Crashing Akademi Fantasia (TV Game)

To the truth, I've never watched one of Astro TV's premier shows in the region, Akademi Fantasia, mainly due to my lustful intimacy with my computer rather than my TV (take note however, I am now two-timing my computer with my cellphone, which probably explains why they never want to communicate peacefully via UBS cable anymore).

But last Friday was one of the hectic-est (can I patent this word?) day for the last 2 months and a half I've ever been in MyGO. Reason pertaining was that completing the new AF game was of the utmost priority, so that Astro can make the most standard-telco-rates-apply money while the momentum is running strong.

I can't really show you the full game we were crash testing, mainly because it's not fully completed yet at time of writing. Furthermore, I'm too cheap to hire a lawyer in case Boss Bun turns against me and sue for infringement of privacy, breach of contract, etcetera-etcetera. Now that I think about it, his attention span of two minutes would make court proceedings slightly difficult.

So I can only afford this secret cellphone snappy.

Everybody! Stop working and start playing. That's your boss's order! Now!

If you're an avid TV SMS gamer or just curious to know how game developers do beta-testing, read on at your pleasure. It was something new for me too.

When a system is done, head programmer (Supervisor-Christy) needs all hands on deck to abuse the game to the max. Once in the company's server, the main programmer of the game, in this case is green-jacket-guy Usuff, starts the countdown to tell the system how long it should run.

Meanwhile, anybody who's glued to a PC has to access this dummy site that simulates a cellphone SMS system (but without the standard-telco-rates-apply) which connects directly to the test server. Since it was a dummy site, most staff of MyGO opened two or three of them, since the game system was designed to accommodate a Mongol horde.


Dummy SMS site. This image was blurry on purpose but I'm guessing you get the idea.

The plan was to hit the AF game system with an overload of players, real-time scenario, so we can check for any bugs, failures or even sudden stalling of the whole thing, which Astro company most definitely don't want that (we work hard so you play hard, hehehe). This is what the cyber-universe community calls a crash-test.

Once the countdown started running, it was like provoking a pack of hell-hounds. Everybody had only 20 minutes to get the highest score possible and with no minimum charge, who the hell wants to be skipping out of the Numero Uno battle, even a mock-up was it was?

Not all the participating 8 staffs of building 2A, Jalan Wan Kadir 1, that's for sure. The greatest reward is in the play.

It was a lot of fun, being the very first players of a very brand new game based on a popular reality show. Especially since it was a shooter style game and pretty easy to catch on. Once the 20 minutes was up, I managed a respectable 6th place (but about 200 points behind the 5th, bleh).

Our top game designer Kenny, master gamer as he always have been, gathered 600+ point on the top. If this was a real TV SMS game, he would have spend over RM20 but since it was a mock-up, I'm sure he enjoyed his rich, dark, very sweet, one gula-gula Hacks prize.

Again, the best reward is all in the play (Head programmer Christy was too cheap-lar~...).


As for the AF game system, it survived our abuse and had kept its smooth run. After a bit of tweaking and a list of credits, it'll be ready for Astro TV's Channel @ 15 soon enough.


Later that afternoon, Boss Bun gave a minor party to everybody to celebrate MyGO's stability.

My Pretty Face of Berita Harian... Sort-of.

A few weeks ago, sometime before Tour de Langkawi caused a massive traffic jam between LDP and Taman Tun Dr. Ismail's residential roads, a couple of nosy reporters armed with a camera invaded the space where I'm undergoing my internship. Predictably, they were interviewing the said company, a games development with a contract with Astro TV and Blue Hyppo for as long as cellphone TV-games had been around Malaysia.

Well, I'm not too big on reporters, even though I had aspired to join their club back when my Bahasa Melayu was better than my English (and reporting job was less dirty back then too). But when Berita Harian finally printed the centerfold story (coloured too~!), the interns' picture had more or less reminded me the nature of my position in this shoe box.

I know I hardly put the full picture of my face in this blog for reasons of security, but in the one area I would have been happy to smile for the camera was *ahem*ahem* blocked by Bun's arm. Awww damn-it, I'm the intern programmer in between the 3 graphics guys. I'm the REAL game builder!
... ...

Picture I 'borrowed' from Berita Harian: Ekonomi.

The picture is dated Monday, second of Match 2009 (today!). Haha, but for the laughs, that's the nature of many work environments. The joy is better in the job itself than the distraction that follows it, which in this case, a photographer who could have shown that girls can be game developers too.

Anyways, let me introduce you to my fellow interns. The boss in the coffee-chocolate shirt is Boss Bun himself. Bun is not his real name, naturally, but it was a nickname way back in university in United Kingdom. So everyone in the company calls him Bun. And yes, he's as big a gamer as the rest of us (occasionally helps with the music score on his guitar, so I've heard, hehehehe...).

Intern in far right is 3D artist no. 1, Zubs. Zubs is part of his real name but most folks around here call him Zubs (again, my secretive blogging nature, *squeak!*). Picture in his computer monitor is the texturing he's working, on a 3D model of a pot/vase/barrel/some other object, depending on his range of attention. He's one of the two older interns, fellows from the previous batch who came in the company a month early than me and Dinnie.

The Chinese guy in the red shirt squirming under Boss Bun's hovering presence is LM, another 3D artist. He's the youngest intern and most inexperienced. But oh-my-God he plays Devil May Cry 4 like it had been designed for him. Everyday, not a noon-hour goes by without a hacking-and-slashing hell-monsters with great sound effects.

See the pretty blue laptop, half-closed? Probably to hide his Dante-inaction (hehehehe!). LM's the only non-university intern. He's only here for a short job while wating for his SPM results.

Then there's me, sitting next to LM, just behind Boos Bun's arm/ You can't see my face but yes, I'm the girl with white headscarf and red shirt, covered by a coffee-chocolate sleeved arm. There's no pretty graphics on my monitor, even if you could have seen it. As programmer, I command piles of codes and written in a sequential order. And according to a chart my Supervisor-Nizam had on his cubicle (wow, a freaking dreaded box!), programmers are at the bottom of the developers' chain.

Nice... as an intern programmer, no wonder I'm invisible.

For the short of the blog message, the other 2 interns are another 3D artist, Dinnie, and a games designer, Nadia. Dinnie is the guy sitting on my right (you can see his head in a profile in the photo) and he came in at the same time I did. Dinnie is the 3rd 3D artist and is buddies with Zubs, coming from the same university and all.

The lady-not-in-the-picture is the only other female intern than myself, named Nadia. She's also from the previous batch as Zubs, specialty in game designing. Her table is somewhat on the wall facing the cameraman so she's completely covered by Boss Bun (Boss Bun was never a small guy or liked sitting small, I noticed). Like LM, she brings her own laptop to work, a powerful Acer which I totally envied.

There you go, the people of my station who I work with. The environment is great, as long as you understand that pizza and fizzy drinks are the main source of fuel in the company. Maybe if I stay a little longer than my internship, I'll finally get a real photo capture someday *winks*.

First Paycheck is Like First Sex... Need Help

Wooooooow... Chinese New Year comes early-la for me! Yahooooooo...!

I don't care if you think I'm making a fuss over something as common as this for the average ordinary citizen, but for hell, there's only a few handfuls of 'first time's in your life (like first word or first civil arrest) so I really got to plan how to spend this memorably.

Especially being that it’s the first hard-earned cash I’ve been given that didn’t come straight out of a wallet *cough* Ayah *cough*, I just thought I’ll photograph it for memory’s sake (and to remind myself how damn cheap these people are, even for an intern).

The amount is only about RM$455 though. But as compared to my previous choices to work at, I’m still better off, I think. Companies with exposure to trouble-shooting, customer service and networking. Actually, I hate networking but I picked it out because that way, I build character (Character = Grumpy). Most internship jobs fluctuates between RM$200-RM$600 I’ve heard, but I didn’t do much research on that part though. I was more interested in a fast graduation and formally call myself a graduate.

Oh crap that. Please excuse me while I do money-check-porn.

I have MONEY! I freaking have money that’s mine! Mine, mine, mine, myyyyyyyiiine! All mine!!

Okay, I confess. I already know how to spend a bit of it already.

It's a trip to Majlis Bandaran Petaling Jaya.

To pay my parking fine.

Yeah, talk about a deflating orgasm.

Hey, why don’t YOU try to find a parking space around TTDI on every freaking weekday morning. Previously, I had resorted to get myself parking at the residential area near the Damansara Specialist Hospital. Unlucky me, it came the day when the men-in-uniform left me a pricey love note on my windshield. Of course I didn’t tell my dad. He had the bad habit of blowing things out of proportions when it comes to money (my first money, what's more).


The office party at MYGO. These were the leaving interns posing with the 2 bosses.


The project I had worked on is so top secret, even one of the major characters is not allowed to be seen in the intro screen *laughs*.

Still, the resulting three hundred bucks is nothing to sneeze at. But now I’m at a bind. As I had been living the beggar-student life, I have completely no idea what to do with the extra cash (I don’t pay taxes yet).
-I already got new shoes
-And a second-hand laptop
-My current favourite game is a free-to-play (heh...)
-I haven’t read my hefty new novel yet; Twilight

All that’s left is to eat something different. Maybe I’ll try Wendy’s at Giant Kota Damansara. Blearg, put it at the bank until further ideas. Or the next paycheck (hehehe!).

MySis and Abang Arsenal told me how lucky I was since they weren’t being paid for anything during their internship (both had internships close to their universities). Then again, my older siblings and I had a wide age gap between us so times must have changed since then.

It did got me wondering about other people’s internship jobs, particularly since it’s so interesting that nowadays, you can actually get paid to learn a real hands-on-skill, whereas back then, interns doing a good job is its own reward. Based on the current situation, how much do interns of today actually get paid?

Can anybody tell me about their first jobs? And what to do special with the first paycheck?

Not-A-Games Review: Celestial Destroyer (3D MMORPG)

Full Games Review: Celestial Destroyer Online (3D MMORPG)
Shadow Pimpernel's longest and most extensive games review yet! I was playing so much at office that my boss made me write a report.

*****

Other than being able to blog again, having a readily accessible connection to cyberspace that does not include a nanny-firewall (but I still can’t access YouTube though) means that I get to try out neat stuff which I had never tried out before but had always, ALWAYS wanted to and was ashamed to call myself a game enthusiast since I’ve never tried it before.

I’m yapping about the great leap from stand-alone system to the client server network... 3D MMORPG.


Celestial Destroyer

I had never played any kind of adventure games on a network before. There were 3 strikes against me; original software, technical capabilities and internet connection. The former is what I can’t afford, the middle is what I can’t afford to have and the latter is what I can’t afford to have all the time.

And today, I still don’t have any of the damned 3. But since everyone around me is so generous to be taken advantage of, I finally became a proud member of the worldwide culture that young parents would rather let their babies starve of food than miss out on that “limited-time-only-magic yo-yo with super one-hit kill” (available with assorted power-ups; extra boost against ogres and politicians).






Screenies from the main website.

Yeah, it’s obviously the background art and 3D visuals that had captured me. As most 3D RPG goes, this is not as spectacular in the mind of a veteran (and I’ve been many times the cheerleader behind the plastic seats of many cyber-café veterans) but I feel that this game can really stand on its own right.


Damn, my character is sexy.

It’s not a games review here, but rather, just showing an excuse what I’m doing when I’m not working on flying camera angles on my own system (more on that later, someday) and when I should be making reading rounds to my old bloggers’ blog. Don’t worry; I’m not an addict (yet). Pretty much, when I play RPG in my stand-alone (like Dungeon Siege 2, waaaaaaaay back), my habit is taking the Grandma’s Guide for Leveling Up RPG Characters (guarantee not to break your hips).

After taking the most basic of basic requirement quests, I would look for a low-level monster...


Aww, a butterfly...


Go to hell, you F-ing butterfly!!!


Upgrade complete.

And I would probably do this all the way until level 20+ or I succumb to melting pulp to a cheats’ trainer, which ever comes first. Tell ya the truth, I’m freaking scared of quests, any type of quests, especially the boss battles that without a very high-level character, they are usually 999x tougher to kill (but oh, so visually bad-ass). It’s just that I go by the principle that running away and not getting hurt can also be considered a “smart” move (I’m not a hack-and-slash tank machine; I’m a hit-and-run yella-clucking chicken).


My dream clan to be in the healers’ category. Cos they’re yellow.

Which, coming back at my old-lady style of beat-‘em-up. At the rate of my play-time hours, about 6 hours a week (hey, I DO work!), I probably hit my I’m-not-scared-anymore target character-level by the end of my internship.

Bleeeeah, I’m just exaggerating (hehehe!). Who knows? I might take a bite at a major quest sooner than later. Hey, c’mon! It’s my freaking first online RPG. Although the game can have the players get resurrected in the nearest town after any death situation, there’s not reason to rush what I can experience at my own pace.

Thus, why I say this isn’t a games review but rather, just a tit bit of somethin’ that’s related to games since it’s just soooooooo me (this is a blog, remember?).

Celestial Destroyer is completely free to download, to install and to play. You can download the English version files (a pretty big 1.15 GBytes) at the Downloads Page at their main website. The game had just been upgraded to open beta by now and you can still order your free games DVDs until January 19th.

If you’re looking for me, I’m usually in the zone, around 9am (GMT+8) for only an hour on weekdays, but more-or-less for 3 hours on Saturday mornings.

Just ask for the master ass-whopping butterfly-killer.

A Wayward Pimpernel... Wannabe Games Programmer

I’m not going to scream or shout anything big like a set of capitalized word like “I’M BACK!!!” mainly because I’m doing this on my company clock and I aim to stay here after I graduate (for reasons that they have excellent internet connection and at the rate of the recession nowadays, I probably be falling into that clichéd ‘jobless undergraduate’).

Wow, so many words under one sentence. I guess my bad habit of talking about myself to myself still hadn’t abated. Then again, what is a blog if you don’t extend excessive bragging rights to the immense void of the World Wide Web? Har, har. Okay, keeping it short and simple (which is really said since I hadn’t updated my secret space for over half a year), my last post speaks of my short break from school.

In April.



Not that I’m actually going to feel any better after this since hitting myself maybe seen as sexy in remote parts of Africa, but here in Malaysia, it ain’t mature..

I may dust up a few parts around this place, getting rid of those widgets that don’t really mean a thing and fixing both Photobucket and Imageshack profiles. Particularly the lasy bit because one of the main reasons I had to quit was the excessively annoying firewall of my university is that they hate Imageshack and I don’t like to rely too much on Photobucket.

As some might remember, I’m a graphics whore and I love to post images I might find from looking around stuff (see sidebar to details). Now that I have a faster internet line that doesn’t require $RM2 an hour, namely company’s PC, I guess this is a chance to redeem myself back into the Community of Self-Bragging.

And so where do I start updating about myself? Hmmmm...

Well I did say I’m working now. Though it’s just practical training, I hope to stick around here for much longer than the 3 months stipulated. Actually, it’s 4 months by university requirements but at $RM500 a month, I suppose the programme’s budget can only make it so far. It’s not that I love the job too much, I’m just more in love with what I can do.

I’m a games programmer. In training.

Hahaha, shouldn’t be a surprise there for my former readers, since I make massive games review like an illegal downloader on guilt pills. Really, I wouldn’t have had this opportunity if it weren’t for one of my lecturers who was moderator of my final project, which is entirely a whole other story so more on that later, someday.

MYGO Solutions

Apparently, there’s this programme by MDEC trying to make Malaysia a happier place for delinquents and school-skippers by jumping into the internationally and grossly profitable industry that’s 3 times bigger than the movies. By sugar-coating it as ‘Information Creative Technology’, the programme aims to produce ‘knowledge-workers’, aka Cyberjaya minions.

These workers should be capable of hypnotizing dead beat working-class citizen into parting their money and their youth to be hooked to a monitor that glows and makes random beeping noises. Often, these unsteady-income individuals would be connected by miles of wires that link human-machine interaction by on sound system and multiple touch-sensitive devices that jack up adrenaline stimulation of their living bodies, just to make sure it’s still living.

And every so often, a whole new method would be developed, fresh off the experimental lab, and is inserted into the machine, just to see how the stationary human would react (take note that a loud fart is NOT considered as a sign of life).

So what’s the difference between game developers and sleazy doctors who treats institutionalized coma patients? Health insurance, I think.

Well, that’s what I wanna be by the end of 3 months. This place is great, really. Closer to home so it takes less petrol consumption for my car to take me here. It’s also got great clients and had managed to stay afloat for a good handful of years. Not to mention a really cool massive project coming out sometime between August and September this year.

I’ve just started on the first Monday of 2009 so I can’t report of any real experience yet. Wish me luck, though, as they’ve stressed that they do expect a lot from me. Gotta to end here for now (my boss is haranguing me on MSN messenger), more on this later of what are the changes to my blogging lifestyles later.

Oh, one last thing.

“I’M BACK!!!”