Working hard. But not alone.

I got up way too early this morning. Couldn’t sleep any more. Kept thinking about the work on Bientôt l’été. It’s a bit of a crunch period at the moment as we’re trying to get a presentable work-in-progress version of the game ready for IndieCade‘s late deadline on Monday.

I’m not the only one working hard. Walter Hus is delivering new music tracks at rocket speeds. Laura Raines Smith is animating the dressed characters out of Texas, while Auriea is modelling their undressed version here. Our very first intern Daniel Hellweg is working on the café table at the moment. And Theresa Schlag is taking care of the architecture. And even outside of Tale of Tales, somewhere in Russia, Universe programmer Neodrop is studying a troubled system from Bientôt l’été in an attempt to improve the performance of their wonderful visual programming tool.

This busily buzzing little hive adds quite a bit on my plate. I need to communicate with collaborators and evaluate the assets that come in, in between adding the final essential features to the programming and making the whole thing run acceptably. But they’re delivering such good stuff that I’m happy to interrupt my work for it. And after each such occasion, the game looks and sounds a little bit better.

Bientôt l’été is starting to feel very nice. Once in a while, I get a glimpse of what it can do. I’m beginning to see it, to understand its potential. Like vaguely deciphering the silhouette in the mist of a person I would like to know better. But I don’t have time to really sit down with it. And when I try, there’s always this or the other thing that urgently needs fixing. Hopefully the build for IndieCade will be playable enough to evaluate (and perhaps do some much needed playtesting).