Cold Winter - Developer Diary #4
One second you are part of a crew with a purpose, all hands to the pumps, all
sheets to the wind, racing headlong before the storm of time and deadlines, all
the time aware that even the most sea-worthy developer can be caught and
swamped. You race around the clock barely cresting the wave of one milestone
before crashing down into the trough of another. With labour and pressure the
team has formed into an efficient crew, each knows the ropes and your early
mistakes are long behind you in your wake. All the time the lights of your
salvation twinkle on the horizon, the safe harbour of Sony submission.
And then, almost unnoticed, you’re there, at journeys end, the game is
complete and the shiny master disks are safely on their way to duplication. The
storm has passed, the pressure lifted, and your normal life begins to flood back
in, the unpaid bills, the neglected partner, your family, friends, hygiene,
holidays, sleep… you have a beard, how did that happen! This is a bittersweet
time for a developer, when the ground feels unnaturally still beneath his feet,
a curious sort of limbo I have experienced many times in nearly two decades of
slaving before the flickering screen, and its something you never quite get used
to.
Being needed, being necessary, being a vital cog in a well oiled machine
screaming at full steam, no matter how hard the work, is a very heady cocktail
indeed.
The limbo has its advantages though. I am in Sorrento Italy now, high on a
craggy hillside looking down onto one of the most beguiling sites in Italy.
Before me lies the bay of Naples and to my right, the picturesque Amalfi coast.
Across the water lies the ruined cites of Pompeii and Herculaneum and looming
above them, directly across from me, is their nemesis, the ominous and strangely
beautiful Vesuvius. It’s been a childhood dream of mine to come and see these
sights and the calm before the next development storm is the perfect time to do
it, no pressures, no deadlines and no waiting for the phone to ring.
It’s in these breaks between projects, whilst your body recovers and your
mind returns to Earth, that you reflect on the choices you made during
development and see how they panned out in the cold light of the finished
product. Cold Winter has many great features that really make it stand out; AI,
graphics, animation, lighting, shadows, multiplayer, movies, story, characters,
player controls, sound; the list goes on, but the physical systems were my
biggest personal battle and the thing I am most proud of. If I told you
implementing a fully physical world is very, very hard, you would believe me.
Just like when I was told driving a car in Italy was scary, I believed it... but
I still hired a car. It’s not until you actually try and drive around an Italian
city that the true horror of what you have let yourself in for hits home, and
the same was true of implementing physics on Cold Winter.
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