Plan for Mychal McCabe

What's going on with Grav and the Badlands Games Team.

We've been working actively on Grav for about 14 weeks now. Prior to that I worked at getting the team together, a first pass design doc, and generally getting ideas down while Joel worked at getting our systems in order. We're using the heck out of Bugzilla, and we're starting to make significant progress toward our goal of bringing a Real-time High Velocity Mid-air Ball Sport to life.

It might be more rewarding to write this month's plan up after we've gotten through our milestone, but in hopes that describing the effort may be more interesting than listing the achievements, here goes...

Badlands Games is up to 2 full time employees

I'm stitching Freelance Work, Dot Com severance, and 4 credit cards together to stay on good terms with The Misses while I Pursue My Dream. Luckily we pay just over 500.00 a month rent - anyone who lives in the Bay Area has some idea of how unusual this is - otherwise I'd almost certainly have to have a steady day job.

Joel (the first team member to be named a Garage Games Associate) recently left his gig at Stanford and is I think in the same situation I am.

We expect the number of full time employees to increase by at least one over the summer as our Student Team Members wrap up their Spring Semesters.

We've hired two more Team Members

Masoud Maysami has signed on to be our Tools Programmer and also to help out with AI. He has dome some FSM-type AI work on Sports titles previously.

Chip Collier has signed on as a Code Team Intern. He has an interest in art, and has already begun modifying our Game Setup Interface.

We are hard at work on Milestone #1

For those of you who subscribe to Game Developer Magazine, our Milestone one is a lot like the M5 described in the Milestone Acceptance Testing article. Milestone One will be our first significant build since the First Playable I mentioned a couple of plans back.

Some highlights from the milestone:

Joel is working at turning our Ball into a ShapBase object. Having the ball be ShapeBase (a convex solid) means that we could use the same sort of motion equations and collision code for the ball as we do for the players. This is not so easy a thing to accomplish - he was glad to have rewritten the camera code prior to tackling it. He's not posting many comments these days, and I see less of him around our webspace and hotline server. Sure signs of an impending code dump.

Greg is reworking the skin modifier on our placeholder character model for the third time now. This is a painful process to watch, but it's been great to see him persevere, to stick with it, all the while knowing that at some point a hired gun is going to give us our default model and that his character will come out. Keith gave us our first animated Ball Launcher knowing that it too is a first pass and will be improved on and revised.

Chris Dreessen is developing our Boomerang Ball. When "Boomer" is fired, it assumes the trajectory determined by the player, and executes its flight path normally until a specific number of clicks have passed --guessing that 1 or 2 seconds will generally be right (a bit longer than the time required for the ball to travel from one end of the arena to the other) or it runs into the wall of the Ball Valid Zone at which point a consistent --predictable & learnable over time-- and elegant arc should return the ball to the player's present location.

We had a windfall of Concept Art from an old friend of the group, Levi Hopkins. This was immensely energizing. For some time now we'd been making good technical progress while our Art Direction seemingly lagged. James, our primary Scene Builder, is working on multiple titles as part of his day job. Emp-ty, our Character Modeler, is in the same position. I've taken a very get what I can when I can approach to these relationships, and it has paid off but has meant slow periods. So it was great to see this in my inbox. Just a rough, and this character won't make it into the game - if you play with the last two digits of the URL you can see two more skteches though ;].

I'll post Levi's next pass at our Trog character as a Developer Screen after we meet this week.

Mychal McCabe
Badlands Games