Another late night in the hallowed halls of Jester Interactive Mold HQ! Crazy as it might seem, I am actually getting to enjoy this solitary office life. It's cool. The way I figure it, with the time we have allocated in normal office time, we aren't really going to make the deadline with a quality product, so I'm making sure that at least the art side of the project will be more than catered for by staying late most nights. At the moment, I've worked it so that Monday-Wednesday is late-night fodder as is Thursday-Friday. Weekends at the moment are going to be spent at home doing some work on the project, but I guess it's the only thing which will keep me pretty sane. After all - I'm sleeping in the office!!

I'm getting used to it, though I get the feeling that a lot more people will also be joining me in my crazy escapades. I'm not alone normally when I do this, but on this occasion I am occupying an empty office. Normally Nick or Andy join me, Andy being the more fanatic and crazy, though Nick has also been staying late nights. I could throttle Nick - here's me thinking the monolith level is completely done, and he's adding even MORE stuff to it... arrrrrggghhhh! For the last part of the monolith level's production, I'm going to be adding Jester Level Materials (our own custom materials) to the level, and adding some more vertex lighting effects because they look so darn cool.

This is my new home. Wipe your feet as you come in.

Also we're re-exporting many of the character models because of the fact we're got a new model format. This is pretty irritating, because 3DS MAX 3.1 is doing a fine job of completely ruining our work schedules by crashing at every moment - by the way, this is due to Character Studio's awful bug-ridden code. Motion Flow - the essential glue which holds together all seperate character animations is crashing something rotten, so I've had to bodge ways of getting around this little problem, and I reckon I've got it more or less sussed. Tonight I get all the character stuff more or less out of the way. Unsurprisingly, Nick is also working on a new model for... the monolith level!! It seems like most of the work has been concentrated on that one sodding level, so you'll know which one I'm talking about when the game comes out.

I've stayed most nights here, but it looks like the deadline has been moved YET AGAIN....! Now Friday is an "unofficial" deadline (where have I heard that before) with next week being the time when prospective publishers will come in and see what we're up to. The game itself is starting to really progress now - the bike animations have been put in, and we've got working doors and portals. I managed to knock up a VM animation in 10 minutes flat of a burning skull the other day, and today I used Tok's biped zombie to knock up four animation sections, so we have another character! The zombie jumps out of the ground and attacks you. In the full game, he can grab onto the back of the bike, slowly reducing your bike energy. You need to shake the bugger off to get rid of him!!

The FMV is looking amazing, considering our team size, so that is going well as well. Me and Andy are all set to take on and completely do over the city level. We're going to be vertex colouring sections of the level and putting all our collective groups together to come up with the final finished city. The deadline for that is 30th June set by... yep, Yours Truly. There's no reason why we can't get it done by then, except for our sanity. But from now on, it's late nights all the way through for me, so I live in renewed hope. Besides, back home, things are tense and the office is a Fortress of Solitude. I love it!! (Get the men in white coats!!).

Tonight I get the Office Dreamcast I bought onto Dreamarena and also the Chu Chu Rocket network to see how well it all runs. Cool, eh? Ooooh, and another copy of Chu Chu Rocket!! Things are definitely looking up.... in a month's time, I expect the office is going to be that bit more crowded...

Almost the end of the month, then two short months to go. I feel kind of confident that it'll all go well in the end, seeming that I am pulling out all the stops to make sure that my ass isn't on the line when the dreaded deadline looms like a big black, spiky, scary thing. But I am taking more and more late nights in the hope that the more work I get done now, under less stressful conditions, the less work and stress I will have to deal with when the game is finalised.

Already the office is looking different with the prospect of a nice, retrotastic Space Invaders arcade machine! I've got the high score on it after beating one of the management - a nice feeling, y'know. Everyone is desperate to get that all-important 5,000 mark and beat the original Taito score. As I type, someone might well be in the process of doing it. Yipe. Hang on. Nope, he's trying again. Hee hee. The monolith level is all done with Jester Materials, Nick permitting, and the demo level for next week for the prospective publishers is going very well indeed. We're adding more effects to the game too now, including animated water, rain and lava textures.

The VMU burning skull LIVES!! Do one like it with VMU Animator from sega.com

AI is also started to be worked upon, and Burt has asked me to get 6 snapshots of the game in action. By that, he means "Photoshop screenshots" where we doctor the screengrabs. I told him I wasn't going to do that, oh, no. I'm going to use the GD Workshop or Gareth's TV card thingy to get them screenshots. Even if it is mere publishers, I don't want to cheat any screens out of the game. Really, we can grab a screen or two from the front end and also some from the deathmatch. As for the ingame stuff. Hmmm. We'll have to see. And still we haven't gone public about the game yet!! The mind boggles...

Unfortunately, there is still the small matter of realtime lighting. Ernie keeps edging away from the prospect, and I try and compromise with him. We do need some kind of realtime lighting if we're going to get some kind of interaction with the levels. The biker needs to have his animation sections correspond with the actions of the bike onscreen, plus a ton of baddies are in the level, most of them exported (groan) by myself. If I only think of the level building, I know we can make it. If I think "ooh, more baddies to do!", I feel like we're going to be in deep trouble.

Still, things are looking good because Mark's call for all the demon bikers means all the characters of a certain type have been created in one fell swoop. With bipeds. Pretty darn impressive, eh? The game is looking more and more appealing every day, and that is always a plus sign. I just wish we had more time to do the game the justice it needs. Thank God for the time-stretching powers of allnighters, eh?

Another late nighter, and the only sounds I can hear are Space Invaders as Jim, one of our management types is becoming slowly addicted. Nick has got the highest score of 4780, though it doesn't look like the score will be beaten. The fact that people in the office have been playing Space Invaders for a "quick go" has lead to a semi-official sign on the machine itself stating that the game shouldn't be played during office hours. As I speak, it's 10.30 PM and Jim has just helped himself to another go. The elusive hi-score of Nick just won't go away.

The game is still under wraps and not public yet. This is frustrating and enlightening as this means we can get on with work without too much pressure. We are actually crafting the Dream On demo, which should be easily ready by the middle of July, and fully crafted it shall be! The programmers have been moaning a little to me and I've been moaning to other people as well. Tension was a little tight today, because 3DS Max was crashing as if it was out of fashion. But crashing with purple flares. With tassels.

I'm putting the finishing touches to the city which John built many moons ago. This includes props, "humourous" signs(!) from John himself and vertex colouring. It is looking awesome now, and all encompassing. Very cool but a little scary. Once the city has been sorted out, it's only a matter of seperating the PVS data (Andy's job, thank God!) and putting on the Jester Level Materials (my job, yipe) making sure the thing can fit into the Dreamcast this time, with collision data being reduced as we get rid of complex geometry you aren't going to collide with anyway, in one fell swoop.

Real-time lighting is still something of an issue. I managed to get a cheap copy of Shadowman for the Dreamcast from Mold Currys the other day, and that has the perfect example of real-time lighting. The game uses more or less the same poly count in rooms as our game, and with its real time lighting, sometimes it looks really bad, sometimes it looks great. Ernie says it's only where there are very low poly areas which will cause unsightly glitches with the lighting. We are still undecided, but I do reckon we should have some form of interaction between the action and the background.

The game itself is still morphing into something more game like. It's always pleasing to be away from Hellgate's programming side, work on some horrifically huge level, then come back and see even more cool stuff being produced. The latest which made me laugh was Ernie mowing down a corridor of zombies.

I still wish we had more stinking time though - oh, and I've now been forbidden by management to even attempt to stay late for more than one consecutive night. They don't seem to like enthusiasm much, do they? Still, when Burt told me to keep the workload down, I had to oblige. The voice of reason and experience. Oh, and also the voice of madness if I remember rightly....