Plan for Mychal McCabe

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

Missed my .plan for last month, hopping around France for my belated honeymoon. The trip was also meant to be a reward for reaching Tech Demo on Grav (a real-time, airborne, sports game), but in the weeks leading up to the trip the Team realized that we'd fall short.

Badlands Games has gotten some work out to the world before - contributing to Bungie Software's Myth II and then an expansion for it. The crew was different then, and a few months back one of our current members complimented me on the strength of the team I'd gotten together for our current effort.

Since then, a big chunk of that crew has been siphoned into funded projects or other paying gigs.

So, we have some staffing needs.

There's more information on our website, or you can e-mail mychal@badlandsgames.com, if you think you might be interested in helping us out.

In the past I've scoured the developer listings here, poured over Polycount, and generally left no stone un-turned in coming up with a list of people to lure into the project.

Results have been mixed, and so I'm considering placing ads with Craigslist (70.00 per ad, per category) and even *swallows hard* Gamasutra (300.00 a pop). I'd be interested in hearing anything anyone had to say about gamasutra in particular.

Onward an Upward Though:

We released some Concept Art and a shot of one our models as a Dev Snapshot.

We're getting into the meat of our game design. This is basically myself and Joel Baxter butting heads over things like how we handle balls that go out of bounds, how we handle powerups, etc.

We're getting some output from our recently acquired concept artists. Ursula Williams and Adam Pilkington are working on ideas for our other classes and their early results are very encouraging.

The male model for our Lightweight Character is done and skinning is underway. emp-ty snuck the work in while getting his work-a-day project ready for E3. Now he's heading off to Europe for vacation. With three classes, and two genders per class there's still a lot of work to be done in this area.

Joel's also beginning to dive into the animation code. Issues here include things like how we keep a player's head from bobbling as much as it does when we try to blend animations. Animations for each of the models, while we'll reuse as much as we can, are leading to some scary estimates time-wise.

The Team is also working to co-ordinate our first dev-a-thon, something I've been looking forward to for a while.