"total anxiety pay for variety
we'll wait for time to turn around your faith
wait for time to turn"
-Sunny Day Real Estate
Today's update is actually an update on the progress of the game. Surprising,
huh? I'll bet you didn't expect THAT, unless you read the Feedback page, in
which case you knew precisely what was coming today.
The artists seem to be mostly done with their stuff - they assure us that they
have a nice, leisurely schedule to the end of the ride, those smug #@*(&s -
excuse me... As I was saying, they're taking care of the in-game movies,
last-minute item requests, cleaning up the maps some more as we designers
"suggest" last-minute changes. Our suggestions usually come on bended knee with
lots of whining and complaints that we'll NEVER finish the game if we can't have
just this ONE last change. Of course, we come crawling in the next day with more
requests. I think the artists love us all, secretly.
The scriptors have their hands full, as far as I can tell. We designers are
shoveling areas, characters, cut-scenes, and scripted sequences at them faster
than they can breathe. We have them locked away in a special dungeon in the
heart of Black Isle. When they complain that they haven't actually seen the sun
for some weeks now, we just laugh and close the door on them, Later, we throw
raw meat down the stairs and watch them fight the rats for the bloody scraps.
It's our theory that this makes them aggressive and thus better scriptors. Since
they're turning out good scripts, we see no reason to change this practice.
We'd do the same to the programmers, but they're generally bigger and
meaner. Plus, they know how to do scary things to our computers. I think they're
the adult form of scriptors, fed a diet of raw meat. We leave them alone unless
we have armed backup.
We, the designers, have our hands full. We're putting in stores, checking
creature files, creating new dialogues, designing puzzles, setting up cut-scenes
and in-game movies, implementing dialogues, and generally spending a lot of time
at the office. I have only (CENSORED - Ed.) days left on my schedule, and I'll
be spending pretty much all of them here. After (CENSORED - Ed.), 1999, we'll be
putting the game into full-time testing, where we spend even longer hours just
playing our areas over... and over... and over... and over... and over... and
over... and over... All I can say is that this game had BETTER have good
replayability value, because otherwise we'll all go insane.
Yes, I said "GO insane", indicating that we're not quite there yet.
So that is where we are. I'm just looking forward to (CENSORED - Ed.), when I
can justify sleeping in again.
-Colin
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