This month we’re pleased to announce some significant progress with Ham and Jam after the lull period of the past couple of months! As we’d mentioned previously, most of our team was tied up with other commitments, mostly exams and finishing up school related projects for the summer term. Now that that’s over, everyone has a lot more freetime and things have started moving again.
Here’s whats going on and Ham and Jam HQ:
Support from CVSDude
Ham and Jam is pleased to annouced a sponsorship deal with CVSDude who have kindly agreed to provide free version control hosting for the next 12 months. We use SVN extensively and it makes collaboration much easier within the team. Everything is kept in one place, tracked and shared with everyone during updates. We also use it for the actual game content and binaries which means everyone always has access to the latest version as it’s being developed.
Version control is a big part of the development of Ham and Jam and the potential loss of our existing SVN provider was a big headache. CVSDude stepping in has helped relieve one headache and certainly made moving forward easier.
New team members
We’re please to annouce that Olah and Baer have come aboard to help us with some of the coding and E.T. has offered his help to complete our missing v_model animations. We’re really glad to have them and things have really moved forward in the past couple of weeks with the extra help.
Objective system code close to completion
We’ve mentioned this in previous updates and are glad to say that with the help of Olah, our objective system is starting to take shape. The objective system is what drives much of the gameplay behind Ham and Jam and lets us build up missions and objectives in our maps. Hopefully soon we’ll be able to start plugging it into our maps for testing.
Wiki and Steam Community pages
Collaboration was a bit problematic using just our forums so in an effort to keep everything in one place and make it a bit more collaborative, we’ve set-up a internal developers Wiki. Sorry folks, it’s not public but hopefully by the time we start pushing out public beta versions we’ll be able to make some sections available. Mostly it’ll be info on the game and for people who want to map or model for it.
I’ve also set-up a new Steam Community group for Ham and Jam which hopefully we can use for playtests and better organisation. Again, it’s currently a private group but when we go public we’ll allow people to join it.
Odds and Ends
Our new codebase is getting close to matching our original internal alpha build in terms of content except this version is much improved in terms of code quality and functionality. If you’re not a SDK coder this won’t mean much, but we’ve been careful to seperate our own stuff from the Valve codebase to make merges easier and to use proper OOP programming techniques as much as possible. The hacky “how does this work?” code is slowly disappearing.
Final words…
We appreciate how patient everyone has been with us so far and we know you’re itching to see more than a bunch of map screenshots. We hope to very soon start playtesting internally and luck permitting, we’ll maybe get some actually gameplay screenshots out and maybe a video.
We can’t at this point give you any percentages on how complete the game is or what’s left or any estimates of a release. All we can say is that development is back in full swing and this past month we’ve made a hell of a lot of progress.
