Zex
A little history of Zex and some of the
inner workings of Lightsoft
Music du jour:
Camel
Zex is finally in public beta! And
no-one is more surprised than me!
Ian,
Rob, Claire and more latterly Tony and George have all put in some tremendous
work to get it to this stage (not to mention other friends and family that have
been supportive over the years). Did I say years? Yup, here's the story... (with
thanks to Rob for some dates).
Work on
Zex started back in '98. I was pretty much working on it full time (I was full
time at Lightsoft at that time) and Rob was looking at getting it going on his
280c (he was stuck in a hotel for a couple of weeks). As we moved into '99 Ian
and Rob also started working on the main code set. I continued on it pretty much
full time until July '99 when I had to go get a real job (we don't do Lightsoft
full time these days).
By December '99
it was pretty much complete (we thought at the time anyway - ha!) but I also had
to change jobs and move locations whereupon Zex sat on a disk collecting dust
(Rob will correct me if I'm wrong on the dates
here).
Now the way we work here at
Lightsoft is one person will be the lead and does the majority of the game code
and the other guy develops all the support stuff, porting, OS interface, file
stuff etc - in a game you really can't have two designers. Now Rob and myself
have been working together for a long time and we know each other pretty well -
for instance the other day Rob said he'd added an animated cursor to Zex and I
thought "Oh God, some kind of Jet Set Willy rainbow colours; I'll have to change
it to a nice blue throbbing arrow". When I checked it out, what did I find? A
nice blue throbbing arrow.
Anyway,
yes, at Lightsoft we always have a lead and the other guy gets to do all the
other fun bits and we pull in other people as we can. For instance on Z-Dungeon
(can I mention that Rob?) Rob is the lead - it's his design; I just code up
whatever he needs at the right time - for instance last year I did the sound and
the font system which was genuine fun. Being NOT the lead at Lightsoft is fun.
Being the lead is work :(
Anyway if we
move forward from '99 to about April 2005. We thought it might be an idea to dig
out the old Zex code to see how much work it'd need to get it running on OS X
(it was written in the OS 7/8 days). Rob took it and within a few weeks it was
running native (with an added bonus I'll come to in a bit). That was pretty much
it; we started developing it as a primary
project.
Thus this current development
cycle has run from April 2005 to Jan 2006 - about 10 months to beta 1 - and we
thought it was pretty much finished back in April! We've adopted the CVSTrac bug
ticketing scheme which has worked really well for us. With this, at any time day
or night we can go in, view the high priority tickets and tick them off when
fixed, whereupon they vanish from the
report.
SDL is used to provide a layer
between the OS and the game itself, one of the offshoots of this was that it'd
make it easier to run on Window's. As we had to do the Intel 'port' for the Mac
anyway (and this is the added bonus I mentioned above) Rob quickly came up with
a make file for GCC to give a Window's build which I'm pleased to report runs
just fine. It hasn't had any testing though, which is why it's just the Mac
build that's in Beta.
And there we are -
finally Zex gets its day as a public beta. Hopefully we won't have too many
problems in beta - we're looking for bugs obviously but would like feedback on
the game-play as well; we can probably expect some tuning for the next
beta.
Either way, I'd just like to show
my appreciation for Claire (who managed to get the ships items graphics finished
in the last few weeks even with the demands of 8 month old Emily), Ian (did the
control panel and radar graphics), Tony and George (dev testers) and Jess for
the web pages.
It has been an incredibly
hard few weeks for us here, but we hope you enjoy the game and we look forward
to your feedback.
Posted: Sun - January 15, 2006 at 12:49 AM