The countdown to D-Day news

Our apologies for the obvious lack of recent updates about Ham and Jam. The past three months have been very chaotic what with John leaving us to work at Crytek and myself working away from home a lot. It’s never easy when the team leads aren’t around and what little time available had has gone into production rather than the PR side of things and keeping the website up-to-date.

Ham and Jam has been a chaotic project through and through. It’s been almost four years since we started. Of those four years we lost almost a year and a half trying to use the original HL2 engine and then porting it over to HL2:EP1. We cautiously experimented with porting to the Orange Box engine too but given past experience decided to forget it and focus on getting the game finished.

We’ve also suffered from various team members coming and going due to their circumstances changing. Real-life always take a priority and over four years many of us have graduated and now need to focus on our jobs and some have had children and need to focus on their family. Ham and Jam was always meant to be a hobby and as such, it often has to take a back seat for some.

So with all this wistful retrospection, what the heck is happening with Ham and Jam?

Well brace yourselves.

We’ve set a release date.

Yeah, let it sink in for a second. We’re actually planning on shipping this thing.

Our intention is to release a publicly playable version on 6th June 2011. That’s the anniversary of us announcing the game and the anniversary of the actual World-War II mission that gave us our name.

We’ve had some disagreements within the team over the date. I personally wanted to add more polish before we released but I have very high standards and we would have been here forever. Others wanted to release right away but there are still some unfinished art assets that we really need to do the game justice. So given our own schedules and available free time I decided on 6th June.

The version we put out won’t really be a Beta per-se as it will be pretty much the finished game, it just won’t have quite all the content we want to put in for the “1.0” release. It’ll also allow us to get feedback and bug reports on a larger scale and hopefully we can fix those up for the proper release.

I genuinely hope we can make the deadline; it will be tricky as many of us get less then five hours a week to work on the game but we promise to do our best.

I’ll attempt to update our website with more recent media from the game soon.

Thanks for sticking by us!