studio-gameOn

The heat is on, as studio management, and the respective teams, ponder the reality that this is really the week EVERYTHING should be in place.  Sure we still have another week for tweaks, improvements and polishing the final product, but by Friday afternoon, all game levels are expected to be ready.

Such is the state of things that on Tuesday, Duncan and Marco of 3 Blokes Studio volunteered nearly two hours of their precious time from 7:30 in the morning to meet with the programmers and help resolve a few issues.

This week, we began upgrading the precariously balanced player state system.  It had grown out of hand as the design team kept adding new features, but now that they have provided a new and improved (and final?) player state/action design document, we have unleashed the typhoon upon the original house of cards … and spent the last couple of days reintegrating it.  Not ideal timing, considering that play testers are coming into the studio already, and the features that were working last week were not ready for them this week, but it had to be done.

However, today I virtually finished restoring those features to their former glory (ok, if you try hard, you can still make him somersault up the stairs … for now it’s considered “a feature”), while Alex developed some of the newer features so that the player can vault and perform other new stunts.  Josh was busy incorporating other map objects, such as the stage coach, improved exploding hay stacks and, nefarious villians and … well, we can’t give too much away.  All of which now leaves the programming team on the verge of completing, and not a moment too soon … LEVEL 1!

Furthermore, the designer (and temporary producer while Rory is MIA), Ian had previously been instructed in the basics of level production, and he began incorporating barriers into levels 2 and three.  Josh also began working on the features for those levels.  So while a lot is yet to be done, we are making progress, and, with a little good fortune, we may be a little closer to reaching our milestone than many would suspect … which is a good thing because I suspect now that the designers are receiving feedback about the game, there are plenty more changes on the road ahead …

Colin

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Development Blog, Programming Team. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.