I know what you’re thinking — what a title, eh? What follows may sound made up, but I swear to you that every word of it is true.

Before I moved out to Phoenix, Arizona, where I now live, sleep and breathe Stargate Worlds, I lived in rainy St. Louis with my parents, two dogs, a hamster and the occasional fish that could manage to stay alive. He was something of an urban legend in my house. A thief. A thief of underwears. I kid you not.

I’m sure my family is like most other families. We buy underwear as we need them. Well, in my house we needed them quite often, because when washing day came my underwears would leave the hamper to be cleaned … and not all would make it back from the battlefield.

My mother, God bless her, was routinely doing laundry every four or five days in my house. She would call me out of my bedroom and I would see my stack of clean essentials on the table in the living room. “What the heck,” I would say upon picking them up. “What,” my mom would ask. “There are four pair here. You haven’t washed in six days … I’m missing two pair!” And it was so. Someone, or some thing, had absconded with several sets of these necessary undergarments. It wouldn’t happen often, but it would happen enough that I would see diminished height in my stack over the course of a few months.

Well, since those days I have moved out to sunny Arizona, where I have the privilege of washing my own underwear. I recently took these clothes of mine home with me for the holidays, where my mother would get reacquainted with them for the next two weeks. As I’m packing my bags on New Years Eve, I turn to my mother. “What the heck,” I said. “What,” my mom said. “There are six pair here. I came to St. Louis with TWELVE! He’s back!” “Maybe you didn’t bring as many as you thought,” said my mom. And I considered that point. So I put the matter aside until I could come home and investigate my drawers for myself. And sure enough, I had taken 12 with me to St. Louis.

I don’t know who you are or what your problem is, but I know where you stalk. And when next I’m home, you and I are going to have a prisoner exchange.

I’ve been having a lot of fun constructing our music system these past few weeks. Paying the price of entry was easy enough: 1. Create a trigger region. 2. Asign music to it. 3. Profit!

Of course I want to go further than that, so I’ve been creating this neat little network of music nodes that kind of functions like a communication network, with different music regions chattering back and forth asking each other, “Is the player over there? No, he’s here, and he’s been standing here for a while. Should I keep playing? Actually, you finish up and then I’ll go. Hang on…” It’s especially fun since I have everything commenting to a log in plain English so I can watch the musical conversation in literal terms. Then I examine their conversation. Is one region talking to much? Is everyone participating equally in the conversation? Anyone speaking out of turn? It makes the debugging process easier, but more importantly it give me more artistic insight into how things are working and balancing by funnelling technical data into a more readable format.

I don’t know what I’d do without Kismet to build all this on. Make some poor engineer miserable, probably, with my requests. And it wouldn’t work right then. But it’s great just moving the wires around, spitting out messages and designing these custom nodes and effectively building electronic pieces and plugging them all together to make it all dance. It’s great.

Wow, what an amazing time to be working at a game company. If you haven’t followed my blog posts then you’ll know I’m not a “game industry” veteran. I came here to follow a dream and take a chance on something I really wanted to do. I’ve always wanted to in the game industry and it had always seemed like it was never going to happen, my career paths just went another way. So to be here (for almost 2 years now!) and helping and watching the teams grow is incredible. That said, the hardest part about working here is what I *can’t* say.

To be fair, we don’t have any draconian rules about what employees can and can’t say publicly about what we’re building. Cheyenne employs the “common sense” mentality. Basically, if you think you shouldn’t say it, or you wonder if you should, or you need to check with someone first, you’re probably better of not saying it. So with the release of the game trailer and the corresponding increase in attention we’re getting, it gets harder and harder to practice common sense. Rest assured, we read all of the feedback, all over the net. From Gamespot #1 rankings, to comic strips, to the avid forum discussion on the validity of powered armor, halo, that Canadian guys “Bear Suit”, we see it all and read it all.

There are things I’d love to share with the community at large too, it’s just not the right time yet. All will be revealed soon “tm”, or at least in time. After all the hoopla I went back over all the concept art for armor and I have to say, I really don’t think folks will be disappointed. Both the SG fans and the sci-fi fans will find a lot to like about SGW art direction. But the hardest part is not being able to share it with you guys just yet.

Which brings up a good point, why can’t we? Simple, most of it is not entirely approved yet. I’m learning a lot of differences in game design and development vs. software design and development. That’s not to say they are mutually exclusive, just the approval process for design and implementation is different in a lot of ways. Especially when it comes to Art. Art is subjective, there’s a ton of opinions on what looks good, what doesn’t and the types of changes that get made range from completely scrapping an entire look to making subtle changes to coloration and details. And it takes a lot of time, and it can change unbelievably quickly.

I watch in amazement as we do our weekly art reviews. All kinds of things get reviewed, from concept sketches, to textures, models, animations even pixel shaders and special effects. An entire room in the office gets dedicated to the review and we easily have 30+ people in there going over it asking all kinds of questions. The presenter has to subject themselves to all kinds of feedback in return. While I can’t sit through the whole thing, and haven’t seen every piece of art, I can say that what I do see in those rooms constantly impresses me. Both in the maturity of the feedback process (being able to take constructive feedback) and the actual art talent itself. The fact that even *I*, the IT Director who’s never worked in the game industry before, get asked my opinion and actually listened to. No, that doesn’t mean my ideas make it into the game but the fact that as a team we’re asked to provide feedback and we care about that feedback is a really great feeling.

So the trailer is out, my team has had to worry about website load for possibly the first time. I must say, the load on the site has increased five fold since the airing of the commercial and that’s a good thing for us. Making people aware of the project, bring people to the site and most importantly, openly discussing opinions of what we’re doing. Trust me, the team appreciates the feedback, positive as well as negative! Community is important to us and if you’re not getting all the information you want *now* its because we want to make sure its information that counts. You’re going to see a lot of things from us during this year. So if there was a year to be a fan of the game and wanting to know more, this is the year!