May 26, 1989
Yesterday I showed Paul the skeleton. He was thrilled (it was his idea) and has been going around telling everyone about it. It’s paid off more than I could have imagined, in terms of boosting his enthusiasm about the whole project. Just goes to show you.
People in PD, art and marketing are starting to treat me differently. Brian is delighted and amused by the amount of work I take upon myself. (When I told Sophie today I’d like to take the box copy home and “play with it” over the weekend, Brian laughed out loud. “Sure, he said. “I’d like to have you ‘play’ with something I wrote.”)
Brian’s away all next week for CES and is leaving a lot of things in my hands – the final box copy, getting a beta version to QA, possibly the selection of the artist to do the box. I don’t know if it means anything, but I noticed that in the latest schedule Nancy made up, the blank for “Product Manager” now reads “Brian Eheler/Jordan Mechner.”
So I’m not just a programmer any more.
The bad part of all this, though, is that I only have about three hours a day to actually work on the damn thing.
May 31, 1989
Spent the morning rewriting the box copy. That’s a load off my mind, for the moment.
More problems with the IBM conversion. Jim just isn’t putting in the hours. He’s getting muscled by Atari to keep putting more last-minute fixes into his other, supposedly finished project, and Doug Greene is getting pissed at him.
I called Jim and told him he’d have to choose between Atari’s project and mine. A difficult conversation. I’m not used to being the one who lays down the law. I gave him a couple of days to think it over.
Tomi is back! I showed her the game. She was duly impressed, especially by the palace background graphics, the fighting skeleton, and the upside-down and weightless potions.
Stayed till 11 pm with Robert, designing levels.
June 3, 1989
All hell is breaking loose in China.
Meanwhile, I rented a camcorder and spent the morning videotaping Michael J. Coffey at his apartment. I think I got everything I need. Can’t wait to digitize it.
June 4, 1989
It’s my birthday. I’m 25 years old.
Put in the potion-drinking animation. It looks really good but takes up more memory than I’d expected, which is a problem.
Sometimes I feel like I must be no fun at all. Bored and boring. Burnt out and empty inside. Not depressed – just tired.
Maybe I’m just working too hard.
June 5, 1989
The new animations I shot with Mike are going in very quickly. Already the “potion drinking,” “unsheathing your sword,” and “collapsing” are up and running.
The only big ones left are:
-climb stairs
-pick up sword and hold it up
-sheathe sword
-“alert turn” for guard
-“collapse” for guard
I think I can squeeze it all into the available memory, except for “climb stairs”; that one might need a disk access. I could live with that.
My major achievement today, though, was to completely redesign the first two levels to make them more fun to play. There’s more freedom now, more exploration, more rewards. The previous versions were rather humorless – you go from A to B to C and if you mess up, you die.
Level 3 is still pretty punishing and bleak. I don’t know quite what to do about it. I guess I’ll hand it in to QA like this and see what they think.
Level 4 is pretty good.
Level 5 is nonexistent.
Levels 6, 7, and 8 are pretty good, although they need work.
I guess tomorrow I’d better come up with a Level 5. Then my “beta version” will at least have the first two-thirds of the game.
There’s no getting around it. To achieve the reasonably complete, reasonably bug-free beta version I’d hoped to deliver tomorrow will take me another solid week’s work.
Should I ask QA to hold off for a couple of days (how humiliating!) or just turn in what I’ve got and then give them an updated version a week from now?
June 6, 1989
“B-Day”
An extremely productive twelve-hour day. I fixed lots of bugs, designed a brand-new level (5), and hard-wired the shadow man to steal your potions. Another couple of hours to make sure it all fits together smoothly, and I think I’ve got a beta version.
One day late.
Boy, will Brian be impressed.
In the middle of it all Doug Greene called to say he thinks he’ll probably pull out of the project at the end of the trial period.
I’ve pretty much had it with Doug and Jim. They’re good programmers, but enough is enough. I should have listened to Doug when he said no in the first place, instead of working so hard to change his mind.
I went and talked to Glenn for an hour about Alick D. Glenn says he’s a good programmer, but the bad blood between him and Broderbund could be a problem.
I need to teach the little animated character not to draw his sword when the other little animated character who’s trying to kill him is on the other side of a pair of snapping steel jaws.
