A Quiet Week in No Man’s Land

It’s been quiet in the office this week (note: we don’t actually work in an office, but we’re Office Mayhem, so I had a moral obligation to make the joke). The art team has been hard at work tidying up assets and animations, and the design team has been balancing the task and movement systems. The engineering team has been hard at work at polishing the edges. Tony has been hard at work cleaning up the elevator interface for our designers, and Andy has been crunching the animation pipeline behind the scenes. I spent this week hunting down any remaining bugs.

There wasn’t a lot of visual progress this week, but that’s ok. The game as a whole is stronger, and we have a lot planned for these coming weeks. We’ve come to a new solution to the break rooms (but for now is under wraps), and that will be a large (and probably difficult) project over the next week. We’re hoping to get Norman’s characters with Andrew’s animations into the actual build this week, and we’re excited to see just how much life they add to the office. The accolade system is also very close to being implemented; we just need to decide on the final representation of them and how they’ll affect the players/break room environment. We also cleaned up Interruptables this past week, so we’re hoping and excited to start adding group task types to the mix (and with that comes the concept of point stages and difficulty curves).

We have a lot on our plate this coming week (obviously), and that’s not even including the smaller things like replacing outdated models, cleaning up some of our data-holding architecture, and implementing the alphabet rain in the start menu when the Konami code is input. (I really hope if Office Mayhem reaches the public, someone stumbles upon this post and realizes the immense power they have just unlocked). It’s going to be a long, but very exciting week.

In other news, David and I finally finished our particle system project for Game Physics, and I could not be happier with the result. Expect a write-up on that sometime this week.