Plan for Justin Mette

Enjoying The Ride

After reading Davis's post-turkey novel of a .plan, I felt inspired to take a snap-shot in time and write about some cool things going on, so here goes...

21-6 has a great opportunity to show off GravRally at MacWorld in early January and are hastily working to get the Mac build running in time. It looks like David Chait will be helping us again with GravRally supporting the Mac just as he did with Orbz that's great news! We are also buying a Mac in order to do builds and testing which is way cool can't wait to get my hands dirty and extend our automated build system to generate Mac builds as well as Windows builds.

We also put together a plan for the Alpha, Beta, and Final release of GravRally which you can read more about on the official GravRally Web Site if you are interested.

December is going to be a nail-biting month for Orbz being in two different sets of awards Game Tunnel GOTY Awards and IGF. As you probably saw in Jay's news post, Orbz is up for 4 categories at least in the Game Tunnel GOTY Awards, which is outright awesome. We also entered Orbz into the IGC this year and as far as I'm concerned, getting a top ten slot is equivalent to winning because of the free ticket to GDC and overall media exposure. Game Tunnel winners and IGC top-ten finalists will all be announced in the next couple of weeks and the excitement is building.

In other interesting Torque news, it looks like I will now have two consulting gigs that entail teaching people how to use Torque. After working with the engine for over 2 years now, I'm quite comfortable with most of it enough to teach people how to use it to build their games and applications. Every once in a while though I get hit with a doozy of a question and have to dig in and learn a new area. It's just amazing how much this engine does and that we keep on discovering. Anyway, it's really cool to get paid to teach others how to use the engine and is really a welcome source of revenue that cropped up unexpectedly.

The rest of my work time lately has been spent programming on a new game and writing content for an accompanying book both of which are too early to make any official announcements on. One of the more exciting programming tasks I have been on in a while includes developing the AI for this game. I am seriously addicted to teaching bots how to play games and this whole effort has been a great distraction from the normal business/management type of stuff I typically have to do.

On a final note I've broken my old habit from this past year of NOT playing games. Each week, I'm dedicating some time to my XBOX now and playing all sorts of cool stuff including KOTOR (love that game), Midtown Madness 3, Top Spin, and Links 2004. I'll have to say that XSN Sports is a very cool additional to online console gaming if you haven't checked it out, it's definitely worth a look.