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Plan for Mychal McCabe
Plan for Mychal McCabe
| Name: | Mychal McCabe | |
|---|---|---|
| Date Posted: | Mar 22, 2002 | |
| Rating: |  Not Rated | |
| Public: | YES | |
| Comments: | YES | |
| RSS Feed: |  or Subscribe with  . | |
| Profile Page: | View profile page for Mychal McCabe |
Blog post
New Site, Job Openings, Monthly Updates, Process Observations, open calls for feedback, and more.
A few bullet items:
We redesigned our website, and gave it more of a company emphasis. You can find a press release there, and the skeleton of our backstory. I'm very interested in feedback on our press release which we'll be distributing early next month (as per the date) if all goes well.
We have two job req's open, one for a Tools Programmer and one for a Programming-Scripting Intern. We'll be interviewing for the positions next week, and encourage everyone to apply.
We settled on a name. We went from Rimshot, to Long Shot, and have now settled on Grav. This has been tough, and the group has diverse views. But with press release machinations forthcoming and the new site going live it was time to settle.
***
An odd month at Badlands Games. Two team members were taken out of action by relocation, while two others were reduced to very part time work because of real world projects - the only disadvantage to having game industry types involved in your project as near as I can tell.
Over the next month we'll be banging away at content, and our internal deadline of May 15th for a Tech Demo still seems within reach (plus or minus a week).
Design
Our design process is getting more defined. Typically I'll introduce a set of definitions for an aspect of game play in a .blog. Then, Joel Baxter will comment extensively on it. We may go back and forth over a detail or concept, and one or two other comments will come from the rest of the team. the majority of the team tends not to develop opinions until they encounter a thing in gameplay, and these opinions generally come out in meetings. This used to freak me out, I expected lots of high volume input, but it's a process that i've recognized and can be comfortable with. Here's what came of it this month:
We have game types described and posted here, feedback is still very welcome.
Began discussing the particulars of ball passing and ball launching - pivotal to a team based ball game, particularly one with multiplayer ambitions.
Code
Joel has stepped up big time in this area as he wraps up his commitments at university - soon he'll be a fulltime team member. In recognition of these things we changed his title to Grav Project Technical Lead.
Rodrigo will soon be full time as well, having trained his replacement for his prior employer. Our AI, and my long neglected efforts to get some code out to The AI Core project will benefit immediately.
We're on the brink of having the most basic form of gameplay fully implemented, so the following are either working or nearly there:
getting the ball
firing the ball
scoring goals
posting scores to a HUD Scoreboard
complex movement model // effected by stamina etc.
planning time
1st half of play
half time side switch
2nd half of play
post game
GDC
Joel is attending GDC each day, and has confirmed that no one there is hawking a game that's exactly like ours - this was reassuring*.
I dropped by last night with Pete Gulezian (our server backend guru), to hang out with some former Badlands Games guys who have been working on Halo and Phoenix (which is emphatically not a Mech game). They got us into the GDC Awards Presentation, which was inspring and depressing all at once somehow. Great to see professional game developers taking their work seriously and being honored by one another, depressing to see the empty seats and hear the token award show reponses and etc.
*There was some high volume discussion about our direction when FF came out featuring the Blitz Ball mini game. In some ways Blitz Ball is like our game, though Grav stands out in ways that Blitz Ball reinforces. i remind myself of these every night before I fall asleep.
We redesigned our website, and gave it more of a company emphasis. You can find a press release there, and the skeleton of our backstory. I'm very interested in feedback on our press release which we'll be distributing early next month (as per the date) if all goes well.
We have two job req's open, one for a Tools Programmer and one for a Programming-Scripting Intern. We'll be interviewing for the positions next week, and encourage everyone to apply.
We settled on a name. We went from Rimshot, to Long Shot, and have now settled on Grav. This has been tough, and the group has diverse views. But with press release machinations forthcoming and the new site going live it was time to settle.
***
An odd month at Badlands Games. Two team members were taken out of action by relocation, while two others were reduced to very part time work because of real world projects - the only disadvantage to having game industry types involved in your project as near as I can tell.
Over the next month we'll be banging away at content, and our internal deadline of May 15th for a Tech Demo still seems within reach (plus or minus a week).
Design
Our design process is getting more defined. Typically I'll introduce a set of definitions for an aspect of game play in a .blog. Then, Joel Baxter will comment extensively on it. We may go back and forth over a detail or concept, and one or two other comments will come from the rest of the team. the majority of the team tends not to develop opinions until they encounter a thing in gameplay, and these opinions generally come out in meetings. This used to freak me out, I expected lots of high volume input, but it's a process that i've recognized and can be comfortable with. Here's what came of it this month:
We have game types described and posted here, feedback is still very welcome.
Began discussing the particulars of ball passing and ball launching - pivotal to a team based ball game, particularly one with multiplayer ambitions.
Code
Joel has stepped up big time in this area as he wraps up his commitments at university - soon he'll be a fulltime team member. In recognition of these things we changed his title to Grav Project Technical Lead.
Rodrigo will soon be full time as well, having trained his replacement for his prior employer. Our AI, and my long neglected efforts to get some code out to The AI Core project will benefit immediately.
We're on the brink of having the most basic form of gameplay fully implemented, so the following are either working or nearly there:
getting the ball
firing the ball
scoring goals
posting scores to a HUD Scoreboard
complex movement model // effected by stamina etc.
planning time
1st half of play
half time side switch
2nd half of play
post game
GDC
Joel is attending GDC each day, and has confirmed that no one there is hawking a game that's exactly like ours - this was reassuring*.
I dropped by last night with Pete Gulezian (our server backend guru), to hang out with some former Badlands Games guys who have been working on Halo and Phoenix (which is emphatically not a Mech game). They got us into the GDC Awards Presentation, which was inspring and depressing all at once somehow. Great to see professional game developers taking their work seriously and being honored by one another, depressing to see the empty seats and hear the token award show reponses and etc.
*There was some high volume discussion about our direction when FF came out featuring the Blitz Ball mini game. In some ways Blitz Ball is like our game, though Grav stands out in ways that Blitz Ball reinforces. i remind myself of these every night before I fall asleep.
Recent Blog Posts
| List: | 10/13/02 - Plan for Mychal McCabe 08/21/02 - Plan for Mychal McCabe 06/14/02 - Plan for Mychal McCabe 04/20/02 - Plan for Mychal McCabe 03/22/02 - Plan for Mychal McCabe 02/24/02 - Plan for Mychal McCabe 01/19/02 - Plan for Mychal McCabe 12/22/01 - Plan for Mychal McCabe |
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Submit your own resources!| Matt Webster (Mar 22, 2002 at 23:40 GMT) |
Hehe, mind filling us in on what you mean by token award responses?
As for empty seats, it think it's because there's no one standard award show for games. Until that happens you'll still have 3-5 each year that no one knows which to support. Still I think the GDC one is the most important.
| Mychal McCabe (Apr 06, 2002 at 17:35 GMT) |
I know I tend to talk just long enough to stick my foot in my mouth. And I'm pretty sure I'll do that here, but so it goes:
The teams were shockingly non-verbal - even the designated talkers were pretty non-verbal, and not just because Ico kept winning awards.
Each of them generally thanked "everyone", said they "couldn't have done it without the team", and moved along.
Hubert Chardot, who took some post-show heat from the crowd for looking like a middle aged balding French guy (which he is), earnestly mustered some names at least.
It ranks up there with saying,"This is for the fans" or any of that other old hat clap trap. Which was hard to hear coming from Yuji Naka - the guy who I worshipped for bringing me Space Harrier.
I understand that all of these things are true, and would probably leap at a chance to say them in front of thousands of eager listener's who had bestowed prestigious awards upon me. But the reason we respect these guys, at least in part, is because they let us transcend the ordinariness of our lives - it would be nice if they could transcend the ordinariness of the Award show rigamarole.
Only one of the Teams DMA/Rockstar managed to saying anything interesting* - as they picked up their GOTY award. In so doing the came off like tools.
My beer addled recollection runs like this: "Dedicated to bringing virtual realities to life without hobgoblins, wizards, or any of that nonsense".
*I'll allow that Ico guys could very well have said something interesting, though their translator didn't seem too keen on giving with the details. Somehow each of their Thank You's sounded suspiciously like coded transmissions to the Sony Mothership.
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