As the co-lead of Ham and Jam, and given that Gingerlord has been lumped with writing most of the monthly updates, he gets a break this month and I give you my own round-up of where we are at the end of the year.

Well first of all, I’d like to thank everyone who’s stuck with us and given us their support over the past year. We appreciate things haven’t been going quite as quickly as we would like and there’s been a number of reasons for this. However we’ve kept on, keeping on and things are really starting to look solid.

Map updates and playtest

The team got together a few weeks ago and decided to have an informal playtest on our two maps, haj_radar and haj_pegasus, which was probably the most populated tests we’ve had. It was also the first proper playtest we’ve had since Gingerlord expanded Pegasus all the way up to the Bénouville road junction. The map now has a number of objectives – secure the command bunker, capture the bridge, liberate the Gondrée Cafe and then push up towards the Bénouville junction.

The Germans put up a spirited initial defense of the Bridge, but were soon pushed back to the western side where one heck of a firefight took place. With mounting casualties the British liberated the Gondrée Cafe, pushing the enemy back towards Bénouville. What followed was an intense battle for the road with men crawling on their stomachs just to gain back a few feet of territory. Through gardens and overwalls both sides thought tooth and nail to hold on and although the casualties were huge, eventually one side broke. Who won? That would be telling….. ;o)

New art assets

HaJ is certainly starting to have it’s own “look” now that we have a large library of art assets to draw upon. Unfortunately we’re still struggling to replace all the borrowed content so that we can be 100% legal before we release a public version. The biggest hurdle is currently the weapon view models which need to be animated and skinned. Texture artists aren’t a problem, but animators are and we need those first so we can remove un-needed faces from the model and optimise the texture maps. This is so the texture artists have the best possible base to work from.

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