Found out today that we’ve passed Microsoft and we are now through all three console makers and are heading to manufacturing. Though, we’ve hit our slow down point at work for about two weeks now, it’s finally official that we are done. Madden 2005 will be hitting store shelves on August 12th. On or around then, I will be updating my Madden 2005 page with new screen shots and information about the game.
Electronic Arts has put up a web page devoted to the features that I worked on this year. Storyline Central was the main feature that I worked on all year. The Newspaper being the hardest one, in particular the newspaper picture. Because of created players and new rookies that come into the league during a franchise, there’s no way you could do a static bitmap for the picture. The picture in the newspaper is actually a posed 3D player. He gets moved and placed when flipping through the newspaper.
The other feature that I’m pretty proud of is the Sports Radio. This feature is like no other in a sports game. It’s so compelling to listen to the radio show after each week of your franchise to hear what is going on around the league. The Radio Show and the Newspaper both use the same story tracking system that I wrote for all of Storyline Central. Each week I put together the “radio script” from the major stories or which coaches or players are doing well during the season.
A pretty normal day of work today. I showed up and I was the only one to show up. Apparently I had been elected to hold down the fort while everyone else was “on call”. It ended up paying off because tomorrow I will be “on call”.
Here’s pictures of our new sofas and rug.
Well, Madden is still not out the door. Since, I’m writing this at 10:00 p.m. from home, then I guess it’s a little bit of good news. We had to once again rebuild today and our QA department is going over the build right now. I’m on call and I’m hoping that I don’t get a call over night.
We went to eat Bar-B-Q at church tonight. One of the members of the church is a chef and every Wednesday night, he cooks a meal that you can sign up for and go eat. The extra money made is donated to the church. I met Jennifer and the girls up there and we had dinner together. Before we met Jennifer took Abby and Emily to the park. Abby hadn’t taken a nap all day and was worn out and fell asleep in the car on the way home.
Today’s picture is still from the trip to Texas. While in Houston, Jennifer and the girls went to the Houston Children’s Museum. They had an old VW van which Emily enjoyed driving.
Won’t Madden ever end? I went home early today just to get a call at 8:30 p.m. to come back in. We had received Central QC’s list of “concerns”, one of which was a “show stopper”. The leads went in and we fixed it all up, but build problems kept us there into the morning hours.
We got our new sofas today. They are very nice. They have slip covers to protect against the girls. The main sofa has a hide-a-bed, so now we can have two sets of people stay over: one in the upstairs bonus room on the futon and one down in the living room on the new hide-a-bed. I don’t have any pictures of the new sofas yet, but when I get a chance I will snap one and post it on the site.
Today’s picture comes form the reunion a couple of weeks ago. It is my sister, Jill, and my cousin, Brooks Ann.
It’s Monday and Madden isn’t quite gone yet. We submitted the PS2 and Special Edition to EA’s Central QC department, but they found a problem that we had to fix today. We hope to submit the XBox and NGC versions tomorrow. It was another late night, but only until midnight, not the wee hours of the morning as has been the norm of the past few weeks.
Abby is really confused about not being in school. She keeps wanting to go to school and asking where her teacher, Mrs. Campbell, is. We keep telling her that everyone is on vacation, but she just doesn’t understand and keeps asking over and over again.
Here’s another picture from yesterday’s car washing: Abby playing with the water hose.
Well, today was a momentous occasion. It was the first day I hadn’t see the inside of Tiburon since May 16th. Forty-one straight days of working. Isn’t the game industry grand? I guess no news is good news from work and we will have sent the game off to Central Quality Control at EA-Redwood Shores (EARS) in San Francisco.
Since it was my first day off, I was given my Father’s Day/Birthday gift from Jennifer and the girls: an Onkyo Stereo Receiver, with 6.1 surround sound. I got it all hooked up today. Now I just need a good set of speakers. I currently only have 3. Since the ultimate goal is to start watching more movies, today we signed up for Netflix, where you get DVD’s mailed to you. You have three checked out at a time and when you send them back, they send you the next movie on your list.
The only thing we did today was wash Jennifer’s car. Today’s picture is from that event. Emily was pretty funny. She would have the rag in one hand but she wouldn’t use it. She would use her bare hand to wash the car.
I don’t think the superstition “knock on wood” really works. I got a call at 11:00 that there was a problem with the game. So, I went into work until dinner time. Fortunately I’ve been able to stay home after dinner.
After dinner we all went to get ice cream since Abby ate all of her dinner. It was amazing because Abby ate all of her ice cream as well. Abby got pink ice cream because pink is “her favorite color”.
Today’s picture is of the whole family from the union a couple of weeks ago.
The Internet is amazing. I had a Frenchville.net first today. My old college roommate, Mike Barnes, discovered Frenchville and wrote me an e-mail. He’s doing well and finally graduated from college with an accounting degree and is currently living in Dallas. After our second year at U.T., college life wasn’t cutting it and he decided to move back to Oklahoma. I heard from him a couple of times after that and then never heard from him again until today. I e-mailed him back and I hope to hear back from him to find out what he’s been up to for the past ten years.
We are very close to having Madden out of our hands finally. I left work at midnight and we are “on call” through the weekend. Hopefully QA won’t find any major problems in the next two days (knock on wood).
While I was sleeping this morning, Jennifer and the girls went over to the Cowans’ to swim in the swimming pool. Jennifer was impressed that two hours of swimming equaled four hours of nap time after lunch. That fueled the swimming pool talks once again. I looks like Jennifer is more interested in more furniture than a swimming pool. I have to admit, on these hot Florida days, it would be pretty nice to just be floating out in the pool.
Today’s picture is from the family reunion on my mom’s side of the family last week. It’s a picture of Poppy, Jill, and Emily. This was actually the first time Jill had seen her niece since she was born. She moved to El Paso and we moved to Orlando before we could ever meet up again.
I’ve finally gotten home earlier than any time this past week and I finally have time to write something. Hopefully now that it’s starting to slow down at work, I will have more time to write. We went “Beta” with Madden 2005 last Friday. At this point, we only fix major bugs that are sent to us from our QA department and each day we have to get back down to zero bugs.
Since the reunion, Jennifer, Abby, and Emily returned to Houston and have been there all week. Tomorrow they fly back to Orlando. I can’t wait to see them again. Hopefully work will have slowed down enough so that I can spend more time with them. Jennifer reported that Emily now knows how to jump out of her crib, so it might be time to get her into a regular bed. We will have to see what she does in her own crib when she gets home.
I would like to wish my dad a happy Father’s Day. I hope he had fun playing with the girls last week. They sent me a calendar with pictures of what the girls did while they were there. I’ve included one of them as today’s picture of the day.
Frenchville 