4/19/99

Here we are with yet another week gone by. I can’t believe how time is flying these days, really. The entire feeling in the office is slowly building towards what we call “crunch time”. It is the time in the life of a project when binding deadlines need to be met and people have to work extra long hard hours to get extra work done that was originally nowhere scheduled or planned. Well, while things aren’t completely at that point yet, many on the team definitely feel the pressure building. It is good on one hand because it usually helps us to get focussed and get more work done, but on the other hand it is also a very exhausting and tiring time. Part of my job is it obviously, to keep track of what everyone is doing and to create schedules that help us getting the project done in time. It may sound like an easy job, but once you consider the amount of different tasks that need to be planned, preplanned, prepared and ordered in a timely fashion that never stalls the overall development, this workload can easily grow to immense proportions. It turns into a process that is never ending. Apart from this boring stuff that you’re probably not very interested in, there are some exciting things happening too, however. Since we tightened up our schedule we found that certain things started to happen that got put on the backburner. These are usually small things no one really wanted to bother about and things that usually just take minutes to fix. Accumulated they can make all the difference however. We went over a number of such things during the past week and all of a sudden you look at certain parts of the game knowing they are practically finished. You start the game and look at the character generation screen and everything is there and working properly! No more “Error #670942361 – Undefined text” laughs at you deviously. No more color clashes of the worst nature are killing your retinas. It is a very satisfying experience to see these parts develop and enter a final stage that makes them look and feel like being part of a game. Amidst all the hardship that comes with the “crunch time”, these are some of the most satisfying moments of creating games. It’s creating magic! Today, Josh, our new webmaster for the Black Isle websites started. As Tuna pointed out before, Josh is hailing from Wisconsin and flew in this weekend. We just had lunch together today and it was nice getting to know more about him. I am very hopeful with Josh’s help we will be able to get the website turned around quite a bit to make sure information is coming out in a more timely and reliable fashion as we were currently able to. He is certainly a talented guy and I know he will give his best. That’s it for this week. I shall talk to you next Monday and hopefully by then I’ll be able to tell you about some cool new developments in the project. Take care everyone, Guido Henkel Project Director

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