What's the hold up? The inner workings of Meda, explained
A lot of folks have inquired about what's taking us so long to bring Grav to market, so I'll lay the situation out for you plain as day.
If you're setting aside 500 Wii points for Grav (as some folks have mentioned to me, and we're very thankful for your support :) ) or are just cautiously optimistic about the game, you should know how it's coming along and what a day in our one room office looks like...
For starters, we have three programmers, Robin, our lead programmer, and two assistant programmers, Adam (who you've heard from on this blog) and Jeff.
Adam is our only full-time employee who doesn't work another job and he's our primary code generator. Fortunately, he's also a programming juggernaut, and I've seen him turn out a requested gameplay change in well under five minutes. He works long hours and I often wind up (in vain) insisting he go home because I'd rather he not sacrifice his health for the sake of development.
Robin spends his time optimizing our code base, making sure to "clean up" code as Adam generates it. This allows Adam to charge ahead without having to worry about the efficiency of his code as much while Robin cleans and polishes it afterwards, ensuring it won't add to load times.
Jeff works on separate issues which would've otherwise haunted us down the road, such as writing the AI for computer-controlled opponents. He's a veteran in the industry so his insight has proven invaluable on the project.
So this is our programming team, all on a volunteer basis (as is the rest of the company). We're actually interviewing another potential programmer tomorrow. If he works out, he'll get started upon our menus and user interface for Gravitronix. It may not seem it, but user interface in any game is probably one of the longest and most arduous programming tasks to undertake, hence why it would help dramatically if we could get someone moving on it before Adam has to get to it when gameplay is complete.
As for me, I spend my time handling finances (office lease, insurance, office supplies, legal issues, etc.), dealing with PR when necessary, and coordinating discussion between art and programming departments (I see to it that information moves as quickly as possible to ensure efficiency).
I'm also the barista (aka coffee b*tch), the office janitor and the primary beta tester for Gravitronix. I'll typically spend an hour or two an evening (after I leave my first job) watching over Adam's shoulder and helping him test the game and find bugs and exploits. If I'm not needed for testing, I try to get out of the way so Adam can focus without my banter bothering him (I can be very distracting).
So that's how we operate. We're not moving at a strenuous pace, but we're definitely moving forward and the game is evolving quite nicely.
I hope to have a post about some gameplay details up soon, but I still can't drop screenshots (Adam likewise doesn't want to show the game until he gets a chance to pretty it up).
I'll see about getting some explanatory pictures to cover the basic Gravitronix gameplay so people will have a better understanding of how the game will work, after which I can go into details about the game and the depth we're hoping to add. After all, none of it will make any sense without first knowing the basics.
Until then...
:D cool beans.
where did that saying come from originally, lol
Watching creativity at work always excites me. Seeing new gameplay experiences. Its the potential of the industry that excites me most, moreso then individual games.
I hope this interest concept of yalls is fun to me also, because it sounds interesting, and gets me wondering what yall can think of next.
The more variety of unique games i can play, the longer I stay excited playing games, because of the continued freshness of the experience.
I guess that was pretty off-topic. But following indie developers, doing interesting things with such limited resources, compared to the big budget guys, it amazes me.
Actually, I am saving my points for Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People. But if I have some leftover points I am downloading the game ;) .
All kidding aside, this blog entry is quite interesting. Its fascinating to know what is going on behind the scenes rather than the standard "we are working on the game" comment.
I hope that you guys are taking video of everything that is going on during this develompment cycle. It could be good to sit back and enjoy the making of your little project ^_^
Just hurry up! :-p
Sorry, it's just not going to go any faster than it is now. Our office is already packed to the brim without any room for more workstations so we couldn't even add another programmer seat (then there's the issue of finding yet another programmer willing to work for free ;) ).
But the rotation works and the game is coming along. It'll turn out just fine, so long as I don't over-think it, but I have Rob and Mike to call me out if I try to do that.