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.

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April 1st last year we publically unveiled the mod, perhaps too early in retrospect or perhaps not early enough in others.

Compared to other Source engine mods 1 year of offical dev time is miniscule, others have been in production for 3-4 years, some even from before HL2 was released and still have not released. I think its pretty amazing we have gotten as far as we have with effectivly a core of about 5 people doing the work with others chipping in.

That said we had hoped to be much further along now, we are held back by two things really. Coders and Animators. Essentially the maps for version 1 are pretty much done and we just need the coders to finish our objective system and playtest and fix bugs. We need the animators to animate all our weapon models, which are all modelled and the mjaority unwrapped. We want to get the animated before skinning as we can then optimise and give the skinners the best possible UV to work with.

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News is a bit late this month, sadly due to the fact that actual news is a bit thin on the ground.

Ham and Jam is not the only mod going through a bit of a slow patch at the moment, in fact it seems to be a bit of an epidemic at the moment. I suppose the most obvious reason is the demographic of people who are actually working on the mods. We’re talking people in their mid-to-late teens or early twenties who do it in their spare time in and around studies and work. As schools and colleges increase the workload and deadlines loom, peoples priorities change and working on a mod gets pushed much further down the list.

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