Istvan's Update:
Two and a Half Weeks
We asked Istvan if he'd be willing to keep a brief journal for a
while -- to give Jumpgate enthusiasts a different view of the development process.
The following tracks about two and a half weeks of Istvan's work-life . . .
Wednesday: 1300
Quiet day, as Hermann and Scorch are in Seattle for the ION conference.
Chatted with Kirk for a while shortly after I got to the office, about concepts for the
group of four Solrain sectors we're working on for our current vertical slice. The art
team is doing just fantastic stuff, and there are also great ideas coming in from Keith
Baker, our contract writer. I reminded Kirk to also think in terms of repurposing assets
for PvP. He's got a concept for a simple sentry gun emplacement that I think would also
work well as a low-end unit for squads to build to help claim and defend areas. Minor
change of pace; the corvette asset Kirk worked up the other week, which I thought was so
cool, has been set aside in favor of a capital ship on-station by one of the border gates
in the zone. I'm not too disappointed, though. We'll just use that corvette later, when we
work on tech to handle mobile turreted AI assets.
In terms of general development, Striker is
busy coding the auction/market system. Erm is working on the mission generator, Ohm and
Nikaji are doing different things for AI, and McBracket is nearly done building an asset
streamer to eliminate load times. JRocket, our newest artist, is modeling some new
asteroid variations, and RoGLaRiCoN, the art lead, is almost finished with texturing our
first try at a Solrain capital ship. NeoSpider is doing the first pass at what will become
the licensing system, and I'm trying my hand at a new UI for building interaction. It's
slow going for me, since I've hardly done any UI work in JGE and am just learning the
tools, but it's so much less painful than it used to be working on the JGC UI!
Wednesday: 1630
Checked in the preliminary UI asset and functional code framework; the
thing doesn't do much now, but I and others will be building on it continually over
upcoming days and weeks. By release, or even beta, it will probably look nothing like what
I've been messing with for the last couple of days. But right now, it's the start of a
working widget.
Daily 10-minute scrum meeting due in half an
hour.
Wednesday: 1730
After the meeting, I went by the breakroom to get dinner from the
fridge. Heard the sounds of a half-court basketball game from the rec room, and as usual
someone from another team was playing GTA4 on the company PS3, with a small audience. As I
walked by their area, the web games group was having some kind of big pow-wow around one
of their artists' desks, but I resisted the impulse to join the productivity vortex in
order to maintain objectivity for any future testing they might need.
Kissed off helping with map design work in the
new area tonight since the art team is actively switching things around. Maybe when things
settle I'll make myself useful in design again, but I'll stick to my UI work for now.
Wednesday: 2045
After getting some pointers from Nikaji, made substantial progress on
the building UI asset. Tons left to do on it, even just duplicating the JGC-level base
functionality that's my mandate for the current sprint.
(click here for more "days")
A Picture Paints 1,000
459 Words
Click on the picture to read the full
text of the FIRST
Jumpgate Evolution Story Contest winner -- written by Aelgas.)
|
