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funcroc

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Posts posted by funcroc

  1. Found these at LinkedIn.

     

    Nanthaniel Chapman

     

    Lead Designer

    Obsidian Entertainment

    March 2010 – February 2012 (2 years)

     

    Lead Designer on Dungeon Siege III.

    - Designed our first completed character, Lucas Montbarron, and implemented his abilities across C++ code and data.

    - Designed RPG system, including defining stats, level-up mechanics, loot generation system, etc.

    - Designed and oversaw implementation of all boss fights.

    - Implemented, maintained and fixed bugs in shipping RPG system, ability and statistics code(C++).

    - Handled pick-up programming tasks on design-related issues and assisted programmers with debugging general issues.

    - Provided information on implementation details and debugging on code issues for designers.

    - Gave guidance to area designers, including plans for adding, cutting, or re-working quest and area content throughout game.

    - Worked with Design department to ensure we delivered quality content on time.

    - Resolved technical and interpersonal personnel issues on Design team, improving the efficiency of the overall design team.

    - Designed PS3/XBOX360 control scheme and several UI screens.

     

    Lead System Designer

    Obsidian Entertainment

    November 2009 – March 2010 (5 months)

     

    Lead System Designer on Dungeon Siege III and Cancelled Aliens RPG

    Highlights:

    - Led pre-production Combat Strike Team for Dungeon Siege III, defining vision for combat and iterating on implementation

    - Designed animation timeline system, allowing easy iteration on high quality action combat and animations.

    - Designed Control and HUD revamp for cancelled Aliens RPG

    - Designed Grappling Mini-game for cancelled Aliens RPG

     

    System Designer

    Obsidian Entertainment

    January 2008 – November 2008 (11 months)

     

    System Designer on NWN2: Storm of Zehir Expansion

    - Designed and implemented new gameplay systems (Overland Map, Trading System, Goodies System, Crafting Overhaul) in NWScript

    - Designed and implemented several areas, quests, and the largest Overland Map (Sword Coast)

    - Created a new crafting system that dramatically increased ease of use for players and enabled much faster iteration and itemization for designers.

    - Created new Overland Map AI state machine to control wandering encounters on the Overland Map

    - Implemented and Scripted new UIs to support new features

     

    Assistant Producer

    Obsidian Entertainment

    April 2006 – January 2008 (1 year 10 months)

     

    - Worked with programming and UI designer to implement Front End UI for NWN2 in XML

    - Managed all Creature Data for NWN2:Mask of the Betrayer

    - Designed and led production of control scheme and interface improvements

    - Worked with live team to determine feature set and release dates of patches for NWN2 and Expansion Packs, and oversaw development, delivery and distribution of patches.

    - Managed localized text integrations into NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer

     

    Lead QA Tester

    Obsidian Entertainment

    May 2005 – April 2006 (1 year)

     

    Led QA team for Neverwinter Nights 2.

     

     

    Matt Festa

     

    Lead Technical Designer

    Obsidian Entertainment

    May 2008 – Present (4 years 5 months)

     

    • CTG (Core Technology Group) Tech Designer

    • Strike Team Lead on Project North Carolina [unannounced, cancelled]

    • Lead Tech Designer on Dungeon Siege 3: Treasures of the Sun DLC

    • Lead Tech Designer on Dungeon Siege 3

    • Lead Area Designer on Dungeon Siege 3

    • Designer on Aliens: Crucible [cancelled]

     

    Associate Designer

    Electronic Arts

    January 2005 – March 2008 (3 years 3 months)

     

    • Assistant Producer/Associate Designer on NFL Head Coach 09

    • Assistant Producer (Designer) on Superman Returns

     

    Content Developer

    Realm Interactive

    2003 – 2004 (1 year)

     

    • Designer / Content Developer on PC title Exarch [shipped May 07 as Dungeon Runners]

     

    Designer/Lead World Developer

    Artifact Entertainment

    2000 – 2002 (2 years)

     

    • Designer/Lead World Developer on PC MMO title Horizons: Empire of Istaria

     

    Game Designer

    Cinematix Studios

    1999 – 2000 (1 year)

     

    • Game Designer on console title Hirelings [unreleased]

    • QA on PC title Revenant

  2. from NeoGAF

     

    Well, if the questions that I've asked are of any indication, Obsidian is going to try their best to ensure that the game runs on as many systems as possible, and as well as possible. They're targeting integrated chips too, and not just for lowest settings. Got this in my Kickstarter inbox.

     

    HI ***,

     

    We are really going to work to get the integrated graphics chips to run the game well - and not just on the lowest setting.

     

    Thanks again for the support!

     

    -Feargus

  3. A 4 Hour Story in 400 Simple Steps: Fallout DLC

    SPEAKER/S: Chris Avellone (Obsidian Entertainment, Inc)

    DAY / TIME / LOCATION: TBD

    TRACK / DURATION / FORMAT / AUDIENCE LEVEL: Game Narrative Summit / 60-Minute / Lecture / All

    GDC VAULT RECORDING: TBD

     

    DESCRIPTION: Using Fallout: New Vegas DLC's Dead Money as a test case, creative director Chris Avellone runs through the process in creating a small RPG game narrative from pitch to completion, detailing all the tasks along the way: Pitch docs, narrative standards docs, thematic design, maps and level layouts, bug fixing and more until your game story is finally in a player's hands. Focus and questions include specific studio tools and techniques: story flowchart creation, building emotional vistas, script proofing, and text editing and lockdown sessions.

     

    TAKEAWAY: Specific layouts, formats for conversation editors, localizaton info, level and character design templates, approaches to character concepting, research, and more of a "how to" and "what needs to be done" in terms of game narrative - this will be a listing of a complete product cycle for a narrative designer on an RPG.

     

     

    In the Shadow of Greatness - Sequels and Reboots Deconstructed

    SPEAKER/S: Mary DeMarle (Eidos Montreal), Tom Abernathy (Microsoft Studios), Chris Avellone (Obsidian Entertainment, Inc), Raphael Van Lierop (HELM Studio) and Ivan Mulkeen (Eidos Montreal)

    DAY / TIME / LOCATION: TBD

    TRACK / DURATION / FORMAT / AUDIENCE LEVEL: Game Narrative Summit / 60-Minute / Panel / All

    GDC VAULT RECORDING: TBD

     

    DESCRIPTION: In the era of reboots and trilogies, what are the challenges that a development team faces when it comes to how they treat beloved game IP's? This session will bring together developers from various studios who have all had their hand involved in recreating or reigniting projects that have previously struck gold. Special consideration will be given to how to follow up a successful or beloved story, including how to do right by the existing fans, while attracting the ever important larger fan-base - and how you overcome the preconception that one must play the prequel before playing the sequels.

     

    TAKEAWAY: This panel will address: What are the major considerations taken and needed for successful reboots and sequels? What common misconceptions can we debunk? How does DLC fit into the narrative structure (for fans and for developers)? What does the future look like for original IPs?

  4. Tyler Davis' LI profile updated

    Current

    • QA Department Head at Obsidian Entertainment

    Past

    • Production Analyst at Obsidian Entertainment
    • Internal Production TCR Analyst at Obsidian Entertainment at Square Enix

     

    Credited Games: Project Gotham Racing 4, Dungeon Siege 3, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Magic The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers, Bajo-Tooie, and Lode Runner.

     

     

    QA Department Head

    Obsidian Entertainment

    July 2012

  5. #1: https://twitter.com/...4/photo/1/large

    Yay! South Park: Stick of Truth booth at Comic-Con!

     

    #2: http://insertcoinslv...ap#.T_7Nyqt1Dug

    South Park Is Hilariously Inappropriate

     

    South Park: The Stick of Truth has been on my radar since it was announced earlier this year. I mean, come on, Matt and Trey have teamed up with Obsidian Entertainment to create a turn-based RPG with the only focus being on the point of the game playing like an episode of the show. What

    • Like 1
  6. OT: ex-OEI programmer Erik Novales' formspring

     

    What was it like working on the Neverwinter Nights 2 Toolset?

     

    Very tiring! Heh.

     

    It was an interesting, and very big challenge. It did give us an opportunity to really enhance and modernize some aspects of the content creation process, and try and eliminate some of the really troublesome or tedious aspects of making content for NWN. We considered retrofitting the new graphics engine into the old toolset, and then trying to fix a few of the major productivity drains, but we thought there might be some serious technical issues in trying to do so, and so the new toolset was born.

     

    I was basically redoing an enormous existing application, on a technology platform new to Obsidian (though I had worked with it before, at Totally Games), with new game engine features that had yet to be written. And, with a few exceptions, I was writing it nearly all by myself! (A lot of the terrain functionality was done by Adam Brennecke, and Steve Weatherly worked on bug fixes and a lot of the internationalization work for the toolset. For the expansions, Josh Verrall took over tools programming, so thank him for all the new stuff that was added in MOTB and SOZ. :) We also reused the existing script compiler, and of course the graphics engine from the game itself.) If you take a look at the credits for NWN1 vs. NWN2, you may get an appreciation of the resource disadvantage I was at...heh.

     

    It wasn't all bad news on the scope front, though. One thing that simplified matters was that it was an editor being written to support many data structures that already existed and were extremely well-documented. There were many examples of "correct" data, and many applications and tools that already existed to produce and consume many of the Bioware data formats. This made it much easier to verify that things were working correctly. Similarly, given that the UI was intended to be an improvement of an existing one, there was a lot of existing guidance on how things should be laid out, and certain obvious improvements that could be made. The content creators at Obsidian also had a laundry list of desired improvements, from working on earlier titles with the Bioware engines, and where possible we implemented those suggestions.

     

    A big win on the technology front was our decision to use the .NET platform, which worked really well and provided us with a great starting point for the application. The ability to easily integrate third-party components with the framework and Windows Forms was also incredibly useful, and paid huge dividends both in time saved and a much more polished UI. The docking toolbars, tabbed windows, and property grid UI were all big winners in my opinion. There was also a third-party tree list control that we used which was really helpful -- it made the conversation editor much more efficient in terms of letting you see more information at a glance.

     

    One thing that I wish had existed while I was working on the toolset is the LINQ extensions in .NET 3.5. In particular, it would have made writing a lot of the code in the conversation editor much simpler -- there was a lot of code to deal with the conversation tree structure that could have been written much more succinctly with LINQ, with fewer opportunities for bugs to creep in. Some of the code for the more esoteric features, like the "question node" in the conversation editor, could definitely have made great use of LINQ. (And hey, with all of that hypothetical time I would have saved, I could have made the interface for it much more intuitive!) Another area where I think LINQ would have also been a big help is the script editor parsing.

     

    Another set of tools that would have been great to have on NWN2 (not just the toolset) were the crash and bug reporting tools I later wrote for the Onyx engine at Obsidian. These tools allow one-click crash and bug reporting, with tons of useful information automatically collected, submitted, and analyzed. This would have helped tremendously with hard-to-reproduce bugs and sped up development.

     

    I could probably go into some more detail, but the tl;dr summary would be: interesting work, huge scope, and, as always, the wisdom of hindsight and more modern tools would have saved me a heck of a lot of effort.

  7. OT: http://www.gam3rcon.com/panels.html

     

    "Writing for the Computer Gaming Industry"

    3:45 PM to 4:30 PM | Theatre | FREE with Gam3rCon Admission

     

    While the game-play, graphics, and physics of modern computer games are often the first things to attract players to a computer gaming title, it's often the rich histories, plots, and quests that keep them coming back for more. In some cases the stories have been so controversial or involving that they eclipsed the game in which they were placed (we're looking at you Mass Effect 3). Join our panel of veteran computer gaming writers as they share their stories about creating the narratives for the stories you love.

     

    Featuring Neal Hallford (Betrayal at Krondor, Dungeon Siege), Anne Toole (The Witcher), Chris Avellone (Planescape: Torment, Fallout: Las Vegas), Haris Orkin (Call of Juarez, Dead Island), John Zuur Platen (Ghostbusters, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin), plus special guests TBA. Moderated by Jana Hallford, co-author of "Swords & Circuitry: A Designer's Guide To Computer Role-Playing Games".

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