Birthdayness

Wow its been awhile since I updated. I know, when I first started this, blog thing, I was honestly wondering how long I'd be able to keep it up. Turns out the answer to that is less than a year! There's a bunch of stuff to update this thing on and I'll try to hammer them out one by one.

1) Jade Empire. Yes, I downloaded the game just to see what it was all about. Cost a bit of money - my guess is 14 bucks or so, but I really don't know since Microsoft uses those stupid points that you have to buy to put towards a game. I thought initially those points was something you earned in game, not that you actually have to pay real money for it. Anyway, Jade Empire is awesome - an RPG similar to Mass Effect as far as building your character is concerned. The fight system is nothing I've seen before, letting the user chain attacks from different fighting styles into one combo.

2) Work - I've been transferred to work on Skate2 - a game that needs some help right about now. It's coming together, but with final submission in about 2 weeks, there's still a long way to go. And the team has been pulling 12 hour week days and 8 hour weekends for some time now. It's an ambitious game I will say, and the more ambitious the vision, the bigger the QA team. There's about 40ish people on the team right now, half online half single player mode. Each team is split up into minor teams taking care of individual parts of the game like challenges, modes, interface, etc. I'm for online interface (offline interface is someone else). I've been intending to save up for a laptop and working as much overtime as my body will allow and made some decent money as a result. Saved about half the money i need for my laptop sofar. But I'm starting to wonder whether i want one anymore considering I can't get XP for it.

Just got my contract extended last ... Thursday was it? Or last Friday, one of the two. Anyway, it got extended all the way till Apirl 14th. Talked to Ding about it and he checked the schedule for Wii Tennis and lo and behold, that was the end date for Wii Tennis as well. Which means I'm not sure if they're planning on firing me after that or what, but I hope to be able to climb the QA ladder, as a backup if in case I don't make it as an artist as I work on improving my artistic abilities.

Sara also got let go and this was our first week without her. Damn, I miss Sara and her sass already. And midway through the week, we find out that Jeff got moved over to the Vancouver location so there's hardly anybody left anymore. Trish is still trying to decide whether she moves back to Ontario or stays here since her contract was extended too.

I also told Nate I was gonna get some more logos done for him for his Tshirt business venture but I haven't yet as of this writing ... oops. As a reward for last time, he got me Army of Two , cause I chose it. Got home and played it a couple times but I've reached the conclusion now that it's really not that great of a game. Cody even msged me and told me it was bad just as I was getting into it. I'm not sure if its opinion that tainted mine of if it's legitimately bad game but as of right now, it's not my favourite. Mind you it's not that bad either. Still waiting for my free copy of Dead Space which comes in 2 weeks according to Yavar.

Yes, and that copy of Dead Space comes as a result of our work on FaceBreaker Wii which got a 1st time pass on 3 different levels of QA!! This is a big deal for me because a) it's my first QA project ever and b) I was one of two responsible for compliance issues on the core team which made it past Nintendo no problem and Nintendo is supposedly really anal about their compliance issues and c) this is a new title that EA was taking a real gamble on. So at least on the quality part, I did my job! So Mike Richardson (the lead QA guy of the entire place, i think that's his name anyway) threw a first time pass party for the team and everyone involved in the QA process was there from the QA label team, the core team, the Shared Services team who worked on the game, even Yavar, Mathieu, Sanaz and Stacey were there for hiring us in the first place, lol. They were making a pretty big happy deal out of it all. The champagne they brought, Mike said it was "non-alcoholic" but he seemed to have gotten it mixed up. Cause after a few small cups of champagne, I was starting to feel a bit woozy, and then realized after the bottle I gotten mine from said "12%" alcohol.

Also on Friday, to congratulate the skate2 team for finding x amount of bugs in the last 2 weeks, matt decided to throw a forget it friday event specifically for our team. Had like 2 beers and practically conked out for overtime that night. But I think I worked well drunk because first of all, I hid it quite well. Found about 4-5 bugs in 2 hours. But in the last hour of overtime i couldn't work anymore, too tired so I jsut sat there and free tested the game until it was time go to home.

3) Becoming a Professional Artist - Just last Friday i was browsing the forums at work and there was a posting that someone wanted a concept artist for some new IP they were working on, but they didn't say anything about whether it was for an in-company thing or a project on the side. They had posted the message about ten days before and I'm regretting not having replied until now. Not that I can be considered good enough for the job in the first place but i rather do it and say that i tried than not doing a thing about it at all. Emailed Brandon with my basketball player and bust models but he had pretty much the same thing to say "draw draw draw and learn the basics" so that's what I've been doing for the last little while, whenever work allows some time for it.

No More NFS ...

Starting to get the feeling the QA department at work is starting to wonder what to do with me. After testing basketball for 3 days, they moved me and the remaining members of the original facebreaker team over to a "fresh eyes" testing team for NFS HD. That would be fine and all normally ... except the NFS QA team is probably hands down the largest in all of EAQA existence and adding us to the mix won't really change much. Sofar we have't found many bugs, less than 10 between the 4 of us. And we've already been on the project for a week and 3 days as I write this.

The parents are renovating the basement, finally. They've been talking about it since before I graduated but now that I have, and gone out and gotten a quasi-job and the whole bit, they're actually acting on it. Which kind of sucks because that means the computer has to be moved upstairs and I'm not sure for how long, and the state that my room is right now, probably couldn't hold much more. So I decided to get a laptop instead. It'll be useful not only because it'll allow me to work on my personal projects while the renovations are going on, but I will also be able to work on them wherever I am instead of being chained to this desk all day at home. My only issue right now is I'm not sure as to the tech specs of the laptop I will need. Lots of friends to advise me on the matter though, so I'm not expecting it to be much of a problem.

To save up money for said laptop, I volunteered to do OT this weekend. At first I was tempted to do Saturday and Sunday, but then realizing I'd be doing 12 days of work straight, i turned sunday down but am still working on saturday. I'll see how i'm feeling then, and then decide on what's gonna happen on Sunday if its not already too late. Just gotta be careful not to go over 45 hours of work or the government will tax my sorry ass.