcam temporarily.

Then I started playing around with the webcam API available in Adobe Flash. Accessing the webcam frequently freezes the program, and Vista has no way to shut down the program. I tried both Flash 8 and Flash cs3, no luck with both. Downgrading to Windows XP solved the problem.

No thanks Vista, I’ll wait till you get much more stabler, or perhaps I won’t at all.

Any problems with Vista out there?

Comment [1]

Office Life · 389 days ago

So it has been almost one month since we move into the office.

I’m happy to be back with the office life, abandoning the much gutsy Indie™ life altogether. The reasons being:

1. Contact with real people – jokes are thrown around in between lines of code in the room, not looked up from Al Lowe’s Cyberjoke 3000™ or AskMen.com. Resident game designer Kiki’s chuckles in the next room would pass through the internet cable hole into the programmers room, reminding us that game development is well alive and fun!

2. Direct communication – most of our communication back while developing Exocubes were made using instant messengers. While I’m still intrigued with the endless possibilities of working remotely, lets just say not everyone is well suited to this kind of communication. Discussing matters in real life cut down miscommunications and arguments by a large percentage.

3. Good working condition – I went through last winter working on a shaky chair and a not so comfortable table. I also work near a bed and a refrigerator that may or may not be stuffed with food. A self brain storming session would involve me lying on bed, but I must not look like I’m sleeping! The future mom-in-law walks around.

And the bad:

1. Two hours, up to two and a half hours of commuting a day – the only consolation being all the pretty girls are hardworking and commute early. But more than 10 hours a week wasted on commuting? I’m so tempted to get one of those iThingies to pass time.

2. Bye bye to hobbies – As a result of the above, I no longer have time for running and music practice. I still want to do a half-marathon this year and I’m not able to put in enough training.

3. Spend spend spend – Getting my ass outside the door also means I need to spend more. Transport costs money, I’m more tempted to eat well while outside, and also exposed to those iThingies adverts. And they said the first rule of indie life is to downsize your life.

All in all, I’m still happy to go back to a 9-6 life at this stage of life, as long as we are working on games that we love to make, and we still have this very enjoyable energy of a startup.

Doorbell, thats my Dell laptop arriving at my doorstep, see ya!