studio-gameOn

It’s difficult to nail down the atmosphere in the studio at present.  On the one hand their is excitement and laughter, an air of camaraderie and the scent of impending victory as the project completion date draws near.  On the other, there is the frantic click of the keyboard and groans of frustration as weary squinted eyes search reams of code and carefully crafted artwork to ensure that every proverbial ‘i’ is proverbially dotted and every proverbial ‘t’ is proverbially crossed before the looming final deadline.

While stress was relatively evenly distributed among each individual in the team at the start of the project, it has now shifted from the design team so that the bulk of it is on the artists and programmers.  Producer Rory’s absence for most of last and this week has compounded things, particularly as he has the final say in many important design decisions.

So now, the programmers are scrambling to implement as many features as possible, and complete the four levels we’re working on before Friday.

Christina, being absent today and yesterday, due to her part time status, will be back tomorrow, so she will relieve some of the pressure on debugging the state system and developing the final action types, such as when the player straddles objects of specific sizes.  This will pick up from her and Alex’s work earlier this week.

Alex today implemented a lot of the business end code into level 1, such as the cut scenes at the level’s commencement and conclusion, and the scoring effects built off Josh’s efforts in the last few days.  He is on the verge of finally completing that level, and anticipates that, aside from a few state related bugs, by around lunch time tomorrow, level 1 will be done.

Josh again tangled with the massive level 3, no small task, particularly as there are several game modes built into that one.  It almost feels like a separate mini-game was tagged onto the end of it, and it may well have been easier if that section of the game was a separate mini-game.  This week also marks the final week of Josh’s contribution, as he will commence his co-op placement next week.

As for me, today I incorporated new features into both the introductory level and level 2, and I merged a lot of the code … something that was quite urgently required since so much work has been done but not shared since early this week.  Now it’s all about incorporating all those changes into all levels.

Tomorrow, I hope to work on the player state system, debug it and add the very final states so that these levels can be tested properly.  There is still so much to do, and so much to fix … the workload is massive, but our team is determined and competent, and rather than focus on the fact we have deadlines, we will continue to focus on getting the job done.

Colin

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 1:03 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.