It’s almost mid summer and with it comes June 6th and the anniversary of D-Day. That’s always something special for us as it marks the events at Pegasus bridge which inspired us so much in the making of the game.

For me it’s an especially poignant time due to my personal interest and involvement with the Glider Pilot Regiment. I’m privileged to know a number of ex-glider pilots, some of whom flew the gliders to the Caen canal bridge landing zones.

Can you imagine what it must of been like gliding silently in an 8-ton plywood aircraft over 12 miles in pitch darkness with only a stopwatch and a compass to navigate and then landing it in a specific field barely big enough take one let alone all three of you?

Seriously, give these guys some thought on June 6th. If they hadn’t captured and held the bridges the Allies wouldn’t of been able to push on so quickly from the beachheads.

So, after that moment of reflection, here’s this months update.

Donations

A huge thanks to everyone who donated something towards the Ham and Jam project. We won’t name names, but you know who you are and we greatly appreciate it. We’re very close to our target for what we need to keep our development services running but we still have a deadline of June 25th! If you were planning to make a donation please do!

Hopefully next months update we’ll be able to give you a breakdown on where the money is going.

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As you’ll no doubt of noticed we’ve had a bit of a spring clean of our website and are now sporting a new design care of Spine our art lead. The original site design was something we put together quickly when we first launched Ham and Jam but after a year it was really starting to look a bit shabby. We’ve tidied a lot of things up too so hopefully using the site will be a bit easier and for us, keeping it up-to-date will be a pleasure rather than a chore.

We need your support!

This month we’d like to draw your attention to the nifty “donate” button lurking over there in the sidebar. As we briefly mentioned in the last news update we’re trying to raise money to help cover some of the expenses that Ham and Jam has incurred.

Up until now our expenses have either been covered by sponsors or from members of the development team digging into their own pockets. Luckily it’s only been small amounts so far which has meant sacrificing beer money on the odd occasion. However, we’re having to dig into our pockets more often than is financially viable and the kindness of our sponsors only goes so far.

One area that is critical is to maintain and pay for the teams SVN server which has been the central pivot to our development process. Our current SVN server was provided free for a year by a sponsor but very soon that deal will end and we will have to cover the cost of the server ourselves.

This is where we need your help. We need to raise £200 by the end of June to secure our SVN services for another 12 months. Without it development on Ham and Jam could grind to a complete halt!

At the moment we have a fairly basic SVN set-up but with £200 we will be able to expand our source repository and allow more of our development team access to it. It will also enable us give access to beta testers so that they always have access to the latest updates - something we sorely need for our upcoming regular playtests.

We don’t expect to raise the entire £200 from donations alone and the dev team will add what we can to the fun as we’re able. So if you’ve got a few pounds, euros or dollars sat in a paypal account doing nothing, we could really put it to good use!

If you’d like to donate but don’t have a the ability to use Paypal, let us know and we’ll discuss other ways you can get your donation to us.

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This time a month ago I was dreading having to write this post, development had been slowly ticking over like a car on idle. Things were warming up but not as fast as you need when its a cold morning and you have to be at work in 10 minutes. I was thinking “What am I going to write about this month?” and struggling with any decent chunk of insight and information to come up to fit the bill.

Then something amazing happened. Out of nowhere and by pure coincidence the majority of the team found a good portion of time in their busy lives where nothing was going on, even Olah our coder has managed to dig his way out of a hole and help commit a whole bunch of new stuff. So without further a do, let get on with with whats happened this month

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