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Our apologies for the obvious lack of recent updates about Ham and Jam. The past three months have been very chaotic what with John leaving us to work at Crytek and myself working away from home a lot. It’s never easy when the team leads aren’t around and what little time available had has gone into production rather than the PR side of things and keeping the website up-to-date.
Ham and Jam has been a chaotic project through and through. It’s been almost four years since we started. Of those four years we lost almost a year and a half trying to use the original HL2 engine and then porting it over to HL2:EP1. We cautiously experimented with porting to the Orange Box engine too but given past experience decided to forget it and focus on getting the game finished.
We’ve also suffered from various team members coming and going due to their circumstances changing. Real-life always take a priority and over four years many of us have graduated and now need to focus on our jobs and some have had children and need to focus on their family. Ham and Jam was always meant to be a hobby and as such, it often has to take a back seat for some.
So with all this wistful retrospection, what the heck is happening with Ham and Jam?
Well brace yourselves.
We’ve set a release date.
Just a short note to wish everyone a Merry Christmas (or your festival of choice) and to let everyone know we are not dead.
We are infact finalising the content for our first release and polishing up the UI which is looking pretty special.
More news (we promise) is coming in the New Year.
Sorry about the excessively long delay since the last update. The vast bulk of this news update has been written for quite some time but we just haven’t had time to finish it off for a variety of reasons, the main being the lack of time to work on the mod by most of the team.
Unfortunately as is life, there are times where you just don’t have time spare. I’ve been incredibly busy at work bombing up and down Sweden and Ginger Lord, who usually takes care of the news updates, started work at Crytek UK a month or two ago and has been incredibly busy doing “stuff he cant talk about”. His employers at Crytek have unfortunately deemed HaJ as a ‘conflict of interest’ so for the foreseeable future his involvement with the mod will be limited, which is a real shame. He’s looking at resolving this as soon as possible as we’re so close to finishing it would be a tragedy to have to leave at this point. The rest of the core team have all been incredibly busy with a combination of final year University/College stuff and finding/moving jobs which has put a serious dent in our team work time.
As I write this in one window of FireFox, I have the “To Do” list for the mod open on another screen and it is slowly but surely turning green. We keep all the done stuff on the list just for motivational reasons as you can see just how far we have gone. If we had an extra player animator/rigger and a sound engineer, we’d be much closer! *hint*
We hit a little blip mid March where productivity dipped a little but in the last two weeks lots of amazing things have happened. Last month I told you about some work mXed had done, but didn’t go into specifics. What he had done was a bunch of stuff for the first major patch after release, but they were so awesome we have brought some of them early into 1.0. One by necessity and the other because we thought why not?!
The first is the Thompson M1928A1. It is a beast, lets get that clear, with a much higher rate of fire than the other two SMG’s you really don’t want to get caught in its path. We brought this into an earlier release because technically we were breaking the laws of history by using the Sten in a few maps, it wasn’t invented/supplied till 1942 and we have some earlier maps than that. Porc, one of our testers, has compiled a short video showing the rampage it can cause:
Ham and Jam is a teamplay orientated, first person WW2 multiplayer game centred around the British and Commonwealth campaigns from 1939-45.
Historically accurate missions coupled with careful balance between realistic and enjoyable gameplay makes Ham and Jam a unique experience.
Ham and Jam will be a free mod when it's released but it does still cost us money to develop. For example, our SVN server costs us £200 per year to keep running.
Help keep the Ham and Jam development rolling along and make a donation, even if it's just what you would have spent down the pub tonight. Any money left over go towards veterans' charities.
Ham and Jam is supported by:
