Home Stretches
We are tantalizingly close to the end of pre-production on the project that must not be named (and which I sometimes call Revolver, which has led to interesting discussions with the HR department despite the fact that Revolver is what management-types specifically told me to call it in outside discussions). We have a demo that looks better than many finished games and gives a pretty good look at the directions we intend to go on look and feel. On top of that, the writers have taken the free time (since the demo was an art-and-programming issue past a certain point) to hammer out a concrete style and some rules for things that did not, until now, have formal guidelines. We've got some models for how to get quests, how to turn quests in, and how to handle the beautiful logic as it unfolds like a delicate lotus blossom and then blows up because you forgot to set up a conditional for whether the player had already completed the quest for another quest-giver.

The goal is that when all the teams are good to go -- the artists have a vision, the programmers have a means, the combat team has a system, and the writers have a story -- we'll all be able to hit the ground running. In the next few months, I figure we'll get to see how well that works out.

My best work moment of the week was watching my buddy Cookie (who plays Diwata, the Wonder Woman (or, really, Wonderella)-inspired heroine in my Mutants & Masterminds game) play Mass Effect. She's the project's editor, and wasn't a huge gamer herself until now -- and hearing her start shouting the trash-talk as one of the game's toughest boss fights opened up was fantastic. This is a game that has convinced a non-gamer (one who, after more than a year of editing dialog, has reason enough to be tired of the setting and plot, even) to pick up a shotgun and start firing with a vengeance. It's gonna be big, and I'm incredibly jazzed that I got to be part of it.

Now I just need to convince Mom and Dad to get Xbox 360s...