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-Gold 2 (Apr. 11th, 2022 - Apr. 17th, 2022)

Pre-Gold 2: 16.25 Total Work Hours

*Apr. 11th - Monday: N/A
I was busy working on my job at Goldcast, a Harvard Business School SaaS startup founded in 2020. Here's a screenshot of what that looks like a bit.

*Apr. 12th - Tuesday: 0.5 Hours Total
From 11:30am - 12:00pm I put out some recruitment posts about Bluebird Studios hiring for the summer.

*Apr. 13th - Wednesday: 0.5 Hours Total
From around 5:00pm - 5:30pm EST I looked over WolverineSoft Studio channels to keep myself updated on the project.

*Apr. 14th - Thursday: 1.5 Hours Total
From 7:00pm - 8:30pm ET I attended the WolverineSoft Town Hall. I took a bunch of notes for it on a Notepad text file, with around 200 lines of input from club members. Notably I proposed a model for WolverineSoft to adopt to support people who don't make it into the studio since currently the demand for the experiential game-dev learning activity is much higher (~75+ applicants each semester) than the supply (~25+ applicants each semester).

*Apr. 15th - Friday: 1 Hour Total
Goldcast Stuff
From 11:00am - 12:00pm EST I attended a live Harvard Business School 2+2 Application Office hours. I was shocked that no one in the group was asking questions, so I fired away with many I had. I employed tactics I've learned in ELP to give a strong impression of who I am while not appearing as domineering over the others in the group, ensuring they had chances to ask their questions/impress the Admissions Officer on the Board a bit. I am counting this as time spent for WolverineSoft Studio because this tested many of my personal marketing/entreneurship skills in a highly complicated situation, and I personally grew a lot from it.

*Apr. 16th - Saturday: 2.25 Hours Total
From 3:45pm - 6:00pm EST Bluebird Studios met in person at the Dude (Duderstadt building on North Campus at UMich)

*Apr. 17th - Sunday: 10.5 Hours Total
From 5:00am - 6:30am EST I worked on updates for my devblog site.
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From 10:00am - 10:30am EST I continued updating my dev-blog entry for the Pre-Gold 1 Sprint.
From 10:30am - 12:30pm EST (NOTE: I am not counting this as work-time, but to reflect a bit about myself). I celebrated Easter by attending my church via Livestream. I would've gone in person, yet I needed to finish my time with WolverineSoft Studio so doing this saved me work-time. I haven't tried this before with the church I'm currently attending, it worked well! I was blessed to hear a sermon about Jesus Christ's death, burial, and resurrection from the dead from a new angle. While I usually go to the evening services because of the WolverineSoft Studio meeting, I decided to go to this morning service as my church didn't have any evening service this day. --
From 12:30pm - 3:00pm EST I just completed a bunch of miscellaneous marketing and studio tasks, primarily updating the social medias on the itch pages we had, with providing thought-out feedback for the Studio W'22 Post Mortem form, and learning more about itch.io. --
From 4:00pm - 7:30pm EST I primarily collected a bunch of gameplay videos to be used for marketing purposes for future endeavors such as social media posts (with a 1 hour break from Studio work, which I used to gain philosophy advice from a professor for an upcoming exam and eat dinner). --
From 7:30pm - 8:00pm EST I attended the playtest session with our Advisor George Castle. --
From 8:00pm - 11:00pm EST I created a sneak peek post of the game and tried making a bunch of GIFs. However, as seen in my dev-blog notes below, I ran into some posting and GIF creation problems. For the schedule I provided my availability on a when2meet promptly in my new role with the Studio Planning Committee for the Summer 2022 semester.

*

PRE-GOLD 2 SPRINT RECAP:

TOTAL NUMBER OF HOURS FOR PRE-GOLD 2 - SPRINT: 16.25

*Target Number of Hours: 12 Hours (for 4 Academic Credits 15 Hours Per Week, 12 Hours * 1 Week = 12 Hours)

*Hours Achieved During this Sprint (Week): 16.25

*Hours Achieved During Entire Pre-Gold Sprint (2 Weeks): 9.5 from Week 1 and 16.25 from Week 2 = 25.75 Hours

IMAGE AND VIDEO EVIDENCE

*Most of my evidence this week is in the form of photos; I may add my gameplay video clips to this devblog post shortly after writing this note down as some of them were really cool.

BUGS AND PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED

*Problem: Being busy with finals; Finishing up 23 credits and celebrating Easter this week!

*Problem: Had trouble with video size formating for Instagram/TikTok versions of posts.

*Problem: Finalizing my job opportunities and powering through my business school application to Harvard Business School.

*Problem: My GIFs clipping/not recording properly. The files kept freezing midway.

TIME MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES USED:

*Solution: Prioritized my personal self first amidst all these challenges during what is likely to be the busiest semester of my life.

*Solution: Looked up simple video re-formating tools to quickly make the gameplay clip I used for a sneak peek post on social media to match Instagram/TikTok formats.

*Solution: Being decisive with job offers and making the most of ELP resources. Truly honored for my promotion at Goldcast and my internship with ELP professor Grace Hsia's Warmilu this summer to directly shadow/train/work with her on business development!

*Solution: I kept lowering my video settings in ShareX. Unfortunately nothing's working to solve my problem, so I've downloaded a new software and am working to ensure we have aesthetically-pleasing GIFs for the itch.io page of the game before the Tuesday release.

SUCCESSFUL TASKS:

*Personal development and career trajectory as an entrepreneurial individual with a software job and a social impact job to make this world a better place.

*Balancing my insanely busy life (at the moment) with WolverineSoft Studio time/impact.

*Creating 14 gameplay video clips (13 of which are 30-second, 1 of which is 5-second) for future social media posts about this project.

UNSUCCESSFUL TIME INVESTMENTS:

*Troubleshooting the GIF settings for ShareX, as after a couple hours of that I still ran into the same exact problems.

*Lack of time spent on implementing social media.

*I still overall don't feel like too much of my time was wasted, especially given I created a Resume Book for WolverineSoft Studio, social media content, and long-term workflows that will continuously build the reputation of WolverineSoft Studio and empower it to lead other potential future student game-dev endeavors such as this (like Spartasoft Studio).

STRATEGIES FOR IMPROVING IN FUTURE SPRINTS:

*Implement more social media throughout the week, also gives more consistent time during Sprints.

*Don't take 23 credits in a semester while part-timing at fast-paced HBS SaaS startup while working on student game-dev project all along with WolverineSoft Studio (mainly speaking just for during this finals crunch, LOL)

*Continue to prioritize myself so I am able to provide quality time for WolverineSoft Studio and/or personal professional growth for game-development and entrepreneurship in game-development environments involving multidisciplinary work.

*Staying updated with other parts of the Studio more frequently than I have been.

*Applying advice I hear from ELP sooner, as in retrospect I could've accomplished much more this week had I applied lessons from my entrepreneurship cohort class.