It's now the 59th minute of the 11th hour of the Jak X: Combat Racing development process. We've created what we think might be our Gold Master disc, and we're testing the pants off it to see if it's solid enough to submit to Format Q/A -- the final, and deadliest, phase of the PlayStation game approval process. It looks like everything is in order: the game is tight, the networking is solid, and we've crushed every bug we could find. Now all we can do is cross our fingers and wait for the thumbs-up from Sony.
The very end of the project is always the toughest part for a game designer -- it's been over a week now since I personally have been able to make any changes to the code or the content, and all I've been able to do is play test, bug-hunt, and pace the corridors like an expectant father. It's tempting to obsess over all those small details that I wish we still had time to tweak, but there always comes a time when you just have to let it go. The trick is to have made sure that everything important has been taken care of before that time comes! That was certainly the case with Jak X, and I'm incredibly happy with the game that we've made. In just over 10 months we've built a giant online virtual-sport package, heaving with features, and jam-packed with both single- and multiplayer fun!
The process of helping to create Jak X has been an amazing journey for me, thanks in large part to my incredible and talented teammates. The brief we gave ourselves for Jak X was to make a bad-ass combat racing game (and most definitively, not a cutesy big-headed kart-racing game!) using the Jak 3 vehicle technology as a building block, and taking the chance to expand the story of the relationships between Jak, Daxter, and the other characters in the series.
