As the Belief & Betrayal developer diaries continue, more and more names from the development team will be referenced. To help keep track of who's who on the team, the following is a handy list of the integral Artematica staff members working on the game.

Andrea Barbetti (Andrea B.) — Lead coder
Andrea Vialardi (Andrea V.) — Musician
Alessio Fallabrino (Ale) — Lead animator
Andrea Cuneo (Cunix) — 2D Artist
Francesco Fugazzi (Franz) — Cross service & video assistant
Jonathan Gervasi — Co-Designer
Massimiliano Calamai (Massy) — Production Director
Paolo Infusini — Location assembly
Riccardo Cangini (Ricky) — Managing Director
Roberto Andreoli (Rob) — 2D-3D Artist
Sergio Rocco — Designer & Product Manager


6th January '06

Over the last few days, we asked Andrea B. (in charge of project codes) to come up with a feature that really got the programmer's brains working overtime. The creation of two separate inventories for each game player, a standard one for objects and another one for information each player collects.

In order to solve an enigma at any given time, you might have to exchange information you've collected with another character by sending him/her a kind of text message (this operation can be carried out via a digital system available to all the players). By swapping and collecting information or objects, the characters can get out of sticky problems and will be able to resolve various conundrums.

One aspect we've more or less had to deal with for the first time was having to create game scenes depicting real places, because we had to get hold of a great deal of photographic documentation and architectural plans. Obviously we also let our imagination loose by creating entirely imaginary locations, rich in atmosphere and at times a little surreal.

At the end of January, the third milestone phase of development will be completed. We've already finished many scenes and characters (nearly 20 sets and about 15 characters) and we're in the process of perfecting the "editing pipeline". We've launched ourselves into the writing of provisional dialogues with enthusiasm and we're about to complete this task, too!

The functioning of the game engine is very satisfactory and we are nearly ready to start the render sequence work that will give the finishing touches to the spectacular 3D animation.

We've already arranged all the sequence storyboards and we're in the process of allocating scene sets and characters to the staff doing the animated scenes.

If everything proceeds as it should, and if there are no unforeseen or nasty surprises, we'll start working on the game's teaser film within a month or two, and we will present this new adventure very soon.




24th January '06

When something is going too well, automatically the ever-present Murphy's Law kicks in and there's always some uncomfortable, unforeseen snag waiting to present itself.

Today Sergio's back-up hard disk, containing a large part of our 3D projects and post production material, looked as if it had died, and we were all very worried. As soon as the problem was discovered and resolved (the feeder had gone), it was the C: hard disk's turn to malfunction and consequently more time was wasted sorting out Sergio's computer...

If something has to go wrong, then it obviously has to go wrong where it can cause the most discomfort!


13th February '06

During these first days of February, Andrea B. has made an effort to optimize the engine code, taking care of infrastructural issues such as:

—memory management and cleaning
— collisions enhancement
— the output from the player

He has also begun to define the features of a range of tools useful to make things easier for Paolo, who first will assemble the different parts of the game. The new automatic assembling tools will avoid the confusion created by a manual management of that myriad of printouts and files that make the game.

As for graphic work, Ale is making the first real-time JD and Kath [Kathrine McKendall] animations with success, while Sergio continues turning out the locations of the game and, in a particular way, studying the teaser contents.




8th March '06

During this period, new stages have been reached. First, the post-production of the images rendering. Within a few days, we'll see them.

After the location pipeline has been set up, the assembling of all the environments will start within a couple of weeks. In addition, Andrea B. and Rob have organized themselves to complete the character face morph assembling so that almost all the characters will have lip-synch in real-time, an upgrade asked by a lot of reviewers and players of Martin Mystère.

Franz