Crunching on Halo Wars: After getting past an important milestone, the team took a short break of working actual normal hours. We have resumed crunch hours and that will continue to Thanksgiving probably. For anyone new to the term “crunch,” it means we work from 10 AM to 10 PM Monday-Thursday, with lunch and dinner catered (normal hours Friday). This may be our work schedule through the end of the year, with breaks for holidays. The idea is to get a lot of work done in a short period, together with reduced numbers of meetings and shorter meetings. We have answered almost all the questions for Halo Wars and now it is just about execution and completeness.

Crunching is understandably hard on everyone but we try to break it up with occasional events for relief. We took off a few hours recently to take the whole team to see the new Max Payne film. We have had masseuses come in to give massages. We are holding our last Ensemble Studios Halloween party October 31, with families invited. This will include a costume contest with nice prizes, a pumpkin carving contest, a face painter, and a fortune teller.

Playtesting Contests: We have turned some testing into contests with prizes, hoping to make the repetitive playings more interesting for everyone and keep the level of participation high. We put the leader board up on some of our hall monitors so everyone can see who is doing well and Producer Chris Rippy publishes standings at least once a day. Last week, for example, the contest was playing Scenario 2 from the single player campaign at Heroic difficulty level for score. Karen McMullan led the leader board for a while, but last I saw Kevin Holme (known as The Sheriff to Age players) had taken over top spot.

Turning this aspect of testing into a contest is being well-received and the competition last week turned up a few new bugs that required being fixed. Artist Pete Parisi offered to keep playing but not take any prizes he qualified for after already taking one home, but Lead Designer Dave Pottinger encouraged him to keep any prize he might win. We expect to give out over 40 prizes during this testing.
For this week the contest is speed playing scenarios 3, 4, and 5. Games must be played solo and at Heroic difficulty, with lowest overall time winning. Dave Pottinger noted that the speed playing of Scenario 5 found some significant bugs, which is what the testing is all about. The fixes went in Wednesday but they invalidate all the earlier recorded times for the scenario. So everyone who wants in on the contest and played early in the week is asked to give it another shot.

Pitch-Car: Another tradition at ES during the final push to complete a game has been some games of Pitch-Car, a fun, three-dimensional racing game where you finger-flick a disk representing your car around a track. This is another way to break up the strain of hard work under pressure. Jeff Brown has been organizing the games that are an opportunity to yell and have some fun. We play with two eight player games, and the top three finishers from each game go on to the championship race. This week’s winner was Vijay Thakkar. If you are unfamiliar with the game, you can check it out here.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/150

We have our own house rules for Pitch-Car, developed over the years, that we like when we have eight “very” competitive people pitching together. We play the standard rules plus these modifications. The last one is the big change we play with and it makes for much more interactive games.

1.  There’s no penalty for flipping your car over.
2.  You’re allowed to skip up to 1/3 of the track in a single flick, so long at you end up in a legal spot. No aiming backwards, though .
3.  You can call “Knockoff” and intentionally knock someone off the track. Normal rules say that anyone going off is a bad shot (and you go back to where you were, etc.) We play like calling the 8 ball…. If you call it right and its ends up that way, you’re fine and the knocked off car(s) goes back to your previous spot.

Halo Wars Bug Counts: We continue on a good pace for fixing things and Chris Rippy sends around the numbers daily for everyone to see. Our goal is to average a drop of 40 bugs a day (new finds minus fixes). On Tuesday the net decrease was only 8, way below our average. Our best day in the last ten was a net drop of over 80. At some point in the next few weeks, we hope to have the list of bugs hovering around zero.

Game Music: Robert Anderson of our community relations team passed around a message sent in by a fan of the music in Halo Wars- “tell whoever wrote the music for the Field Trip to Harvest to pat themselves on the back; it was amazing. I was humming it for days.” That music was written by Stephen Rippy, brother of Chris (and David), who also did the music for Age of Empires III and some of our earlier games. Artist Gene Kohler responded by saying that he believes the music in all of our games has been “incredible” and that he still listens to the Age III music CD. I remember walking into a hotel lobby in Paris and hearing Age of Empires II music coming over the sound system. Apparently a fellow hired by the hotel to put together sound tracks had borrowed our game music.

Game Voices: Kevin McMullan passed around word that the final audio mixing process began this week. This will particularly address the leveling of voices and sounds in different parts of the single player campaign. We have had a variety of comments coming out of testing of some chats being to low to be heard easily. I ran into a related problem in one of the scenarios where I captured a power generator. The noise that came up from that object overwhelmed all following voice chats from game characters and I had to guess what they were telling me. We go through this now so you won’t have to :)

Halo Wars Builds: Latest archive build I have seen this week is #1073 from Sergio Tacconi. His notes said that the build fixed a memory leak (usually these are very bad and cause game crashes) and that terrain effect files now get loaded at database::setup time.

Bruce Shelley