Twas the night before Xmas...

and all through the house, not a creature was stirring... except me... typing this blog :)
Crunch Over!
I'm on holiday now until 4th Jan which is going to be great. Was off today and managed to do very little, and plan on tomorrow being much of the same :).

Hayden is in bed and now believes in Santa - the tree was void of presents except a few from friends when he went to bed, and now it's choc full, and his sack at the end of his bed is full.

I guess you folks in the UK will be woken by your kids in about a couple of hours or so.. 5am?
We're just hitting the sack now at 10 to midnight.

Merry Christmas to all... and to all... a good night!

;)

Still Working?

Yep still working, 8:30pm.
Really don't want to be working this weekend or over the xmas holidays... so
Still no time to update with photos of the house, answer Skype calls, deal with money issues in the UK or anything.

It's wake up, shower, dress up warm, stand in -12 degrees for 20 hacking at the ice wall formed at the front of the drive by the main road snow plough, brush off car, grab a muffin, drive to work. Work. Come home kiss kids, who are asleep, kiss wife goodnight, sit and have a cup of tea or beer, watch Top Gear, sleep. Lather rinse repeat.

It's becoming addictive!
But I do miss seeing Hayden, Taryn and being able to help Kath out with them - 24/7 she has them at her heels with no respite for 3 weeks or more now.

I must finish a big chunk tonight - will stay another hour or more.

Alpha

Alpha today!

The reason I've been working so late and had no spare time the past 2-3 weeks is the run up to our Alpha build which is due.... NOW!

Luckily the dudes are in Southern California, which is about 4 hours behind us. So they don't leave work until 5pm... which for us is 9pm.
So we have another couple of hours, if need be, to sort out the remaining issue before we send it to them.

Alpha means the first full version of the game, there may be some missing art/audio and there will definitely be bugs, but it needs to be in a state that can be tested properly and bugs reported to us that are meaningful. It's been really important to sort it out, the last build we sent them they couldn't play. This incidentally was not our fault at all. The publishers should have provided audio - which they did... then they went and messed up all their files and file names, making audio go missing or be referenced differently. Suddenly stuff that was working was snow broken, trying to play Voice or Sound Effect files that didn't exist, causing it to blow up!

It really slowed us up, me in particular, as my portions were heavily reliant on the audio. I had them all good, and then they broke, and I wasted time tracking down bugs that shouldn't have even been happening.

Anyway - my hardware build for the device has just finished, so I can now do some more testing.

Still working

Been working late for about 2 weeks straight now, have hardy seen Hayden or the baby as they're in bed by the time I get home.
Kath's finding it really hard to have the kids all day long without me, and Hayden's playing up and attention seeking big time.
Was here until midnight on Friday and worked over the weekend.
First time I've ever worked on a Saturday in my life.

I love the job, and coding is not a chore for me, but not being able to support Kath and see that my baby girl is now double her weight from when I 'really' last saw her is sad and frustrating.

We have a delivery to make by Friday and it's been all hands on deck over the weekend. We seem to be making good progress with all the extra hours we've put in, so hopefully this weekend it'll be 'over'. For a while at least.

Can't wait to chill out in my games room - still haven't been down there, I'm awaiting a new TV which was well cheap $299 for a 32" HD - just for the XBox, and then I can get online and meet up with UK chums for some GTA IV and GOW2.

But before that comes spending time with the boy and wife. Hopefully will get out of here tonight by 9 and can watch X Factor.