Plan for David Dougher

Disaster strikes! No IGC for me! :(

Its been a long while since I dropped anything into the .Plan files. I was hoping that it would be lots of good news, but it turns out to be a sort of mixed report.

After carefully planning a trip out to Eugene to finally get to see everybody, disaster hit with the failure of my wife's computer. Like me, she makes a large part of her life (and a small part of her income) on the electronic beast.

So, with a heavy sigh I must finally concede that I'm not going to be able to make the trip. Finances were just too tight. I ordered her a new machine that arrived over the weekend and spent a great deal of time moving her stuff over to the new box.

She got back online today and back to work. And while I feel sad to not make IGC I am happy to see her happily playing games on her new system.

The time that was going to go to IGC will be well spent as Adellion nears Alpha Testing. Unlike most of the big guys we aren't trying to hide our development progress at all, which means long quiet stretches. We are even going to take Alpha to the public to get our lumps and some insight as well. It has been interesting to watch Ryzom's progress as well. They have pretty much gone the same route as we have in the way they address the public. And I think they have done pretty well as a result.

We have also made some interesting changes to the engine and we plan on contributing some of that back to the developers here as well.

So, I hope to be posting some new material in the coming days -- as will our new Programmer Lead, Claude Alain Fournier. I moved to Technical Director a few weeks ago, and Claude moved up as we get ready to take the core team to the next step, bringing in more programmers and artists for the big push that comes after we get all our Alpha feedback. I will be posting for specific positions on GG first!

The critical core functions will be in place after Alpha and the remaining scripting/coding should be a lot of the fun stuff, adding in the new skills, balancing the game, and creating the vast amount of content required to fill out the lives of six different cultures.

My own company, Pariah Games, which contracted to do Adellion with HonourBound Ltd. has grown a bit as well, and will soon grow a lot more due to other business interests that have come my way. I had some small hopes of dragging a couple of demos out for Jay to play with, but that will have to wait for later, perhaps after the dust has settled from the IGC and I've had a chance to finish off development plans for next year.

Oh well, just remember,

"You can't always count on the weather, but you can always count on mathematics!"