You might have read it already in the game patch notes, but in case you haven’t I’m putting it out here. Jip stepped down as the leader of the game team and the game team elected me to take his place. I’d like to use the opportunity to thank Jip for all the contributions that he did in this position. They are literally too many to name them all. So thank you Jip!
This change in positions will certainly change how the game team operates because Jip was very knowledgeable of the game and could do a lot of changes himself. While I have made contributions to the game myself, they have mainly been to the shaders, which is not entangled at all with the lua code of the game. I will (must) therefore focus on other aspects of the team lead role.
I will stick more to the administrative aspects and one of the first things I plan to do is to review how the game team operates and how that can go on as smoothly as possible despite this change in leadership. The game team is very active at the moment and that means it’s challenging to keep track of everything. On top of that it needs to work in close contact with the balance team, which is a lot less active. This has lead to frictions in the past and I will try to find a way of working together that suits both teams.
I’ll present more detailed plans or status updates at a later date, when I got more comfortable with my new role. You can still expect that development will continue in the meantime as we have a lot of regular members that can continue to work and are not affected by this administrative change.