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October 22 Not Friday Friday EntryLooks like I’m missed the beat again. Lots of exciting things, on Thursday 16th the Champagne flowed freely at the official launch party for Lionhead & Fable II staff only. I was on a coach that got lost, but when we got there fun was had, awards given, and Peter Molyneux gave a very emotional speech. Actors played characters wandering through the party and luckily at the end of it all my wife came and picked me up at some silly hour in the morning. I’m a very lucky guy :-) Friday was a slow day as most people either had the day off or were recovering a bit from the night before. Monday many, many reviews come out… most of them glowing and between 9/10 and 10/10. Congrats Fable II team, I am so proud to be in the credits with you guys it’s untrue! It has been a life aspiration to be credited on a successful game… and now I have been. :-) http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/xbox360/fable2?q=fable%20II is a good place to start, but here’s a breakdown here (from 21st October)
A few more goodbyes this week, Martin (awesome engine coder), Mark (great scripter) and Neil (thank him for co-op in Fable II). Work continues a pace on the other project’s editor, gutting FablEd for bits and trying to get the new one as lean and focused as possible. Refactoring like this the interest meter can go between refactoring zen and frustrating chases down seemingly endless rabbit holes. Landlord did quarterly visit yesterday, and apparently wants to charge us for a gardener to cut the rear garden hedge to his specifications. To be honest that hedge has never been that great, so it’s a bit of a cheek. Still there might be a fully tiled bathroom on the way so best to keep things cordial. We’ll see what we can do for Friday I guess. Yesterday evening I actually got to put a retail Fable II copy in my machine. Peter said everyone could have the afternoon off to go play after we got our copies… I have things I had to do for the other team I’m still on but managed to leave a little early. Danni finally got to see what the late nights and weekend were all about. She seems impressed so far :-) October 13 Friday Entry… on a Monday… whoops… Early on the week I sat with Dave B for a little while going through his physics test bed he had made in C# to simulate hair and help him out with some flickering on the display… later on the week I revisited him and saw some of the stuff working in the Fable II test bed, all very interesting! James left on Thursday… he was one of CTG and I think the first person to buy me a pint at lunch! He will be sorely missed by the team, but I am sure will infuse some of that Lionhead magic in to the company he has gone to in his new position :-) The Fable II TV ad is fab! http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/fable-ii/fable-ii-trailer/1251513 Also I am on the telly in America (G4TV)… for like two seconds in the background, specifically on this one: http://www.g4tv.com/xplay/previews/29112/Fable_II_The_Art_Direction.html (30 seconds in) – this is the entire series of shows:
Friday I ended up staying late (by my own choice mind you) to move my stuff up to a new desk on the second floor… the pillars are blue here ;-) Created a couple of different versions of the editor that will be released sometime on Monday. October 03 The Friday EntryMonday… unexpected announcement about Fable II Live. Move along shall we? Tuesday played some Little Big Planet in the Lionhead Cafe. Before 10am messed with it with a couple of other devs – then at the end of lunch I started messing with it some more and Peter Molyneux came through and asked for the pad. So I gave it up and watched him play and we made comments about what we thought was good (art) and bad (controls) about the game and then he gave me the pad back… and I managed to get myself killed by messing up a jump that involved three blocks, a movable block and some ghosts. D’oh! There is no doubt the Little Big Planet is a work of art but everything in it a 360 could do. The poppet interface is great, though a few times people got a bit lost about what to do (flipping pages to find techniques, etc). I got frustrated with the ghost thing – a couple of times the arms seemed to get me but didn’t kill me, and other times I didn’t feel like I was close and I got killed – I think it’s that poisonous gas thing that trails behind the ghosts that was confusing. The whole having to jump to move towards / away platforms in 2.5d I think I could get used too though again not 100% intuitive. Not dragging blocks towards and away from the screen I’m guessing is a game-play decision made on purpose – not sure if I agree with it but I guess it opens up different puzzles. The emoting in Little Big Planet, along with the art, would be the thing that stands out for me. I’ve not created any levels with it, but I would wager that would be pretty fun to do. Little Big Planet makes me want a PS3… but I’m not going to buy one for just one game! ;-) Wednesday managed to make it to yoga at lunch, and get a new version of the editor together and ready to test and deploy on Thursday. Thursday released new version of editor. Microsoft Adjusts Contents & Pricing for Fable II Collector's Edition Gutted… :-(. Had a great talk with Dan D and Matt H about university, games distribution and narrative at lunch. Started to look at fog editing within FablEd but engine side had a fix. Thinking about documenting Height-fields some more. Tried out some more networking on Facebook – hope the requests work out! Friday figured out that a function call had some expectations… probably down to it’s name… that people were ignoring when calling it (despite the <summary/> block saying otherwise). Was going to fix those instances… but instead figured it would be better to just have the function live up to the expectation. One has to be pragmatic about such things ;-) New version of editor ready to release on Monday. Actually *held* a normal version of Fable II in my hands and skim read the manual at the team meeting when a few copies were being passed around today. Finally PM accepted my Facebook friend request… w00t! Oh and Kostas is now a Fable II Widows party admin – which will hopefully help with the recruitment process :-) |
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