2. What is your favorite game,
games and genre of games ? I guess you
like Doom beside others ?
I myself like Doom, Thief the dark project and
System
Shock.Being a professional game developer, I find it a
bit hard to enjoy games
the way they are meant to be played. I
usually end up playing as
research, analyzing everything from a
developer's perspective. And also,
when you spend your day
developing a game, somehow you don't necessarily
want to spend
the evening playing another game... I just rather play
guitar
instead :D
But occasionally when a game is good enough, I find
myself actually
enjoying it as a gamer. Actually one of the more
recent experiences like
that was Wolfenstein: The New Order,
which was directed by another Dawn
of Darkess veteran, Jerk
Gustafsson
Bethesda Underground: Know Your Devs - MachineGames' Jerk Gustafsson.
I was extremely impressed
by that game and ended up playing it
through, which doesn't happen too
often. Actually it is only
because I played it through to the end
credits that I realized
Jerk worked on that game. I'm that lousy at
following the
industry... Anyway, the little rap beats in the cut-scenes
are
just genious, I love it when people dare to do something unexpected.
Another case of recent "I actually enjoy this" has been
Witcher 3.
Apart from that my "favourite genre" by far
is sim-racing. I used to do
some league racing with GTR 2 for
instance. Those races must be my
favourite moments of all time in
gaming. And lately I've spent some time
just driving around in
Assetto Corsa.
3. Any plans for the future ?Yes
of course, but I can't talk about them...
4. I myself
consider that gameplay is above the a game graphics. What do
you
think ?Well it depends on the case. There are many areas
in game design where
you need to make a choice between function
and aesthetics. Do you want
pretty character animations, or
responsive controls? Do you want nice
clean screen, or
informative UI? Sometimes there are no clear choices,
and what
works in one game doesn't work in another. Sometimes plainly
pretty
graphics can be an important part of the intented experience.
But,
as a gamer, I think more often I tend to lean towards function.
5.
Do you prefer to get in touch with the gamers/developers in a
comunity or rather work by yourself and/or with your team ?I
don't usually really seek out contact with the community, because I
always feel like I'm busy enough as is is... But occasionally
when it
just happens spontaneously, I don't mind.
6.
Any chance for improvement on your behalf if it is needed ?My
attitude towards improvement tends to be that I just learn what I
need to learn when I need to learn it. I've never felt it to be
very
difficult to learn new things. It's important to have the
attitude of
actually understanding what you are doing with some
software and why,
instead of just memorizing what you need to do.
When you actually
understand the reasons behind things, you will
eventually find out a lot
of underlying commonalities behind the
superficial idiosyncrasies of
different systems. And eventually
learning new systems becomes fairly
trivial.
7. I
imagine that you didn't have troubles with the Dawn of Darkness
team, but going to work on Max Payne was a hard choice ?No
of course not. Dawn of Darkness was supposed to be possibly a
launching pad for a company, but as it was with all the mod
groups, only
few would make it. The publishing side of things
never really took off.
The only offered deals were not realistic
at all. I'm somewhat of a
pessimist, so I can't say I was too
disappointed. More realistically
Dawn of Darkness would operate
at least as a resume for the individuals
who worked on it, and
that's pretty much what happened.
Sometime after the Dawn of
Darkness demo was released, Jerk Gustafsson
asked me if I was
interested of joining Starbreeze in Sweden. I said
sure, but I'll
first ask if Remedy is interested of hiring me. I knew
they were
building Max Payne, and then I wouldn't have to move outside
of
Finland. And indeed they were looking to hire level designers, so
Dawn of Darkness simply operated as my resume.
And since then
I've worked on Max Payne 2, the Alan Wake games and more
recently
on Quantum Break
Quantum Break - Time is Power Trailer not just on level design but pretty much all over the
technical designs
of things.
8. What is your favorite
compiler you use ?If you mean to ask what are my
favourite tools I like to use, it's not
really a question of
what's my favourite at this point anymore. I just
use whatever
tool gets the job done the best. We use a lot of in-house
and a
lot of third party tools, and all of them have their own strong
points and their peculiarities.
Back in Quake days I used an
editor called "BSP" which I thought was
wonderful. Back
then a large component in level editors was their
modeling
capabilities, but that part has become pretty much obsolete
nowadays. Everybody are just using standardized formats and third
party
modeling tools. As of actual code or script compilers, we
have our own
proprietary script language and compile out the
level scripts from our
own world editor. That might also become
obsolete in the future, and
perhaps we will create level logic
directly with C++ interfaces.
9. Any advice for a newbie
game programer, beside learning by himself ?Well one idea
to develop one's skills overall, whether you are a
programmer or
game designer or artist, is perhaps to play around with
Unity.
Mostly because it allows you to quickly get a feel of various
areas
of game development fairly independently, without getting too
bogged
down with tiny techical details right at the start. On the other
hand if you just use something like Quake or Unreal level editor,
your
creativity tends to be somewhat more constrained than it is
with
something like Unity.
As of advice specific to
programmers, I would say it is very important
to develop your
skills also in understanding the realities of game
design, and of
all the other departments of game development. As a
programmer it
is easy end up too focused onto the details, and kind of
miss the
big picture. Especially in complex projects.
10. Do you
prefer lan or online gaming or none ? I myself prefer
multiplayer
over single player. A single player game must be real good
to be
played. I switched to this some time ago.Well since I
mentioned sim-racing, definitely multiplayer there. But
then if I
play something with the consoles, I tend to not bother with
the
multiplayer side of things. A well made single-player campaign is
easier to just play bit by bit at my own pace. I can't say I
would
prefer one over the other.
11. What you rather
try not do to, in developing something ?There are plenty
of things I would avoid, but I'm not really sure what
this
question means... Sorry!
12. Can you give any advices to
the Quark editor team, who developed
theyr editor for a multitude
of games, beside Quake 2 ? They are a good
team who are always
improving and learning from others.I've never used Quark
and I don't really know much about it... Sorry again!
13.
And one final question, can you tell me something about your
involvement in Quake 2 Dawn of Darkness developement ? What
editor did
you used than and what is a .bru file ? A .mrg file
(which by default i
don't know who can opened it) can be renamed
as a map file and used by
Quark.These are files used
by BSP editor. I can't really remember the details
but I guess
mrg stands for merge, and could be used to save out and load
in
portions of a level. I think .bru files may have been the same idea.
BSP used the concept of prefabricated components, meaning you
could
build a little collection of entities and save it out into
a "prefab"
library, to be reused multiple times in
different levels. I suppose
pretty much all the editors nowadays
use the same concept in one way or
another.
My involvement
with Dawn of Darkness was to implement a lot of the level
logic,
basically script in the triggers, the monsters, the conversations
and the logic with which the game proceeded. I think I ended up
implementing pretty much all of the logic you find in the final
demo,
because when we finished it pretty much all the other level
designers
had already moved on to other things, as it was pretty
clear the thing
would probably never get published in any
commercial form. I also built
a fair bit of the level geometry,
especially towards the end as there
was no other people left. The
best looking bits in there are still
probably built by other
people though, as I was definitely not the most
skilled when it
came to building the environments.
One thing in particular I
remember designing and implementing carefully
was all the
conversations that occur during your quest to get into the
Cheitan
Keep near the village. It was originally written down in a
rather
traditional manner, where during a particular point of your
quest,
only particular characters would actually tell you something that
would help you out. This is somewhat common still because of the
linear
way game story scripts are usually thought out, even in
non-linear
worlds. Screenplay writers are not very good at
thinking in terms of
possibility spaces, they just rather focus
onto maximizing the drama.
This often creates a situation where
the player is somewhat uneasy about
what to do, and he is just
trying to speak to everyone randmoly until
the correct piece of
dialogue finally pops out and the story proceeds.
In DoD, when
Roarke is doing all the tasks he needs to do to get into
the
Keep, I decided that at any point of the quests, the player could
ask about any relevant quest item from any of the characters in
the
world. And most of them would be able to at least point you
to someone
who should know the answer. So if the player had been
told he needs a
shovel, he could trust that he was able to
actually ask about a shovel
from any friendly face he ran into.
Even if the NPC didn't know the
answer to your question, at least
Roarke tried to ask. It's a very
simple thing to do, but very
very often overlooked in story design.
For those interested of
creating DoD levels, if you look at the various
text files for
2_2, you will find that for the NPCs, there's pretty much
the
same set of questions for everyone, just onlocked by the flags that
represent the player progress in the story, meaning every single
character had these questions unlocking the moment the player
became
interested of that particular item, and the player could
go to anyone at
any point to ask about any interest point.
