Plaidophile

Had some inspiration for how to make the touchpad interface not suck. Implemented it. Also finally got the code running on SDK 2.0 and the real hardware (though I'm having weird issues with sprite data only coming through in a piecemeal manner... I think it's a cache coherency issue, and I probably just have to issue a cache flush or similar — yes, the DS has a software-controllable cache, mostly because of the broken memory bus which is also related to why it has software-controlled bus-locking for SMP). It's kinda weird to play it on the real DS instead of on the computer.

Also, the real DS has way better debugging support than the TEG board did, though the visual debugger app is still pretty gimpy.

At about 8PM, Jason ordered pizza for us. At 9:30 it still hadn't arrived, and so he called the pizza place. They claimed that they tried calling back and that his phone wasn't working, which is a lie since he'd taken many calls over the course of the evening. (Hooray for our animation contractors being in New Zealand.) At 9:50 we finally ate.

Stayed at work until 11 PM (though most of the writers had left by 10, and James and Antoine left at 10:30, the wussy dorks...) so at the end it was just me and Jason, who was quite indulgent in letting me do lots of "crap one more bugfix" until we were finally kicked out of the building.

Walked along with Jason for a while and chatted (he had to go to the bank on the way home so our paths were the same about half of the way to the L station on 14th — during the evening I usually take the F/V at 23rd but after 10PM the F/V starts to come very infrequently so it's quicker to walk the 9 blocks) and we chatted along the way. Mostly we talked about how little commercial experience any of us have (none of us have worked on a commercial video game before) and how it's great that it's finally coming together in a tangible form.

Hopefully on October 2nd we can all breathe a sigh of relief after shipping the gold master image off to UbiSoft, and then from then just wait to get oodles of praise for our quirkly little game from IGN (while everyone else on the planet wonders what the hell we were smoking when we decided to make a dating simulation).

Oh, and now I know first-hand what has to happen for ESRB ratings. We have to finish up the game assets and just send everything to them, and then hopefully in a week or two they get back to us with a rating or a list of things to change. Since we don't have any overt violence, sex, or drug use it should be fine, though Jason's suddenly (finally) clamping down on the language usage, since he had a meeting with some ESRB folks last week. (The guideline: "ass" as an abstract concept is okay; "ass" as a body part is not. "bitch" and "slut" are right out, at least if we want to maintain a T rating, which we do.)

Anyway, this means that the writers and artists are in even more of a crunch than us, since they have to have everything done by Friday (minor tweaks can happen but nothing new can be written).

It sure is comforting to think that we need to have our gold master final ROM image done in two and a half weeks when we're not even done with the game engine yet... :/

Got home at 11:45.

Only other sour note for today was that Antoine looked at some code I wrote a month ago and decided to bitch at me for its lack of comments. Yeah, like his code's been an amazingly well-documented mass of goodness. At least I could still understand it perfectly well a month later. (The issue was that he was finally using an API which I wrote for him a month ago but where the requirements had subtly changed in that time. Of course, he could have just fixed it himself, but instead he had to get all high-and-mighty because he "couldn't understand" the code or what I was doing, never mind that at the time he never even said what he wanted the API to do; I thought he wanted it to track the progress through one particular state, while it turns out he wanted it to track the progress through the entire lifetime of the object. Changing the former to the latter just involved ripping out a bunch of code and replacing it with two lines. But he wouldn't even let me just do it myself — he wanted me to tell him what to do, and then fought me on what had to be done because he thought it wasn't right to remove so much code. And then he complained about how the code wasn't commented so how was he supposed to know what I was telling him to remove? Argh.)

Oh well. I just chalk it up to tensions running a bit high because of the various stress factors which are affecting all of us.

One thing Jason said while we were chatting kind of seemed like he was dropping the hint that if this game doesn't ship on time, the company president might decide we're not worth the investment; Jason sees how talented and dedicated we all are, but as far as I can tell, the president only sees the balance sheet and sees us as resources with a specific cash-inflow value. I really hope I'm just reading too much between the lines, and that I just need sleep again. (But the Coke I had at 10:00 doesn't exactly act as a barbituate.)