One Week of Work, Two Weeks of Other Things

This week flew by quickly. We're slowly churning out work, but it feels like a crawl right now. Everyone is really busy with other things, and scheduling is sort of a mess. It's slightly frustrating. We did get a few things hammered out, and we made a decision on studio philosophy while filling out our new production backlog and getting some work done on audio mechanics.

The big issue is that last week was spring break, this week we work, next week is GDC (so that week is mostly a wash), and the week after that is the Ubisoft competition (which will be relieving us of half of our engineers for a week). Our engineers literally don't have enough hours in the day to work on everything. After all of that is said and done we'll be looking pretty clear, but its taking a huge bite out of our production time.

So how do we fix it? Well, we start by pushing alpha back until the first week of next semester. That way we get the summer to work on the game. Our team discussed this already, and everyone, as of now, is very excited to keep working on Vinyl through the summer. We believe that if we have a viable schedule and sound reasoning that convincing the EP's to let us push back alpha shouldn't be too hard. They know there's a ton of stuff going on this semester.

As far as development goes, we've gotten even more great ideas, and really focused down just exactly we want to try. We've decided that we are going to have a very Valve-like, super-flat management style. This is something we strongly believe in. The other team has made the decision to go with a more traditional approach, and that's fine if that works for them. For us, we think it gets more people more involved if everyone has a say at all times. It does require more legwork in meetings and a lot of trust among coworkers, but we're getting there. Interestingly enough, this makes it a little harder to talk about what you do on a game, and forces you to talk about what you did on a game. A "Lead Designer" can just say that she's the design lead for X game. But when you don't have that title, you have to talk about your job in a way that discusses things done, and not some abstract role. It's kind of wonderful, and it makes everyone work to contribute in a concrete way.

The biggest hurdle right now for me is deciding what engine we should use. We really do want to try CryENGINE, but their free SDK requires a Crydev log-in to even play a game published with it. This will not fly for our program. We need to publish, even if its free, on a major platform (like Desura, Steam, iOS App Store, etc.), and we cannot publish requiring a Crydev log-in. I reached out to Crytek, but there wasn't much they could do. The information was helpful though. It seems that our only way of actually using their engine is to acquire an Independent Developer license, where they take a flat 20% of all investments and revenue. That's fine by us; we're just worried that if we decide to charge nothing if we violate the agreement. I sent out an email to Bob and Roger in regards to this, but no one apparently got my email (it was sent though, I checked my sent mail folder). However, after talking to Bob and Mark, they've given us the go-ahead to apply for the license through the Utah Game Forge, we just need to let them know what we need. Hopefully that goes well, and quickly.

For now it's fighting the good fight against time constraints and other commitments until the glorious day when everyone doesn't have three places to be simultaneously. I know it never gets perfectly clear of course, but right now it's just rather insane.

See you next week, after GDC.