Im done with story based games bitches!!!

heehee

I am feeling kind of scattered today...So I decided to do another daily breakdown of my day…mostly because I wanted to see where the hell most of my day goes each day. It seems like I blink and it’s already 9pm. It's a little long...and in truth it may be boring as shit to most people…but hey that has never stopped me before. So check it.

10:30am – Arrive in the office a little hung over from the night before and check some email. I do a quick scan for all the emails that can be responded to in as few words as possible so I can get those done first. This way I can get to my first meeting on time. I am checking out some sound tests for the voices of one of the Sisters of Fate and some other Voice over sound tweaks.

10:38am – Checked my voicemail to find a message from Paul the PR guy. He wants to talk about one of the answers I gave in a written Q&A I did yesterday. I was behind on a bunch of Q&A’s so I decided to bang out a bunch yesterday thinking “Oh this will be easy.” Man that is a freaking full time job…it takes forever. So I imagine in my haste I did not go back and edit out some of the objectionable content that usually pops out of my head when I go into the stream of consciousness writing thing I roll with.

10:45am – Found out the question from Paul the PR guy…my answer was none too sweet. That’s what you get for trying to rush through those things. But I will try and carve out some time later in the day to give it another go. That is why I like the phone interviews more. They take less time and my lazy ass doesn’t have to do all the writing.

11:35am – Just got out of the audio meeting with Phil (Sound Masta’) and got some great stuff done. I think the stuff is going to work…which is a massive relief for me as I have been really concerned that some of my choices were going to come back and bite me in the ass.

12:00pm – Going to a cinematics meeting with Jackie (Cinematics Lead) to check out the latest work for some of the scenes. We are a lot further along now so things are really starting to take shape. The animation is looking great too. I love the prep work, but seeing the game really take shape like this is so freaking exciting.

12:40pm – Cinematics meeting done so now I go to an impromptu meeting about the Barbarian King boss final mini-game with Mehdi (Lead Animator), Sean (Animator) ,Derek (Combat Designer), and Angie (Animation coordinator). We were trying to all get on the same page as to how we were going to kick it up a notch and make it freaking awesome. After much discussion it seems like we have a plan and I walk away with confidence on that one. I pass Nate (Designer that I am tuning the game with) and tell him we should take some time to tune today for the upcoming playtest. Need to make sure I have no more meetings. Steve (Producer) has just asked for ten minutes to have a meeting. Gotta go.

1:24pm – Just got out of the meeting that turned out to be with Stig (Art Director), Steve (Producer), Ken (Art Lead), Aaron (Design Coordinator), Michael (Level Design Lead) and Joel(AP). The meeting was about some more level art overages in our schedule. I am having a lot more of these meetings the closer we get to alpha and we realize that there is just too much stuff and too little time. But I have cut so much out of this game already so the meetings are getting progressively harder, since I really can’t cut anymore out of the game without really hurting it. This one was not as bad as the others though since the solution that Stig and Ken were able to come up with allows us to keep a really great sequence in the game, which made me super happy. I made the call to go ahead with not cutting…it is a riskier plan and if I am wrong I might fuck a few things up…which as we all know is never good. It is in fact really bad, since we will burn even more days trying to finish the sequence and if we come up short and don’t end up finishing it…other things will suffer in the game. Not an easy call to make, but I weighed the options and I feel pretty strongly about the sequence so I made the call to keep it. I hope we can make this work! I have a 2:30 meeting with Adam (Combat Designer) to generate some animation lists for the characters I am going to be animating. I am taking on three characters in order to prevent them from ending up on the cutting room floor…which would just make me sad. So it is going to be some fun nights and weekends fro the next few months. I gotta order some food now otherwise my fat ass will just wither away. Still haven’t sat down to tune the game with Nate, I really need to do this. Where does the time go?

2:09pm – I am sitting here racking my brain to come up with a creative way to acquire one of our relics. I am writing an email explaining each of the relic acquisitions and I have gotten to the one that has completely changed…and I got nuthin’. I want it to be something cool, but it is a pretty small space I have to work with. These are the tougher parts of the job…when I have a limited time to work with and I have to come up with something really cool…like NOW! But still…nuthin’. Ok…enough slacking. I am going to just write the idea I have even though it sucks…perhaps the act of writing it will shake some sort of brilliant creative idea loose in my head. Doubtful…but nice to hope for I guess.

2:29pm – Okay finished the write up for the relics…I put a couple of ideas in there…the one I like will most likely freak everyone out. But it will be cool. Well at least I think so…but what the hell do I know? My 2:30 is supposed to start soon, but my lunch has not arrived. Boo for me. I won’t be eating until later now. Oh well. Still no tuning of the game…grrrrr...off to the 2:30 animation/design meeting.

4:23pm – Just got out of the lengthy animation/design meeting for the three characters I am going to be animating on. I think we have a good plan for them and the animation doesn’t look all that difficult…so that is a relief. It is still going to be hard finding the time for the animations while trying to get the maximum amount of tuning time for the game. I still haven’t been able to sit down with Nate and get any tuning done. Another meeting I was supposed to be in at 4pm was cancelled while I was in the animation/design meeting. Sweet…more time to get other stuff done. But alas…I am foiled again. Aaron just came up to tell me I have a meeting to brief one of the designers on the functionality of this combat puzzle for one of the hallways. Ok, off to do that now.

4:53pm – Just got out of the debriefing thing which did not go so well. I am feeling very frustrated today and Eric (Lead Combat Designer) and I got into it a little. We do that sometimes…we fight like little bitches, but we end up making up. I chalk it up to the stupid AC being broken and it’s hot as hell in this office, but tensions are a bit high right now. Oh well…we will hug and make up in no time and move on. I think I might actually have some time to sitr down with Nate and do some gameplay tuning…sweet!

4:56pm – DAMN!!! Paul the PR guy just reminded me about the rewrite on the interview questions…I should really finish that up before I go to the tuning so I can be uninterrupted for at least a few hours. I think I am just going to refer to him as Paul the PR guy from now on. It’s like a superhero name. Well ok…maybe it doesn’t sound like a superhero name…it actually sounds like a name that would be laminated to the side of a Van or something…like a plumber or something like that. Back to writing.

5:05pm – Finished my lame answer. I am not all that happy with it but I really don’t have much left in me to put into that. I need to break away and get some tuning done. The playtest is in less than a week and a half. And alpha is in…oh god I don’t even want to think about that. I need to medicate myself now or I am going to snap at somebody today…or they need to fix the air conditioning. Eric and I are cool now…so I go that going for me today.

6:26pm – Played through a few areas and discussed the fights with Nate, but only got about 30 minutes of actual tuning in before I had to head off to a daily review of one of our levels early in the game. It has really shaped up nicely…the big thing is to get it in front of Stig to make sure that the projected number of days to do the art is still valid. The level is feeling great so I hope I don’t have to cut anything out of it.

6:35pm - Tried to give Dave (Jaffe) a call today to talk about some stuff but I was so busy all day that I only got a chance to get on the phone a few minutes ago so I think I missed him. Nate just stopped by and said to come over and check out the latest fixes he did so I think I will go do that. I ordered dinner tonight. There really is nothing sadder than eating dinner at work. It’s totally necessary sometimes to get what we need to get done, but that doesn’t make it any less sad.

8:08pm – I Just got finished with a good tuning session where I was finally able to play through the entirety of one of our min bosses. We still have some more work to do, but man that was fun. While we were playing through one of the cinematic animators we were interviewing came by to say hi and tell me that I was a ‘legend’ around his parts or something like that. That was weird cause I seriously was like…really…for what? I don’t think that has ever happened to me…so it was simultaneously sweet and strange. I am sure I am going to be getting shit for it but oh well. We should definitely hire that guy…he’s got good taste. :) I am going to head back to play through a bit more and try and tweak some stuff. Hopefully all my enemies will work tomorrow. Eric is doing an overhaul on the reaction system for the creatures some a lot of them are broke which makes it hard to tune the fights. But Eric is the man…even though we fight like Jan and Marsha Brady. He’s Jan of course.

Oh I got to see some of the new bloom FX stuff Tim (Lead programmer) did….it is freaking sweet. Chris (Level Artist) and Timo (Level Artist) added it to their levels and it just looks gorgeous. I have said it before and I will say it again…we have some of the best fucking artists in the business.

I was just able to use a Mod Squad reference…the day is shaping up nicely. That’s the old school mod squad not that Claire Danes crap. Word.

8:30pm – I m going to go back to tuning, but I really don’t feel like coming back here and finishing this up when I am done so I will just cut it off for now. All in all a fairly productive day…but I think I could have gotten more done. Need to spend less time writing my blog. :)