get closer to Sports Interactive - blog#3

get closer to Sports Interactive - blog#3

Hello again. What a busy day it's been, what with 3 blogs here for you all. Don't worry, it'll calm down a bit now, with a blog every few days so as to not bore you too much.

As I said in the first blog of the day, Football Manager™ Handheld on the PSP is now in what is called "submission" at Sony, so it's all hands on deck to get Football Manager™ 2009 finished now, for both PC and Mac. We're in the final stages of development, and are now in a stage called "code lock", which means that nothing new can be added, with only bug fixing and some stuff on the 3d view being done.

This is a stage of very long days. As I write this, it's 10.25pm on Thursday night, and there's still a dozen people in the studio, and many more working at home. QA and a few of the dev team will be running "soak" tests all night, so we can check long term progression of clubs, players, finances and the like and analyse it first thing. The production team has just gone home to get some sleep having done some mad hours earlier in the week doing trial runs of all the different versions of the game that have to be made, although one will be doing more work when he gets in. It doesn't ever stop.

Because we release the game in so many countries, with so many languages (the game gets translated by our amazing team of translators into 17 languages), it's not a case of having one master disc that serves all countries, so we have to do 8 different versions of the game at this stage, and another couple later on. Then there's also the digital download versions to do, and preparation for the demo, so the production team are really busy getting all of that together, as well as having to keep on top of how the game itself is shaping up.

For some of the coders, their work is done on the main game, and they're playing it to see how everything fits together, whilst offering support for those coders who are still full on trying to get everything perfect. There's still quite a bit of work being done to the 3D match view, as quite a lot of the technical stuff has been waiting on other things to be done, so there is extra "blending" of animations and the like to make it look as good as possible. As well as the SI team working on it, we've got a couple of contractors working on that side of things who have been here for a few months to make the 3D match view as good as it possibly can be.