I must ask what it's like to look at the forums, and see all the players playing, using, and being interactive with each other about what you've helped create. So, here goes...
Ahem...
<speech>
Oh, gloriously under-rated coders of the coolest game I know to be in existance, in your own priceless words, would you please kindly take precious time out of your event-filled day, and pass unto me the knowledge of what it's like to -- *runs out of breath*.
</speech>
*catches his breath again*
Eitherhow. I hope you get the point, lol...and though the language may have been a _bit_ excessive, I really do think the world of you all.
Not only do you bust your butts with various chars from A to Asterisk to make an awesome game, you manage to spend time responding to each distressed player individually, in some cases dealing with more crap than I would ever deal with and exclude four-letter'd words.
That deserves a lot more credit than ya'll get. Really does.
: )
To the Staff
other than mit, who's somehow kept up the patience and interest to hammer this thing out of thin air near entirely on his own, the rest of us as far as i know, are pretty much just addicted players like yourself that just happen to have a vague understanding of some aspect of game design, or a strong motivation to lean, and a bit of dumb luck in creating that which resembles something not entirely unlike something you might see in a video game.
i do graphic design, web programming and usability theory for my day job, and started playing this since i would often have to wait around for hours in between client calls. the downside to freelance is that there tends to be a lot of waiting around when you could be outside enjoying the afternoon. invariably the call you've been waiting for comes at practically the end of the day, and you're up all night workin. a-tractor (as it was known at the time) proved a rather fun time-waster, even in the far more simple version way back when.
i never really connected what i did for a living with being able to actually do anything for the game, which is odd i s'pose. mit asked me to try and whip some graphics together for the interior of the pub one afternoon, and it just kind of grew (and shrank, depending on the paid workload) from there.
i like that texture art has completely reworked the way i look at photoshop, and probably saved me from a significant amount of stagnation visual arts wise. there's also been a number of web applications that aren't seen very much by you guys that i'm rather proud of, and probably fueled an interest to bother becoming a bit better at the programming side of things; i don't think there was as much interest in that end of my job previously, i only knew just enough to be dangerous.
i've always just really liked learning and creating things, and i rather suspect a lot of the staff feels about the same. any motivation beyond that comes from seeing other players motivated to create and take interest in skills specific to the game industry.
whether it be clever gameplay that wasn't anticipated, submitting that obscure bug that we can't even fathom how you found, all the way to trying to learn a program like photoshop or gmax for texture art / modeling -- even learning a bit of C and coding a new game for the pub.
havin a bunch of praise would be awkward. we're all just feckin about really :]
i do graphic design, web programming and usability theory for my day job, and started playing this since i would often have to wait around for hours in between client calls. the downside to freelance is that there tends to be a lot of waiting around when you could be outside enjoying the afternoon. invariably the call you've been waiting for comes at practically the end of the day, and you're up all night workin. a-tractor (as it was known at the time) proved a rather fun time-waster, even in the far more simple version way back when.
i never really connected what i did for a living with being able to actually do anything for the game, which is odd i s'pose. mit asked me to try and whip some graphics together for the interior of the pub one afternoon, and it just kind of grew (and shrank, depending on the paid workload) from there.
i like that texture art has completely reworked the way i look at photoshop, and probably saved me from a significant amount of stagnation visual arts wise. there's also been a number of web applications that aren't seen very much by you guys that i'm rather proud of, and probably fueled an interest to bother becoming a bit better at the programming side of things; i don't think there was as much interest in that end of my job previously, i only knew just enough to be dangerous.
i've always just really liked learning and creating things, and i rather suspect a lot of the staff feels about the same. any motivation beyond that comes from seeing other players motivated to create and take interest in skills specific to the game industry.
whether it be clever gameplay that wasn't anticipated, submitting that obscure bug that we can't even fathom how you found, all the way to trying to learn a program like photoshop or gmax for texture art / modeling -- even learning a bit of C and coding a new game for the pub.
havin a bunch of praise would be awkward. we're all just feckin about really :]