Apologies for the lack of news
On behalf of the team, apologies for the lack of Ham and Jam news lately. I know a lot of people have been wondering whats been going on especially as the forums have been pretty quiet. We’d planned a small update about three weeks ago but most of us got snowed under with other things.
So what exactly is going on with Ham and Jam?
Well to be brutally honest, not a lot. As we’ve mentioned in previous updates we’ve hit a bump in the road with coding which is making it hard to go forward. Basically, the “core” of our gameplay code (the part which makes Ham and Jam what it is) is stuck in production. We have a design brief for it and planned it all out but we’ve reached the skills limit of our current (novice) coding team and can’t make much progress. We’ve looked around for another couple of coders who can maybe join the team for a month just to push this part through, but so far, no-ones stepped up. For the team this is incredibly frustrating.
Because of the lack of activity from us, a few nay-sayers have cropped up saying that Ham and Jam is dead, or abandoned or just plain failed. Thats not the case, we’re just suffering a skills shortage and team members have other real-life commitments that makes Ham and Jam bottom of their list of priorities. It’s a universal constant just about every other mod has to deal with at some point in it’s life-cycle.
Speaking personally, I have considered maybe switching engine might help us move forward. Great though Source is, the need to do most of our stuff in C++ is becoming a real pain and my eye’s been drawn to more script based engines. Certainly not having to touch the codebase and just dictate the game logic in something like LUA would make life for all of us much easier.
So, at this point no progress since the last update and our search for a gameplay logic coder continues. If you know ANYONE who might be able to help us, get in touch.
