Game Break - Session Two

There's a suspiciously absent bit of blogging immediately preceding this post. Let's call it lag, to use an internet term. Ultimately, a number of factors led to Incident at Long Rock Junction being shelved for the past 87 days. Just to review, here's a few of them;
* Turnover - We lost a team member a long ways back, and that created what I like to call a work vacuum. This vacuum was filled by another team member. So in this case losing 1 team member was kind of like losing 1.95 team members. And when you've only got 3 members, that's rough.
* General Organizational Upheaval - Change can be really good, and we have the highest hopes that the current changes galloping through our department will result in a better deal for everyone involved; from our customers to ourselves. But change also brings questions like can we make a training game right now? to light, and while it's a very important to ask, answering that question can occasionally take up to 87 days.
* Greater Success means More Work - As the Central IT Help Desk at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, the CITES Help Desk has steadily improved how they do what they do for many years. This means that when people get good service, they call more often. Throw in a new semesters full of students who've had the internet available nearly their entire lives (and therefore may have come to rely on it), and suddenly you've got thousands of people asking for help. Everybody's got priorities, and when you've got phones ringing you've got to pick them in. And to this mountain of work, the Help Desk's training program took the backseat, buckled in, and took a nap.

And take a nap is exactly what the project has done. Having gotten the go-ahead to begin work anew, I'm having to dust off my game-making jacket and figure out where I'm at in the process. Luckily I kept a very detailed 'to-do' list, which turned out to be a really really good idea. So I hit the ground running today, and technically solved a code issue which has been dogging me for a long time now. I say technicaly because while I know it works, I'm still trying to figure out how. More on that later! For now I'm enjoying the still-warm weather here in Oklahoma City.