Blog Hours

This page contains my dev-blog information, where I break down my weekly hours, overall highlighting what I accomplished each week.

Continue reading to see how my hours are broken down.

Pre-Beta 1 Sprint (Mar. 7th, 2022 - Mar. 20th, 2022)

Week 1: 9.25 Total Work Hours

*Mar. 7th - Monday: N/A

*Mar. 8th - Tuesday: N/A

*Mar. 9th - Wednesday: N/A

*Mar. 10th - Thursday: 2.75 Hours Total
I attended the Unity 102 Workshop event hosted by WolverineSoft from 7:00pm - 8:30pm, then the WolverineSoft Officer meeting from 8:30pm-9:00pm, then the Marketing Committee Meeting for the WolverineSoft club from 9:00pm-9:45pm.

While I failed to take screenshots or have any image/video evidence of these activities, for evidence of this one can ask the WolverineSoft Officer 2022 Team; additionally, I should be marked as "Present" for that officer meeting that day.
Another way one can tell I participated in this event is by seeing that WolverineSoft posted about this event on multiple of our social media platforms; I put the post up for LinkedIn/Instagram/Twitter/Facebook shortly before the event started this day.

*Mar. 11th - Friday: 0.5 Hours Total
From 6:00pm - 6:20pm EST I attended our playtest session with Austin Yarger. From 8:00pm - 9:00pm EST I also attended the WolverineSoft Studio community event.

*Mar. 12th - Saturday: 1.5 Hours Total
From 3:00pm - 3:45pm EST I attended our playtest session with Amber Renton.
From 7:00pm - 7:45pm EST I attended the Bluebird Studios dev-meeting, where we updated Jira tasks and reported how progress was going. (I don't have screenshots of actual meeting, theses) are just ones I took before meeting started, and we went slightly over the estimated 30 minutes for this).

*Mar. 13th - Sunday: 4.5 Hours Total
From 11:00am - 12:00pm EST I attended the general WolverineSoft Studio meeting.
From 12:00pm - 2:00pm EST I created some of my main Marketing tasks in Jira for this Sprint, learned a bit for how to edit the WolverineSoft Studio itch page, researched what the WolverineSoft brand was (to figure out things such as exact colors of logo, etc.), and overall prepared myself for the Sprint.
From 2:00pm - 3:30pm EST I received Unity Level Design training from Bluebird Studios Founder Chris Okumura. That is a game project where I am directly applying concepts I've learned from WolverineSoft Studio to make a difference for a real indie game development process.

Week 2: 21.50 Total Work Hours

*Mar. 14th - Monday: 2 Hours Total
From 10:00pm - 12:00am EST I created a Contact List for WolverineSoft (using a prior list I have made for MPowered Entrepreneurship), and I updated the Art contacts section. I only took a screenshot of the work after the fact, yet for evidence I made comments in the Officer channel as I was building the list out and I'd be more than happy to show the version history of the file, which shows the changes I made between 6:53pm EST and around midnight the next day: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pWHnqQZyL6Ep2Gv-rMBed8wMxke3aHHM4p2tDVkzPBI/edit#gid=0 As can be seen, I changed around 200+ contacts' email infos by retrieving that from MaizePages via a quick search strategy I created.

*Mar. 15th - Tuesday: N/A

*Mar. 16th - Wednesday: N/A

*Mar. 17th - Thursday: 2 Hours Total
From 7:00pm - 9:00pm EST Bluebird Studios met in-person at BBB 1690 on North Campus since WolverineSoft didn't host an in-person event this week. Here we discussed several level design and startup workflows for Bluebird Studios and went over our current Jira tasks. Overall I'm helping with this endeavor by applying stuff I've learned from WolverineSoft Studio and UM's Entrepreneurs Leadership Program to catalyze the game development and startup process.
Chris Okumura is the founder of this high-quality endeavor and my fellow Fellow in ELP! My role specifically is as a strategist and level designer.

*Mar. 18th - Friday: 1.5 Hours Total
From 10:30pm - 12:00am EST I researched and completed some audio and design work at the Shammy Jam.

*Mar. 19th - Saturday: 9 Hours Total
From 12:00am - 12:30am EST I spent some time learning more about Warmilu, an entreprenuerial startup that makes non-electric warming blankets for infants to save physical lives around the world.
I got offered a part-time internship job from my Entrepreneurs Leadership Program professor Grace Hsia on early Friday evening for a Strategic Business Development and Operations Internship after I applied!
This is a phenomenal entrepreneurial learning opportunity for me to gain raw business development experience while directly working with arguably one of the best--a Forbes 30 under 30 person and the individual that teaches the university's most elite entrepreneurship course--in the entrepreneurial field at the University of Michigan for a part of life I'm curious to learn more about as a philosopher (that being the world of health startups whose purposes are to save physical lives; as a philosopher I usually focus on less tangible work that nonetheless I believe helps others ultimately in life-changing ways).
From 1:00pm - 3:00pm EST I spent some time learning more about Warmilu and raw business development tactics (while a completely different industry than software/gamification, which is the career direction I'm leaning towards, because of that I can learn and apply supremely unique patterns that few would analyze between these cross industries).
I also spent a little time at the Game Jam trying out some audio stuff (unfortunately I forgot my MIDI keyboard this day, so I had to rely on the good 'ole QWERTY keyboard for my Studio One 5 Pro DAW). However, most of my time was spent on looking at the Warmilu stuff in this section of my dev-blog, yet which I believe is super valuable for my multidisciplinary perspective as a marketer and developer of entrepreneurial ideas and organizations.
Some of the stuff I learned from Grace's resources were also links to articles, one of which was a cool article about prototyping; I've been meaning to do more research on these marketing/entrepreneurial/database-searching topics as an aspiring entrepreneur, so I finally spent some time on the research side a bit also!

From 5:00pm - 7:00pm EST I tried figuring out how to implement "play sound" types of codes in C++ for our game jam project. Since I've been exclusively focusing on marketing tactics for WolverineSoft Studio, I also want to make sure I'm staying up-to-date with my basic game design/art/audio/programming knowledge.
However, alas, I still couldn't figure it out, even though I did learn more about how to operate in Visual Studio again (I'm used to Visual Studio Code, so was a bit unfamiliar/unused to it at first). In this time I also made really small tweaks and updates to Marketing stuff for WolverineSoft Studio, such as double-checking email template I'm using soon to reach out to companies, organizing social pic content for future marketing of WolverineSoft and WolverineSoft Studio, etc.
From 7:00pm - 11:30pm EST I attended the WolverineSoft Studio in-person workshop and had a blast meeting the team!! There I was able to get quick approvals from Devon and Nikhil, which helped me change the WolverineSoft Studio itch.io page quickly and to try several design ideas.
I also researched about Jira stuff in general (also likely bugged WolverineSoft Studio Project Lead Nikhil out like crazy asking about programming terminology in person lol), updated my Jira with new marketing tasks, set up my MailMerge for the email outreach (now planned to happen on Tuesday, March 22nd), and seriously started to request student work to post with based upon responses I got from my previously sent-out marketing consent form.

*Mar. 20th - Sunday: 8.25 Hours Total
From 1:00am - 1:30am EST I learned some audio design principles from Faraaz on a previous music file I had created and his feedback for it. Additionally from 2:00am - 3:00am I tinkered around with MIDI and audio settings in Studio One 5.
From 3:00am - 3:45am EST I organized my screenshots and wrote dialogue for my dev-blog.
From 6:30am - 7:00am EST I formulated/organized social media content to prepare for big marketing pushes as Project Rage nears development (posts were about old WolverineSoft games--have one ready for all of them except Dreamwillow).
At 9:30am I took a timestamp showing I made it! I pulled the all-nighter solo to host the WolverineSoft Game Jam (Shammy Jam 2022) event in BBB 1690 on North Campus at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor!
From 10:45am - 11:45pm EST I attended the general WolverineSoft Studio meeting in-person (somehow feeling good/energized for it despite the all-nighter).
From 4:00pm - 4:30pm EST I rolled out a social media post about a WolverineSoft Studio game of the past.
From 8:00pm - 10:00pm EST I learned a bunch about Unity and Level Design with Bluebird Studios founder Chris Okumura.
From 10:00pm - 12:00am EST I further built out my dev-blog for this Sprint.

*

PRE-BETA 1 RECAP:

TOTAL NUMBER OF HOURS FOR THE PAST 2 WEEKS: 30.75 Hours

*Target Number of Hours: 24 Hours (for 4 Academic Credits 12 Hours Per Week, 12 Hours * 2 Weeks = 24 Hours)

*Hours Achieved During this Sprint: 30.75 Hours (9.250 from Week 1 + 21.50 from Week 2 = 30.75 Hours)

IMAGE AND VIDEO EVIDENCE

*I do not have video evidence, but I do have image evidence and external testimonial corroboration (such as the WolverineSoft Officer attendence sheet for Officer meetings, or the testimony of fellow WolverineSoft Officers at the Game Jam that I did a night shift, etc.) to support proof of my work endeavors this week.

BUGS AND PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED:

*Problem: Organization of and sheer amount of potential and accomplished marketing tasks (i.e., I have to decide how to use my time wisely and creatively find the best ways I can contribute to WolverineSoft Studio's success each week as I create many of my workflows as the Marketing Lead for this studio).

*Problem: Balancing other University of Michigan Extracurriculars.

*Problem: Stress about finding another job opportunity for extra financial support as I likely won't start full-time with Goldcast until June/July 2022.

TIME MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES USED:

*Making many of my marketing tasks this Sprint focused on file and marketing organization.

*Learning and applying marketing and game design stuff in unique and multidisciplinary ways (such as Warmilu stuff/WolverineSoft Game Jam/Bluebird Studios/etc.) to further develop my personal growth while finding ways to use knowledge gained from those to benefit WolverineSoft Studio.

*Setting myself up for success via the Warmilu opportunity, which is a near-perfect job fit for me right now in my career as an impactful entrepreneur/game-developer and marketer/philosopher.

*(Joke Reason but Kinda True) Pulling an all-nighter instead of sleeping.

SUCCESSFUL TASKS:

*Organizing Marketing files in the WolverineSoft drive!

*Making the most of multidisciplinary topics by researching those in depth and thinking of ways to apply that knowledge towards my endeavors for WolveirneSoft Studio (this week was SUPER multidisciplinary for me, from communicating with more WolverineSoft Studio members than usual about their work directly to researching general marketing principles from entrepreneurial endeavors and resources like the Warmilu resources I obtained, sharpening my Game Design and indie-dev startup strategy skills with Bluebird Studios, etc.).
In other words, actually starting to apply what I'm learning via WolverineSoft Studio into the real world of game development, marketing, and entrepreneurship.

*Listening to others a bunch with marketing workflows and advise! Now we have a regular social media flow going on 4 channels (which I'm not sure if WolverineSoft has ever had--if it did it's been many years since that's happened I think).

UNSUCCESSFUL TIME INVESTMENTS:

*Participating in the Game Jam (the person I worked with and I worked too differently to make any meaningful progress on our ideas; basically I view it as this is one of the first projects where my work time did not collaborate effectively with my team/fellow game jammer, which was partly my fault).

*Developing the itch.io page (while time well spent, it was too much time spent on this simple objective).

*I still overall don't feel like too much of my time was wasted; I completed around 10-20 Jira tasks I set up for myself (while giving complete descriptions of work progress as I made it for them) while applying WolverineSoft Studio principles in the real world, and seeing real postive impacts that are truly ameliorating the marketing and project management endeavors I touch, which shows me tangibly that WolverineSoft Studio is a success as an academic co-curricular program!!!

STRATEGIES FOR IMPROVING IN FUTURE SPRINTS:

*Distributing time more evenly throughout the week (much of my time was crunched during the 2nd week weekend, yet in all fairness there was a game jam going on).

*Continuing to spend some time on researching how to market/prototype/research concerning game-dev startups/projects.

*Using more time to communicate with other WolverineSoft Studio members than mainly the Production (Devon the WolverineSoft Studio Director and Nikhil the WolverineSoft Studio Project Lead).

*Continuing to format this website, continuously updating Blog Post formats and game development/progress WHILE I make progress.

*Still on learning more about Documentation styles, glad to see some of my work continuing to be featured for the Design Department.

*Continuing to spend time on applying WolverineSoft Studio concepts into other external endeavors (I learned A TON this way during these weeks, both for game-dev side--Bluebird Studios and strategy/level design--and bus-dev side--Warmilu and research tactics).

*Taking more photos of WolverineSoft social events! (while continuing to apply feedback I'm getting from WolverineSoft Officers and Committee Members)