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.
Thursday: 0930
Back to the code supporting the new UI element for buildings this
morning. Need to write a callback handler and make some preliminary crap I threw in last
night cleaner and more efficient.
Thursday: 1250
Interrupted by an unexpected JGC outage, which vorlon31 mailed me about
around 1045. Right after that I noticed the JGE official site was down, so I passed that
to NetDevil IT to deal with.
Managed to do just one or two test runs of my
code before our concept artist, Kirk, stopped by to talk about ship progression plans. He
was trying to determine where he needed to focus his effort in the zone of content we are
building up. Just as we were wrapping up, Hermann appeared online in the Integration
server, so I briefed him on what I knew about what everyone was working on in return for
some goods on the Seattle conference. Interruptions are a fact of life.
Somewhere I can hear Awen interviewing some
other teammates for a dev diary she's working on. I'd better get lunch.
Thursday: 1335
Walked into the breakroom at the right time and scored an excellent sub
sandwich as leftover from some other team's group meeting with visiting dignitaries. While
chowing down on that at my desk, made some data changes in the ship database to support
the plan Kirk and I made earlier. Really need to get back to the UI if I'm going complete
my goals; sprint ends tomorrow.
Thursday: 1345
Verified the DB changes have taken properly in the current build on
integration. Awen says she needs to talk to me for the article she's doing, too; never
going to get my code done at this rate.
Thursday: 1440
OK, back on the code. Bummer that I guess my answers made Awen decide
she'd better do a different topic for her article.
Thursday: 1845
Just checked in the functional UI. Not pretty, but functional. The UI
now responds to the motion of the player's ship, and can trigger the original building
operation code properly. If I have time, I'll move text data that appears elsewhere into
this UI, but my main goal of getting factories and refineries working via an inflight
Flash interface is done.
The routine meeting at 1700 held no surprises;
everyone's just pressing ahead with their assignments. Erm has made big progress on the
mission system, and apparently a tool for building spawnpoints in the map editor is just
about ready for testing. When that's operational I'll have a lot of design work on my
plate.
Looks like I can head home for dinner, a
little bit late.
Friday: 0930
Beat Hermann into the office, so I don't know yet whether we're giving
a post-sprint demo this afternoon. Awen's here already and cheery as usual. I'm going to
start seeing what enhancements I can add to the building UI before my priorities get
rearranged with the next sprint.
Friday: 0955
RoGLaRiCoN has the new cap ship asset in-game. Glorious. And it's only
a "first try". Probably when the art team works on the next ones they'll be even
nicer. Now we have to catch up on the tech side so the turrets work and these things can
move around. The list of things to do is unending.
Friday: 1100
Scorch and Hermann have seen the new cap ship. Most of the team is now
in the office and various enthusiastic conversations have been happening among the team
about the sweet capital ship asset, adapting battlestation gameplay for it, and priorities
we need to cover for the next sprint. As is common, the great new asset by the art team
has excited the whole team and we're really motivated about what we're doing again. It's a
great feeling.
We've heard a little bit about the ION
conference, mostly that when Hermann was giving demos the spontaneous reactions of
passers-by were hugely positive. Apparently somebody even mistook JGE for the big EVE DX10
graphics update, which should make our three-man art team and our graphics programmers
feel pretty good.
Looks like no demo today, though. We haven't
done enough to make it worthwhile.
Friday: 1200
Resisted the powerful urge to join a few teammates who went to my
favorite Mexican restaurant for lunch. I want to get some stuff done, and besides my wife
would kill me if I went without her. We love that place.
Friday: 1430
Enhancements on the UI I wanted to get in are done! Took a walk around
the building to reward myself and watched the JGE ping-pong duo of Erm and RoGLaRiCoN
thrash two of the LEGO team members in a doubles match. Now I've got to decide whether to
look at some AI loadouts for the zone we're working on, or to just do the boring cleanup
task of wiping out the traces of the older UI I just replaced. Need to keep in mind I need
to wrap up and go home on time tonight.
Friday: 1545
Well, my decision was made because Scorch came by and we couldn't get
him to shut up about how much he wants the AI stuff done so we can playtest. So since
Nikaji has checked in the spawnpoint tools, I'm tackling some design work, and will
probably continue that into the next sprint. Might have to work a bit late after all. At
least there's no scrum meeting planned today.
Friday: 2000
Called home around 1700 to explain I wasn't going to be home for dinner
again. Pressed forward with the map editing and found some issues with the new tool's
capabilities. Going to also have to coordinate with the art team next week in order to
figure out what they were doing in terms of the overall layout. I'm testing a few more
things but it looks like I may as well wrap up and go home.
Monday: 1230
Discussed my priorities with Hermann for the new sprint. Ran into a bug
with equipping mining lasers immediately upon starting some testing and began digging into
that problem.
Monday: 1530
NeoSpider let me know that he was also chasing the mining laser bug,
and volunteered to carry the ball forward. I gladly relinquished that task and went back
to planning out my design tasks for the sprint.
Monday: 1730
Hm. No sprint meeting happening. Hermann's been either busy or away
from his desk most of the afternoon. Got a bunch of new bot spawnpoints configured in one
sector in the zone we're working on, so I'm changing tasks to make some equipment loadout
lists we can test with. Might think about dinner, too.
Monday: 2010
Made some good progress on loadout documentation. Packing it in for the
night.
Tuesday: 1230
My kid's cold hit me full force last night; not well-rested and I'm
probably going to give up and go home within an hour or two. Will just move a few tasks
forward and take some spreadsheets home to work there so I won't infect my teammates.
Week Two
Wednesday: 1300
Still am miserable from the cold, but needed to come into the office
for some peace and quiet to work. Wrote up a proposal for Keith Baker to review, as part
of the design of the zone of Solrain space we're all working on polishing this sprint.
Back to the spreadsheet work.
Wednesday: 1500
Off the spreadsheet work for a little while to do a little QA and also
get into the editor and make some adds to the sector I was designing Monday.
Wednesday: 1800
Made some more headway on the spreadsheet material, and fixed a bug we
found during QA time with building UI response that was based on the building collision
handler. Under the weather enough that I'm going home early.
Thursday: 0900
Back in, back to the spreadsheets. Awen is in early, doing some
QA/evaluation for the team as we try to set up content for the zone we're all working on.
Thursday: 1015
Had a discussion this morning with Hermann about early ship and
equipment progression. He's recommending further simplifications, so that's what we're
going to do in order to test out the results.
Thursday: 1300
It's company movie day, first one in over a year. Occasionally Scorch
takes the whole company out to see some summer blockbuster, which isn't cheap to do now
that we're 80+ people instead of the 12 we were back when I was hired. Most of the team is
taking the much-needed break to see Indy 4, but I'm blowing it off. Just way too much to
do. Besides, with the cough I've got from my cold, I wouldn't be too popular in the
theatre.
Thursday: 1630
The crew is back from the movie, with mixed reviews. I got some massive
data entry done while it's been quiet, including a full stats pass on all the guns
available from Rank 1 - 12 as well as major changes to all the already-defined
manufacturing recipes. We've redefined our cargo unit to eliminate fractional units across
the board and that has had some cascading repercussions. Besides the spreadsheet work I
also checked in a better fix to the building UI bug I worked on yesterday.
Thursday: 1815
Got a stats pass done on powerplants for the Rank 10 ships and also had
a good talk with several people including Kirk and Hermann about UI assets we really need
to create or rework immediately. Sounds like we're going to have a dedicated UI artist
joining us soon, which is good news for the team. The last hour has gotten away from me,
so I need to head home for dinner.
Friday: 1115
Have just spent a couple of hours in an email discussion with Awen and
Hermann of the present state of the game economy tools, as well as working with JGC
support and our webmaster to investigate a reported issue with the JGC billing system. I
also quickly read over the latest interview on MMORPG about JGE, because I think it's very
important to stay abreast of what we're saying publicly.
A big event just happened quietly with a code
checkin by NeoSpider. The commodity market UI in stations has been removed. This marks
JGE's transition from a store-based economy to a market-based (and specifically, a
player-made and -driven market) economy using the so-called "auction house"
market system. Being a trader with most of my interest in the Jumpgate product based on
its game economy, I find this a very significant event. The auction house's basic
functionality is ready to go already, done by Striker these past few weeks. I need to
learn how to use it.
Friday: 1700
Combination of playtesting and database entries over the afternoon.
I've got 12 new bugs or gameplay issues in handwritten notes that Hermann's going to be
just thrilled to see when I transcribe them. Well, that's not as facetious as it sounds;
finding and fixing this stuff fast is how we make the game better, and we're really doing
our best to make something that will be considered great. Some of the equipment geared
toward the rank 10 ships is now in the database and ready for use, though I still need to
config some manufacturing buildings and place them.
Friday: 1745
Spent a little time discussing the new license support code with
NeoSpider; it's ready for design to mess with setting up some licenses that actually do
gatekeeping for some in-game access. This is a step toward making level or rank less
relevant, which is important to me, even though it will remain a factor in the game.
Going to run an errand on the way home, so
heading out for the weekend.
Tuesday: 1240
Back from the three-day weekend. Two new hires arrived to join the team
today. I haven't met them yet since this time of week I start my day late. Just finished
digging through my email and catching up on changes to the plan from Hermann. Looks like
I'll need to make another simplification pass on the crafting lists.
Tuesday: 1320
Took a few minutes to introduce myself to the new guys and welcome
them. They are both fresh out of the FullSail program and don't even have callsigns yet.
There's tons of work to do, so I know they'll both be very busy as soon as they get
oriented.
Tuesday: 1725
Learned at the sprint meeting that Erm wrote a system over the weekend
to algorithmically generate the loot tables from stored procedures, which eliminates a ton
of hours of work I was expecting to do later this week rebuilding the loot tables based on
equipment changes. This is going to make things much easier for rapid iteration.
Tuesday: 1750
Argh. Forgot about the dev chat at IGNVault tonight. Productivity
hamstrung again.
Tuesday: 1925
OK, we lived through the dev chat, barely. Hermann and Awen had
wireless go down at the start of it, and so I was left sitting there as the only guy with
a working connection. They got the issue resolved quickly, so I didn't have to carry us
through the whole chat. I'm glad, because we found my typing speed really plummets under
pressure. No way I could have answered enough questions working solo.
After the usual de-stress cool-down, it's time
to get back to work. Most of the team has gone home already, but Hermann's sticking around
to make some code changes to the auction house system, and I still need to refocus and
make some useful equipment changes before my day is over.
. . . and a Half
Wednesday: 1730
Awen created a new chat channel for JGE today. It's #JGE-Dev on
irc.stratics.com. I and several other members of the team hung out there for most of the
afternoon. It'll be great for community contact, but possibly a big hit to productivity.
The channel did a good job distracting me from both working and making entries into this
dev journal. When I'm on there, I don't like to ignore what's being said, so I pay more
attention than I probably should.
Will try to push some more on econ
spreadsheets this evening, but seeing what people are asking about on IRC is more
interesting, and easier than trying to dig through the forums.
Thursday: 0930
Today's focus is going to be debugging a factory problem I spotted the
other day while playtesting the econ framework. Need to get my local shard set up again to
test with. Had a little trouble last night, possibly because of new adjustments to the
login server code. I'll ask Striker about that when he gets in.
Thursday: 1130
Well, we had to plow through two issues blocking the shard connectivity
- the login server hadn't been doing what Striker expected because Erm made a network
layer change in the middle of the night that affected everything. We've worked that out
and now that I know the new right way to configure the shard, I'm hooked in and can
reproduce the problem.
While I was waiting for info from teammates,
though, I succumbed to the impulse to start lurking on IRC again.
Thursday: 1445
The bug in factories is pretty much fixed for commodities. Now I need
to make parallel changes for all equipment types and check in my changes.
The IRC channel is already getting crowded and
too busy to follow passively. That's kind of a bummer, but it's the nature of IRC.
Thursday: 1730
No surprises at the meeting, as usual. Tomorrow we end the current
sprint, and I've realized I haven't documented most of the things I was going to document.
It's really hard to make time just to write things down, especially because while you're
doing the writing, you think of things that need to be changed and drop the writing to
start changing them.
Friday: 0900
Got in a little on the early side this morning, in the hope of making
headway on my outstanding tasks. Another group is also making a big internal presentation
later this morning that I really want to try to sit in on, to see how their work is going.
Maybe I can just get a report on that from Hermann.
Friday: 1210
Spent an hour this morning making an internal doc on the earliest
economic gameplay for JGE, then managed to watch the presentation I wanted to see. Back to
the grind.
Friday: 1400
Made some engine updates for the rank 10 ships, and helped art a bit by
getting the data hooked up for some fighters they just textured for two of the Solrain
subfactions.
Missiles and radar need stats passes and maybe
a full rework today.
Friday: 1445
Art asked me for a list of gun types in the game so they could start
whipping up some icons, at least for the categories. Our UI still isn't "final"
but parts of it sure feel like they are getting close. After I put that list together, I
wandered through the breakroom again, and ended up helping move a load of snacks and
supplies from our office manager's SUV into the storeroom.
Since the weather's great, I'm going to take a
walk out in the big room with the bright light and the blue ceiling, then it'll be back to
docs and spreadsheets for the balance of the afternoon.
Friday: 1730
Did a combination of spreadsheet work and flying around checking
placement of factory buildings in the game. Ended up helping out art some more by swapping
in some repair and munitions centers in one of the sectors. Fiddling with those buildings
in-game showed me a transaction bug I'm going to have to chase down.
Kirk also came over to discuss combinations of
textures and meshes, once again trying to sort out how many of these he should be making
to put in the game. The problem we've got is that we're rapidly using up the available
allocations for Solrain ships with all the new variants, so we need to change the tech
behind ship designations so we can have more than the old JGC code would have allocated.
That's going to be a fun job for someone.
Sunday: 1730
Feel like I'm not getting enough done, so came in for a few hours.
Managed to fix a bug with repair and rearm building transactions that looks like it dates
from the JGC code.
Epilogue
Keeping this journal
turned out to be fascinating, as it showed how tough it can be to make progress some days,
while other days were just packed with different tasks. On the packed and busy days, it
was noticeably more difficult to represent that in the log, or even to remember to make
log entries at all.
It's already been
nearly two weeks since this journal was being kept, and a great deal has happened since
then. During the wait for approval to release the text of this journal, our two newest
team members have quickly come up to speed and really pitched in. The overall sense of
pace has increased dramatically, and a number of big projects have been started. The
auction market UI is going through its first major functionality pass, asset streaming is
integrated and being debugged, and the network layer is being rewritten. Every art asset
mentioned in the journal is done and has been placed in one of the test sectors we're
working with, and a new set of icons for commodities and equipment have freshened the look
of our market UI. Aspects of missiles, battlestations, and general AI are all being
retooled, and we're building interfaces that will soon let us pump content into the game.
Licensing and storage lockers are now functional in basic forms that we can expand upon,
and an integrated voice chat system has been added for testing. Though we're still
concentrating on the present vertical slice of gameplay, those of us who participate in
the design process have even begun to start talking more substantially about PvP.
We may have just 14
people on the team, and we still have a great deal left to do before we think the game
will be ready for external testing, but I think the amazing amount of stuff that can get
accomplished in such a short period clearly shows the efficiency and excellence of all my
teammates working on Jumpgate Evolution.
-- Istvan
|
