It's an old joke, and one I shamelessly used on our old 'starter' forums, much to Plectrum's chagrin.
I was chatting with a colleague the other day about how different things are now.
At the start of a project, you don't feel as though you're really working per se. You go into work, sure, talk lots, come up with ideas, write it all down and go home buzzing. This is the fun 'making stuff up' part of design I really love. The bit that's mistaken as the entirety of what a designer does by non-designers.
But then comes the implementation of those ideas into the game. Code give us the tools to do this, art make it look wonderfully pretty, and we start regretting the amount of features we dreamt up before as we actually transform them from an ethereal concept into something far more tangible.
Now, more than a year and a half later, I come into work every morning and look at the colossus before us waiting to be finished. After half an hour of uncontrollable sobbing, I man-up and we all get down to it. We're in the real nitty gritty stage of development.
We're feature complete. We're in Beta. We're checking stuff. We're fixing bugs.
We're working to a really tight Beta schedule. There seem to be too few hours in the day to do everything, and we're so busy the days are just flashing by over our heads.
So we're in closed Beta. And we're dead busy. We're listening to your feedback (we have constant meetings about it!) and doing our best to meet your expectations.
While all this is going on, I just wanted to take a moment to pay tribute to some of my colleagues that, from a design perspective at least, are really the unsung heroes of Football Superstars. Without them, I doubt we'd be where we are today.
We were lucky enough to get four students in from Derby University to help us with the game. It was a win-win situation; we get more hands on deck, they get a ton of experience (points).
These guys were incredibly smart, enthusiastic and eager to learn.
Coming from a coding background, they picked up how to use the tools, and write scripts, amazingly quickly. Now they've been here over a year, they really do know their stuff inside out and have each contributed a huge amount to the game you'll all be playing soon.
Ash and Scott have served their design sentence and have fled to the dark side - code - with gay abandon.
It's almost as if they wanted to go! Indeed, Ash is leaving us this week, and Scott the week after.
These two guys have contributed hugely to the game. There'll be things you do in-game that are only possible because these guys were here.
Alan’s stayed with us in design where all the cool kids hang out. He's beaten me many times on Xbox live, but I forgive him. Sort of. He's also taken on greater responsibility of late, which is great to see as he seems energised by the challenge! Amongst other things, you can thank Alan for not being able to walk through buildings, being able to walk up stairs and having items with stats on them! It’s a pity that he's leaving next week.
Andy has been working on GUI related stuff as well as the football game for a while now. He's done a great job implementing the interface, and he has Mr. Steve Bennett as a boss, something I wouldn't wish on anyone! (just kidding Steve!).
It's really no exaggeration to say that without these four individuals in the design department we couldn't have accomplished all that we have in such a small amount of time. I know I speak for everyone when I say we owe them a great debt of gratitude.
It's not just designers of course that make a game; we all work in unison with the incredibly talented code and art guys.
But while Andy is staying on with us, it still feels like the end of an era to those of us left in design. And in many ways it is. Alan, Ash and Scott are going back to finish their degrees. And quite right too!
We have a new influx of students now, and we're all working together to get the game done. A changing of the guard, if you will.
So, to the new guys I say “Welcome”. Oh, also, “I'm always right”.
To the outgoing Alan, Ash, and Scott, I say this:
Gentlemen, thank you all sincerely for your efforts. It's been an honour.
