Plan for Justin Mette

21-6 Productions

[·] New Art Team Of course, the biggest news of the week is the official creation of the 21-6 Art Team consisting of Lucas Haley, Kierston vande Kraats, and Don Toledo. This is an amazing team of talented artists that have decided to help visually realize Myrmidon and we are lucky to have them. We had our first team meeting on Tuesday night, which resulted in some great direction on how to approach the artwork for Myrmidon.

[·] Advice from GG In an ongoing effort to keep in contact with our publishers, Jeff Tunnell provided us with some valuable feedback on a series of questions that Dave and Justin crafted earlier in the week. This feedback has already helped to shape our expectations and prepare us for the long trek ahead.

[·] Incorporation All paperwork has been assembled for incorporating 21-6. During this next week (pending schedule alignment) we will meet to discuss the remaining topics, which require resolution to proceed.

[·] Protecting Assets Since my last post on this topic, we have received some good advice in that we should be focusing on building a team over protecting our ideas. Without a good team, good ideas remain just that good ideas. So, we have put a great deal of effort into team building and will continue to do so. At the same time, we are still putting some effort into understanding what kind of legal options are available for protecting important portions of the game idea itself. To the end, some initial discussions with a Patent Attorney have taken place and we are writing up a quick overview with a few sketches for the attorney to review.

[·] TGE 1.1 Beta Test Tim Gift asked a group of people, including Justin, to help test the new CVS system and the latest build of TGE just before the release this week. This testing occurred over a two-day period and was very exciting. It was an awesome feeling to know that we are all feeding from the same source code repository now and that we will have access to regular updates for the engine. The new demo was also very cool weapons, sound, inventory, new VC6 workspaces, new directory structure, etc. All very, very nice additions to the engine. We were honored to be chosen to help and hope to further contribute to the success of the GG community in the future.

[·] Dark Age of Camelot Game research is essential to understanding the market and keeping abreast of the latest advancements in game features and technology. In supporting this critical aspect of a game company, the 21-6 team is investing in the latest MMORPG game to hit the streets DAoC. The influence that games like Asheron's Call has had on the design of Myrmidon is astonishing. I can only imagine how this awesome game will inspire the design team. Are you buying this?

21-6 Server

[·] ISP Issues At one point this week, the DSL connection for the server just stopped working. The connection had to be recycled manually to fix the problem. We are watching this carefully as it is not an acceptable behavior for our company site. If it persists, we will likely look at upgrading our service or changing providers.

[·] Automation Justin has been working to automate the startup of the server including tasks like making the DSL connection, updating the DNS servers with the dynamic IP, and running the appropriate game servers. The goal is for this server to run mostly unattended outside of the occasion Terminal Service connection to make configuration changes, etc.

[·] Online Task List Ryan is working hard on creating an online interactive task list on the web site. This new system will allow the team to manage their own tasks and provide an overall view of the project plan for each Phase.


Project Plan

[·] Milestone Schedule The only real disruption to our plans for Phase One has been the late introduction of the art team to the project. With only two weeks left in Phase One, it really is impossible to expect that any type of real assets will be generated. Instead, the art team is focusing on the artwork design document and concept art for this first phase. All of the art asset creation has been moved to Phase Two. Our target completion date for Phase One is still October 31st.

[·] Task List Review Dave and Justin went through the remaining programming task list for Phase One and distributed the tasks amongst the team. With the recent adjustments to the milestone schedule, we are pretty much on schedule for completion of Phase One at the end of October.


Artwork

[·] Artwork Design Document Lucas easily convinced the rest of us in the team meeting on Tuesday that we need a design document targeted solely on the artwork for Myrmidon. He sent Dave and Justin some examples of the type of information he was looking for in creating this document, which was extremely helpful in organizing the many seemingly random thoughts we have had about the "look" and "style" of Myrmidon visuals. Dave and Justin spent some time this last week filling in the blanks and providing some general thoughts about the whole style we envision for Myrmidon and have returned that to Lucas. It is our expectation that the artwork design doc is drafted by the end of the first Phase.

[·] Concept Art This is the other deliverable for the art team in Phase One. We are looking for concept art on the following four areas of Myrmidon to start: the Myrmidon characters, the Research Station, the surface environment for the Research Station mission, and the user interface. Don has provided some great sketches as well as an inked, full body Myrmidon, which looks amazing.


Development

[·] Online Design Document - Marlo has reviewed the existing online design doc and forum threads to create a list of open design topics. She has composed a list of these topics, which she will be posting this weekend. The forums will be used to hammer out these topics, which will prepare the development team for the next Phase of Myrmidon.

[·] Player Selection With some guidance from Mr. Gift, Dave has changed how player selection was implemented so that most of the processing occurs server-side. This is a much more elegant solution to the problem and has taught us a great deal about how the network elements of TGE like the game connection and ghosting really work. The new implementation also directly supports the ability to select the next, previous, and closest player.

[·] Safe Area Justin has created a prototype of the "safe area" concept thought up about a week ago. The "safe area" in Myrmidon is essentially like a town in Asheron's Call or Diablo where the player can heal, buy/sell/trade, get organized with their team, and be protected from harm.


Personal Log

[·] Voluntary Severance In a bizarre twist of fate, the company that I work for during the day, Galileo International, has offered a great voluntary severance package. This is in response to the serious decline in business for the travel industry, which Galileo is at the heart of. I personally qualified for package equal to 6 months of our expenses. Since I had been contemplating departure from the company anyway, this seemed like a great opportunity to dedicate myself to the 21-6 business and to Myrmidon. We have a great team and a real good chance at creating a published title with Myrmidon, so I decided to go for it. I will find out if Galileo accepts my voluntary request for severance by middle of next week.

[·] New Computer, Desk, and Scanner Quit your job and buy a whole bunch of toys am I crazy? Actually, these are long overdue items for my home office and are essential to creating a work-at-home environment, which it appears I will be occupying for many months to come. I can't wait! Anyway, a large amount of time this week was spent on getting this new home office set up.

Thanks for reading :)