James has been involved in the development of the game since almost day one, which was all the way back in spring 2008. He is one of the most experienced UnrealScript programmers you can find out there!
- Who are you and what do you do on "The Ball"? My name is James Tan, and I am one of the original programmers on The Ball. I'm 26 and I live in New Zealand where I currently work as a pharmacist, run a lan event business and run a game development company. I worked on The Ball mostly during Phase I and Phase II. During Phase III, I was off doing something else for a while and I was around during Phase IV. I currently help out with small programming tasks when ever I can.
- When and how did you join the team? Goodness, that's a while ago. I think way back in 2008, Hourences initially pitched me the idea of The Ball. I didn't start working on The Ball until late 2008 though when some initial level design had already been completed by Hourences. The mod was looking great and some code had been done too. It seemed like a really interesting project then, so I started writing some code.
- How did you start out with programming? I first started game development by making games on the Amiga using AmigaBASIC. I didn't really make much other than button mashing style games. After that, I got my hands on Doom and was bashing out some levels using MapEd. It always interested me in how levels were built and it was very cool being able to see your creations in a game. Then I moved in Duke3D and started out by making levels, but I got into CON editing. I did some pretty cool stuff there and even had an opportunity to work on eDuke32 which was an advanced form of Duke3D. I also did some mapping for Shadow Warrior. I did briefly try to move into modding Quake, but I didn't quite stick with it as I had a pretty slow computer back then. Then I got my hands on Unreal. Modifying Unreal was an awesome experience as I was really able to create games and modify it quite a lot! And I suppose the rest is history.
- What has been the most challenging thing you have done on the game? Getting The Ball not to crush the player or trapping the player inside it! This honestly caused us a lot of head aches, and it was great that we eventually found a solution to this.
- What do you like the most about the game? I like the atmosphere. Everyone has worked hard to make this a unique atmosphere to play in and that's fantastic considering that most games now have you playing the random generic soldier fighting in some pointless war that only you can win.