It’s with a sad heart that I have to report that the Ham and Jam team has suffered the loss of one of our earliest and long serving team members.

Mitchell Curtis Keesee known to the team by his nickname, “Engineer”, passed away at home on Monday 26th September at the age of 23.

Mitchell was our sound engineer and joined the team in early 2006 not long after the game got started proper. He has created almost all of the games sound effects and was passionate and dedicated in his work.

Mitchell’s obsession with tweaking and getting things perfect was often a blessing and a curse as he could never stop fiddling no matter how much we told him he didn’t need too. He would often disappear for a month at a time only to come back with a massive update.

He was a tireless perfectionist when it came to his craft. To quote the log entry of his last submission to our SVN server:

“New sten sound, superior to previous incarnations.”

He was creative in his work not just aiming to clone a sound but to engineer it to give a specific effect or impact within the scope of the game. He saw the soundscape as something that is experienced rather than just heard. Something we’re sure came from his love of classical music.

Mitchell worked on other games, most notably Firearms:Source, but was always considered a core member of our team and was a staunch supporter of the game who would promote and praise it whenever asked about it. He was a true team player.

Apart from his work as a sound artist we’ll also remember him for his bizarre, absurd and often irreverent sense of humour which has lightened the mood on various bad times during Ham and Jams development.

On a personal note, I first met Mitchell on-line as far back as 2003 when he was a 15 year old kid interested in making 3D models. I shared many tips and tricks with him and watched him tackle new weapon models, textures and even dabble with the odd character model.

Around 2005 he started to become more focused in sound production and was already making sound effects for game such as Day of Defeat, Duke Nukem 3D and was working on The Trenches when I approached him to help with our then new venture Ham and Jam.

He had worked on a number of games that failed to see the light of day but his dedication to Ham and Jam I take as a sign in his belief that something great will eventually come out of all this.

He’ll be missed by all of us but he’ll live on with every grunt, groan, boom and bang you hear in Ham and Jam.

Our thoughts are with him and his family.

Time goes by quickly and I hadn’t realised it’s been three months since we last posted an update. Sorry about that.

I know we talked about a release delay of “weeks” but as usual I grossly under-estimated the lack of free time myself and the team would have this summer. Anyway, with this update I’m glad to say I can bring you some news of positive progress so lets start off with the good stuff!

Commonwealth Airborne Forces player models.

I mentioned in our last update that one of the things that we really needed to get done was the Commonwealth Airborne Forces models. This was a key requirement of our Pegasus Bridge map and something that was very close to my heart.

I’m pleased to say the base modelling and texturing are done and we’re already started the process of getting them in-game. Three of the team – myself, Soren and Lasse – worked on the model and it was certainly a labour of love for me.

Soren was responsible for the 3D model and high-definition sculpt for the normal map, I created the texture for the distinctive Denison smock and Lasse created the rest of the texture for the model, helmet and Bergen rucksack.

It took a lot of work, especially to capture the distinctive look of the smock and we went all out to get it right. I’m really pleased with the results. The screen shots are taken from the Source model viewer so you can exactly how it will look in game. Sadly the detail in the normal maps is hard to make out in a still image so I’ve included a render to give you some idea of the detail.
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It’s probably not gone un-noticed that we missed our planned release date of 6th June. I’m sorry about that and let me apologise for the shabby way I handled the news by not making an official blog post until now. The delay is somewhat indicative of the reasons we missed the deadline.

To get to the point quickly – As mentioned before we’re a very small team with a lot of real-life commitments and though we worked very hard towards the planned launch date we simply ran out of time for the few last tasks that need to be done. There was some consideration to releasing the game “as-is” but I, and certainly others, wanted to put just a little more polish on a few things and make sure that we make the best first impression we can.

So what is the situation? Well, the delay isn’t as bad as it sounds. We probably need another 3 weeks just to finish of a few small things that are important to game play and the ethos of the mod as a whole. I know some of us have a lot going on personally (heck, I’m trying to move house!) so 3 weeks should be enough to get things finished without putting to much stress on people.

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