Icarus Studios continues its Meet the Team series where one developer is profiled through a series of questions and answers. This week, lead scripter, Doug "AFFA" Goodall is the victim. Find out what Doug has learned about his job in the days since beta and a whole lot more.
When the game was in beta, a lot of the members on the dev team were fairly new to their respective fields. As the game has evolved over the past several months, have you learned anything new or interesting about your job that you did not know before?
I'm an aberration. I've been in the game industry for almost ten years.
One of the best things about making games is that you learn new things every week. Players are always surprising. You quickly learn that the players' collective intelligence will always defeat your most careful designs.
Technically I'm a scripter, which means I write easy code in Pawn and Lua (sometimes called "brains" locally) instead of trying to solve np-hard problems in C++. But in the game industry, your "job" can be different every day. In the last month I've answered bug emails, fixed bugs, tested the last patch, written SQL searches, designed and scripted boss fights, made a new mission brain, changed the aggro rules for a dozen creature brains, worked out some spreadsheet formulas, wrote design docs, started working on some more "sandbox" content...
If you're obsessed with games, you learn new things outside your job all the time. You're always thinking about how real life experiences could be made into a game or how a new game mechanic could be applied to your current project.
