Alpha Storm

There’s a nice geeky reference to Skies of Arcadia for you, there. I told you I liked that game, and I couldn’t resist. But anyway, to business!

Our Alpha deadline is fast approaching. I didn’t even know what this meant until recently, but now I know that to get the game to an alpha standard it needs to be in a basic functioning state that can be played from start to finish, even certain levels are graphically incomplete or some puzzles are simplified and so on. This is what we need to do for our game – bring all the levels to alpha standard. Currently we’re about 25% of the way there. The deadline’s before Christmas. I’m shitting it a bit!

Things have changed quite a bit since I last wrote on this. For a start, I’m not writing design documents any more; they’re all finished now. That was the point where all this alpha madness began, and it felt like I was starting a new job all over again. My duties quickly switched from ‘write design documents and do a few pictures to support them’ to ‘help the coders make the fucking game already’. The design team was given ownership over certain levels and asked to chase their status up with the rest of the development team. Lots of talking to coders, artists and so on. Learning to use the in-house editor, which can only be described as evil incarnate, contrived to be as unhelpful as can be (I’m told this is a staple tradition of all game editors).

So yeah, I’m the appointed designer on a number of our levels (for now). I don’t like to say ‘in charge’ or whatever, but in a way I sort of am… in that I’m the one who nags everyone else involved in my levels. “Why isn’t this done, can you get this working, when will this be ready…?” It’s kinda intimidating, because I’m still only 3 months into this job and they know as well as I do that I really don’t fully know what I’m doing yet. I’m trying my best to make it clear that I don’t want to tell anyone how to do their job, I’m just doing my own when I say that something just isn’t working. One or two people like to take advantage; I’ve been set by one of the programmers to do half their job in the level editor on one of the levels. This is a good thing in a way, as it means I’ve gotten to grips with it fairly quickly. It’s also not that great because the job’d probably get done much faster if people who already knew what they were doing were doing it; simple things are fine but not every-bloody-thing. Lucky for me the producer is looking out for me though, making sure I don’t quickly become the code team’s bitch.

My boss apologised in advance for this baptism of fire, but people are right when they say it’s the best way to learn. I’ve gotten to know nearly all the team in these last two weeks, I’ve gained a basic understanding of our editor and how the game actually gets made… It’s all good. And being busy is better than being bored. It’ll be interesting to see how things go over these next few weeks. I’m a little apprehensive about it, but it’s exciting too. It’s really like being in a different job though… I’ve been yanked out of my comfortable little Word doc writing ways and into the real world. Now I’ve just got to grit my teeth and hope I don’t cock it up.