Amazingly, this intense burst of activity actually brought in a working game level with two days to spare, which gave us time to play-test it… a luxury which we never dreamed we would have.

We scratched around for last minute flights to Atlanta and devised what we believed would be a fool-proof fall-back plan, just in case the code which we took to America didn’t actually work. (This involved having one member of the team on standby in the UK for almost 48 hours until we eventually called in to say that everything was in order).

On arrival at the show, we soon saw how crucial our efforts had been, as Fox had honoured us with pride of place… right in the middle of their most impressive booth. If we had failed to come up with the goods, this would have been one of the most high-profile cock-ups in the history of E3.

Luckily, the opposite was true and we received some very favourable notices from the press who now saw our efforts for the first time. We returned from the show exhausted, but more sure than ever that we had created a framework for something special.

One of the first things we did on our return to the UK was ditch all of the character models which we had created in such pressured conditions. This wasn't because we had been unhappy with their quality (quite the opposite), but because by this time we'd made a firm decision to introduce ‘hierarchical modelling’ to our game characters, a reasonably complex process which we'll cover in more detail next week...