Guerilla!

Welcome to my next project with Wonderworks Studio. It’s called Guerilla and it’s been started from August 2012 for a competition called Gemastik V. Guerilla is a stealth-strategy game which provides Indonesian history. Heavily inspired from Koei’s effort to tell the story of Three Kingdoms through Dynasty Warriors series, Guerilla tries to tell the story of Indonesian history. Our target audience are children, as this game goals is to educate children our historical events. Sorry, but this game completely written in Bahasa Indonesia and we have no plan to localize it to English version.

It’s not completed yet, but here are the screenshots of our work:

Master Grade XXXG-01W

Being an impulsive buyer is dangerous. However, sometimes, it’s fun. Last Saturday night, I found my desired Gundam model which I’ve longed for years. It is XXXG-01W, Master Grade Wing Gundam.

It’s the first time I crafted a Master Grade model, so I read the whole guide book carefully before crafting it. Unfortunately, it’s written in japanese characters (I don’t know whether it’s katakana or kanji). Well, since in Jakarta I have no equipment, so I postponed the crafting, at least until I arrived in Bandung.

Sunday, Nov 18th 2012

I arrived in Bandung at 4.30 PM. However, it was blackout, so I started to craft at 5.30 PM in my workstation. It’s the whole box containing the MG Wing Gundam.

I prepared a clipper and a cutter. FYI, crafting a Master Grade (MG) require a great concentration for newbie like me. It’s on a very different level when compared to crafting a High Grade (HG) model. The plastics were so hard, even a single splinter couldn’t cut the parts from the frames. Ergo, I used clipper to cut them down.

It took 6 straight hours to complete the whole body. Only the body, without the wings, backpack, and weaponry. It consisted of a body part, a head, a waist part, two hands, and two legs. I finished my work at 1.30 AM. These are some pics of my finished work.

Monday, Nov 19th 2012

I arrived at home at 10 PM. Without further ado, I prepared all of my equipments to continue the work. The rest which I hadn’t done were the backpack, two wings, buster rifle, shield, and beam saber. Compared to the first day work, I thought it’d be easier. No, I had been wrong. The wings are one of the hardest part to craft. It took 4 straight hours to complete. I finished the work at 2 AM, then started to assemble all of the scattered parts. Here’s the pics of a completed XXXG-01W: Wing Gundam.

It’s a cool Gundam with a very high detailed model, I guess. It took 10 hours to complete. The joints are everywhere, even in places that I can’t even comprehend. But, Bandai isn’t playing game with us. They make it so every joint is movable, and has it’s own purposes. Some parts which I thought were useless were showing it’s usefullness when I transform it from mobile suit mode to bird mode. Here’s the pics.

Undisposable

Nowadays, smartphones, tablets, and notebooks market grow at a very incredible rate.

Technology-wise, it is good. It means we, human, develop better technology at a rapid rate and it’s constantly struggle to make our world better. New hardware come and gone in mere months. Compare to the 5-6 years ago, technology and software growth are not as fast as today. This is the power of smartphone era. Every year, there’ll be a new series of devices competing each other to prove which one is better.

Since new devices with better hardware come out at rapid rate, a question arise: “When should I buy a new device?” I experienced it myself when I want to buy a new notebook. “What if I buy now, then a month later a new hardware release with better specification and cheaper price? Will I regret my choice? What if I wait a little longer, can I survive with an obsolete and almost disfunctional device?” You’ll never know when a better hardware release. It’s very confusing.

Obsolete?

The electronic devices growth are terrible. With each hardware they (OEM – original equipment manufacture) release, they make the older version become obsolete. I mean it. It’s up to the point where they drop the backward compatibility for the older devices. If the periods between new hardware is long, it’s not that problematic. Sadly, it takes only mere months, nowadays. It also means that every device in the world degrade in months. Compare to the 5-6 years ago, the average life span of handphone took about 3-4 years. Now, 2 years passes by, and it becomes obsolete, obsolete to the point where you can’t update it with new applications anymore. Why? Because the application developers focus only in providing application for the “current” market, not the “past” market.

It’s my personal story. When I received my iPhone 3GS in middle 2010, it still feels like a godsend. Just like my sister’s Nexus One, the prototype of Google Android 2.1 which she received in 2010. Then, at the end of 2010, the new iPhone 4 released at a lot of application optimized for iPhone 4, which have a very powerful processor and GPU compare to mine. Those application can run in 3GS, but at performance cost and less eye-candy compare to it’s successor. Now, it’s 2012, and I feel like my phone is just like Apple’s unwanted child. In a mere 2 years, Apple has launched iPhone 4, 4S, and 5. Not to mention iPad, iPad 2, new iPad, and now the iPad Mini. Today, many applications now can’t run on 3GS.

iOS Apps nowadays

My sister had the same problem too. Powered with only 120 MB internal storage and 2GB SD card, many of current android apps demands a lot of internal memory even though they are installed in SD card. Due to the save game and configuration saved in internal memory, my sister’s phone now can handle only a handful of apps. Even now, the Nexus One can’t get any software update due to the device’s age and the system requirements for installing new Android OS.

This is our world right now. It’s where Google and Apple compete each other by keep pushing new hardware to the market. Apple has a habit of releasing new iPad and new iPhone every year. Google, on the other hand, is worse. By July 2012 they released Nexus 7, and now they already announce the Nexus 10 release date in November 2012. Why? Just why?

What happen with the old, obsolete devices? Since it’s not posibble to sold a refurbished items, those things are just being stacked up in the closet. It has become a real problem. They are not like trashes that we can just throw in somekind of trash can. They are undisposable. And the problem become much more apparent in current situation, where new devices keep being pushed to the market, people keep buying new things, and things become obsolete so quickly.

Well, it has become a disease. When I wanted to buy a new notebook to replace my 4-years old notebook, it took me 3 months to decide which notebook I want to buy. It’s not that I don’t have a preference, but I worried what notebook will be released in 3 months. Why should I think like that? Because it is investment, a very important investment in a form of notebook. However, since the era has come to this, sometimes it makes me think like this: “Why should I worry about what will I buy? Why bother, it will degrade in 2 years anyway. Maybe even sooner than I expected. Just go on with it.”

Innovation and improvement is not a bad things. However, the end-user become the victim of this era competition. We need device which can keep us company for years, without having to worry that it’ll be obsolete or unusable due to aging. We need something that can assure us that we do not need to dispose our current device. Why? Because this things are undisposable. Do you think that we need a technology where electronics device become disposable, degradable, eletronics device? I guess that technology will be important. But first, I think we should revise our mindset of doing innovation and improvement.