Work:

Things felt a little insane this afternoon. Because of some personnel shuffling, I’ve basically absorbed the work of one of the designers, while still retaining ownership of the design stuff I was working on, and the scripting tasks I’d already had on my plate. Basically, I’ve now got the work of two people. The designer whose work I’m now responsible is still here for the next two weeks, mind you, and so it’s not like I’ve got *all* of his work on my shoulders, but he’s definitely more checked out than checked in. Not that I mind – I know how it is once you’ve decided to leave a place. I know he’ll close up shop properly, but I also know that he’s not at 100%.

So, though I’ve hit a roadblock in the scripting process (waiting on other, as-yet unavailable resources), and the design work on my section is more or less complete, I had a moment of panic where I thought that I was going to be responsible for the designs I’ve now been made responsible for (as of basically this morning) in the huge design review meeting tomorrow. Now that I think about it, I’m actually fine, because everyone *in* the review meeting knows the status of the transfer, knows that it happened a day ago, and knows that we’re good. So that panic was largely unwarranted.

What *is* worrying me, though, is that the lockdown for the design is coming up very shortly, and there are actually some rather major points that I disagree with the previous designer on, and think that if we’re going to change things, we have to do it soon, and do it decisively. The problem is that with all the other stuff that I’ve gotta review, and understand, before I sign off on it as its owner, I’m not sure I’ll be able to fight the proper fights. Thing is, this is one of the major changes in the game this year, and the predominant opinion seems to be, “It’s gotten this far – let’s not change it now.”

And maybe they’re right, because we are working on tremendously limited resources, on an extremely short development cycle. But the problem to me is that this is one of the central – if not *the* central mechanic in our game, and I don’t like the way it works at all. It doesn’t make sense to me, and my feeling is that when it actually is put into practice as the central mechanic of the game, it simply won’t work. It’s one of those things that on a micro scale seems ok, but when you realize this is an extremely widely used, repetitive system, every little bit has to make perfect sense, and right now, it works fine when used once, but fit into the larger picture, I don’t see how it’s going to work at all.

So, my feeling is that I have to come up with an alternative that is figured out down to the smallest detail, and present another completely fleshed out, substantial alternative that can be perceived as trivial to implement. Because the development of that mechanic has only gone through some previsualization stages, I think it may be possible, but time is of the essence.

Definitely got my work cut out for me.