I work for a game company, Holistic Design, based out of Atlanta, GA. We do computer games, a role playing system and miniatures games. I work as a programmer and so don't have much to do with the non-computer games. But, for informational purposes, our role-playing system is called "Fading Suns", a far future, dark, machiavellian science fiction RPG. Our miniatures games include "Noble Armada", based in our Fading Suns universe, as well as two other games "Carnage" (fantasy miniatures) and "Combat Zone" (near future, post-apocolyptic minis).

In terms of computer games, our catalog includes such titles as "Battles of Destiny", "Final Liberation", and "Merchant Prince". The two years I've been working here hasn't seen a game published, though I have worked on a number of projects.

• My first project was Post Mortem, a detective type game with crime scene investigation, autopsy labs and other tools of the forensic trade. Work on this project ceased shortly after completion of the first case, for reasons I was never informed about. To my knowledge, it is still uncompleted and unpublished. My work here consisted primarily of the autopsy lab, as much of the rest of the game was complete when I started working at HDI, though I did get to do a lot of bug-fixing and interface tweaking. This game mostly served as an introduction to our company's proprietary libraries and to game programming in general.
• The second project I worked on was Noble Armada, which is currently in limbo, which is a real shame since it is about 90% done. I did much of the user interface here, along with some graph stuff that was used by the AI (traversing the jumpweb, finding nearby ships, etc) and the economic engine. I also did some work with our scripting engine.
• Third on the list is Panzer Blitz, with Hasbro as the publisher. But in an orgy of budget cuts, we were one of the many projects they cancelled. We didn't get very far on this one so I didn't do a whole lot. What I was doing while this project was working on was...
• Part of our Panzer Blitz contract including re-writing our library to be 3-D only (our old library offered only a 2-D, sprite based engine). I did a fair amount of the window library (resource compiler, most of the dialog controls (listboxes, scroll bars, etc.), tool tips, etc.).
• Next on the list is "BioStrike", which hasn't been released yet, but is in Alpha with an extremely high probability of completion. The publisher for this title is Red Storm Entertainment. The setting is near-future bio- terrorism. The players control a corporation seeking to prevent a massive bioterrorist attack. Using a squad of "enforcers" in tactical, squad based missions ("Syndicate" style, for those who remeber that Bullfrog game, though ours uses a fully 3D engine), the players seek to assemble the pieces of a horrific puzzle before it is too late. For this particular game, I was the initial lead programmer and did almost all of the initial data structure design work, as well a fair portion of the initial interface code for the strategic game. However, I was moved to Merchant Prince II before long and have only just returned to BioStrike now that it is in Beta.
• Which brings us to Merchant Prince II, where I was lead programmer. In this sequel we actually did keep the old engine and merely added to it, so a lot of the work was already done. New features added from scratch do include a tech tree and TCP/IP network play (completely dumping the old modem based multiplayer code). Multiplayer has three options - hotseat play, turn based over a network (like hotseat, but not everybody is at the same computer), and a simultaneous movement version where everybody take their turn concurrently. Merchant Prince II, code-wise, is technically in gold, but with the release date not until April of 2001 there is still a little bit of time for final bug squashing before shipping.