It's all in the game!

Today is the day. We need to deliver two alpha milestones to one of our clients. First of all there’s the alpha of the soccer game Eugène and Michael wrote about. And secondly, there’s an alpha milestone of one of our newest racing games. To make sure that we can send out a neat alpha version, there’s a lot of work to do. Instead of a beta version an alpha version doesn’t need to contain all in game features, but we do want to show our client the most essential game functionality. Together with a (mockup) menu, screenshots of stuff that’s not in the game yet and an updated game design document they can get a pretty good idea in which way the game is developing.

Today is Friday. And it’s quite. Even the radio is turned off. This can only mean one thing: everyone is working his ass off.
Since there are loads of tasks before every milestone, our programmers and artists are always in a rush at the end of the finish line. There’s always something extra that need to be done. And if you think that everything is finished, there are some technical issues to surprise you. So we need to take care not to wait with important tasks until the last day. That’s why I will annoy my colleagues during the week by asking them repeatedly if tasks are already finished, to make sure that everything we’ve scheduled for our milestone will actually be in the game. I want them to finish most essential stuff by Thursday, so the Friday (milestone day) will be less stressful for them. When taking a look around they’re still busy, but I think I can receive their alpha versions in any minute now, which means it’s ready to send out to our client.

Enjoy your weekend!
And give a big applause for my colleagues who managed to finish their work right on time!

Cheers,
Shirley