Episode 6

Monte: Sure, thanks Danielle. Well I’m a lifelong video game player. I started way back as early as I can remember and started on the Atari and had Atari computers and learned to program pretty early on. So I went through a couple of different majors in college and eventually popped out with a degree in computer engineering and with my shiny new degree went out and took a really lousy job. It got better though, and after that I was working on product development writing software. And I enjoyed that very much, but my kinda life’s passion, what I went home and did was play video games. I still, you know, all through college, all through high school, earlier, even after I got out what really drove me was games.

So after a couple of years of writing software, I thought, you know, I can do this game thing and I was living in Chicago at the time, I’m a native Chicagoan, and I found a little teen tiny game company out there called Game Refuge, and the founders of that were old arcade veterans. They had done some really classic arcade games: they worked on Rampage, and Tron, and Spy Hunter, some cool old stuff like that. Kind of a fun group to work with and they took a chance on me it was kind of cool, so I spent a couple of years there. They were a small shop though and after awhile we were looking, it was unclear if we were going to have some future projects. So I had to look a little bit bigger and better, and by that time I had already killed more hours than I care to talk about playing Diablo and Starcraft. So when the time came to start looking, I thought you know, I really love those Blizzard games, let me see if there is something I can offer Blizzard. And, there was a job for a Tools Programmer, at the time, and what I was doing at the other place was writing a lot of tools and it was arcade development so it’s kind of different from what we do here but a lot of the skills lined up.

So I applied and I got a job as a tools programmer and at the time, this was in 2000, I was working on technology that was shared between World of Warcraft, which was a tiny budding little project at the time, and Warcraft 3 which was in full development. So, for about a year we worked on shared technology and then we split the techs, and I finished up on War 3 and worked on Warcraft 3 and its expansion, and then Starcraft 2, and now I work on World of Warcraft.

Dustin Browder: So the Thor does two things for the Terrans: It gives them a sort of tip of the sword kind of unit, something you can push up front that can take a lot of damage from enemy fire. It’s very survivable, very tough, very hard to kill. And you can use that sort of push past an artillery barrage or push directly into an enemy base to sort of lead your smaller lighter marines into battle. And it’s also got these huge cannons on its back that can strike against air targets so you can use the Thor to defend your forces from enemy air threats and it’s a very powerful weapon in both of these roles. So it really gives the Terrans some additional flexibility in the battlefield they haven’t really had before.

Sam Didier: Yeah basically, I think I covered a little bit early, but we’ll have a bunch of our artists do some concepts and we’ll look at the different pictures and say ‘Oh I like that. Oh that part looks cool. We should add that to this one over here.’ So after a couple of iterations on the concept we’ll settle on one and then we’ll sic one of our artist to start modeling it. And they’ll model it up, they’ll start mapping it, we’ll have our texture guy, if it’s not the same guy who modeled it, start working on it and then it’s ready to be handed off to the animators. And the animators will hit up and we’ll go through various stages of the animation, we’ll have a, here’s a quick walk skittering across, here’s one that makes it look like it’s lumbering. We’ll see which one looks the best because the walk is basically what you see the most with all these units. Then after that we’ll pick one and then we’ll go on and settle on an attack. ‘Oh we want it to really reach out far.’ We want it to ‘this’ or ‘that.’ After that the unit’s all done then we’ll move in on to the portrait. This is where you get all the character on the unit. You know you can’t really see their faces on the field of battle so we have the little portraits there. And that’s where we’ll come up with, ‘Okay the roach needs to have this. We want to focus more on little beady eyes.’ And this and that and lots of little teeth. And so after that, we may need to go back to the unit and tweak the face that’s on the unit to match more to the portrait. But after that it’s pretty much done and then, barring any design changes or if we’re allowed to add more polygons, we hopefully have a finished unit there and then we’re done with them.

Sam Didier: About six years.

Dustin Browder: (Laughs) It really does depend. Sometimes it does take quite a long time. A unit like the baneling for instance went through the whole process extremely quickly and hasn’t had any significant changes since it first went into the game. More complicated units like a Mothership or a Viking or a Reaper sometimes go through some significant changes as they go throughout the process and they can take a lot longer especially if we end up moving around the design a little bit. If we end up changing some of the core mechanics on the unit like we did with the roach where we changed it from being a melee attacker to be a ranged attacker that obviously has an impact on the art and it obviously lengthens the amount of time it takes them to make that unit work in the game.

Sam Didier: Yeah we have a lot, even now, in games that people are playing now we have a lot of placeholder art still. And we have that in there so that if the designers have a new idea they want to try, we’ll come up with some place holder art that looks cool but it’s not one hundred percent polished because there is no reason to polish this unit all the way to one hundred percent if we’re going to end up taking it out or...

Dustin Browder: If we’re going to chuck it or change it or...

Sam Didier: Yeah, we’re still going over, and I’ll talk with Dustin say,

‘How are we on this now? Are we good to go? ‘

‘We’re good to go.‘

‘Okay. Ninety percent or a hundred? ‘

‘Ninety percent.’

‘Okay Ninety percent is good enough we’re going to finish it off.’

Anthony: It’s going really good. I got my teeth drilled today but the Novocain has worn off, and I’m ready to go.

Anthony: Actually no Gravity Incorporated was the first game company, if you could call it that, that I worked at. That was a little start up company in San Francisco, and that was around ’94-’95. They were making a real time 3D game called Banzai Bug, which we actually put out – hit the shelves and everything. Probably sold 5,000 copies but, you know, it was a good experience.

Anthony: Yeah, let me see let me look at my notes. The first thing I worked on I remember asking my boss, “Hey what can I do?”, after being there a few days getting situated, and that was Erich Schaefer at the time. He and Stieg [Hedlund] said they needed some type of flying insect monster for Act 3, so I came up with the mosquito demon. What’s now called the mosquito demon, and that was the very first thing I worked on. It was kind of for a swampy area so I figured that was appropriate, a mosquitoish-type monster, and yeah that was the very first thing I worked on.

Anthony: Probably the most notable monster I worked on was Mephisto. Phil Shenk had concepted Mephisto, so I already had something to start with. I modeled and textured him and set up the initial rigging, and then handed that off to Cheeming Boey to animate. I actually helped a little bit with the effects as well, the effects that are at the base of Mephisto. He has like swirling smokey skulls that kind of swirl around the bottom of him as he’s moving around.

Anthony: Yeah things back then were quite different. Most of the time the artist did everything from concept, to getting it you know with effects and everything in the game. So you did your concept stage, your modeling, your texturing, your rigging, and your animation and then effects. You know whatever skill effects you may have needed for the monster or for the character, and then got that in to the game. On some characters we decided ok let’s have one guy animate it, and I’ll model and texture it, and we started to do a little bit of that back then. It was very different from what we do now.

Anthony: Yeah now ... you know modern art production [and] pipelines for games are way more specialized. They have to be, it’s just the nature of getting things done. So definitely on our team we have things more broken down, not so much as some companies I hear about, but you know I do modeling and texturing mostly. I do some concept work. I help with effects sometimes if the guys need certain things modeled or textured for their effects. The animators pretty much animate all the time, but they also contribute concepts and stuff like that as well. Like sometimes we just want to brainstorm on new ideas, you know everyone will pitch in on the concept phase. But for the most part things are definitely more specialized; you know we have a team that’s just dedicated to rigging.

Anthony: Setting up the characters with skeletons and enveloping the characters, and stuff like that. Making sure things are named properly so they export correctly, and all that kind of stuff.

Anthony: The female witch doctor’s heavy armor set, her look is my design and work.

Anthony: Yes, yes. And the scavenger monster.

Anthony: Yeah the little burrowing guys. The Corpulent, the guy that blows himself up, I did some retexturing work on that. Let’s see, the tree that explodes, I helped with some effects work on that. I helped provide some modeling/texturing needs for the effects team. The shaman goatman I built and textured, the other goatmen I did some touch up on, their textures. The ghosts, I created and modeled and textured the ghosts.

Anthony: Yeah exactly. I think that’s all I can think of right now.

Anthony: Yes I did. I modeled and textured those off of Josh Tallman’s initial concept design.

Alex Afrasiabi: I personally like the new model much better than the Night Elf that we had but we are getting a new custom built model which looks amazing.

Dustin Browder: : I’m not really sure what an end game unit is, I guess it would be like a battlecruiser or a carrier or a thor or ultralisk, I guess it’s what we’re talking about here. But the hydralisk has always been anti-armor, even in the original Starcraft had a strong anti-armor role.

The marauder of course gives the Terrans some additional anti-armor capability from the barracks which we felt was very important since we moved the ghost back so far allowing the ghost to fulfill more of a core role on the battlefield for the Terrans. We didn’t think that the ghost made a lot of sense as fundamentally anti-armor with his sniper rifle. If he’s going to be anti biological and sort of taking head shots and taking out individual targets then we really needed the Terrans to have some way to deal with stalkers and immortals and to a lesser extent siege tanks and roaches. So that’s really what the marauder is pointed at, the marauder is pointed more at stalkers and roaches and you’ll see marauders used in that role. They also can tear apart a colossus or thor which is an added advantage for the Terrans from the barracks again.

One of our ideas initially for the Terrans for the infantry for the Terrans was to make sure that the infantry were viable throughout the whole game whereas much as they possibly could. Obviously at a certain point when a lot of psi-storm comes into play or there’s a lot of splash from enemy weapons fire you’re going to see the infantry start coming off of the map very quickly but we really wanted to make sure that the infantry were viable throughout the gameplay experience and that’s one of the things that the marauder is getting for, he’ tough, he can take a lot of hits, and he dish out a lot of damage to some heavily armored units and so if the threat is like roaches, and immortals, and stalkers the marauder has a lot of firepower.

And the hydralisk has a similar kind of role in that sense, obviously the hydra can shoot air, he is also a lot softer than a marauder but the hydra has some very powerful abilities to deal with some of these heavily armored threats that are very low down in the tech tree. Units like the thor, the mothership and the colossus all have their roles and we see them in games probably about a half or a third of the games that we see will actually see these units even come into play. And when they come into play they can be extremely dangerous of course but there’s a lot of counters already in play and the marauder is just one of the choices you have when dealing with an enemy unit like the thor. You can also obviously bring in mass siege tanks, even mass marines ultimately can be very effective against a small groups of thors because the thor is just not doing enough splash, he can absolutely obliterate a marine in a couple shots but there are simply too many marines at that point in the game sometimes for a thor to tear them all down so we’re really not worried at this point of these end-game units sort of eclipsing the core gameplay experience. They’re definitely finding their place, they definitely have their uses but they are definitely something you can counter and the marauder is part of that counter list but it’s not really the reason the marauder exists. The marauder really exists for stalkers, immortals, and roaches. Threats like this that are massable, can be fast but they’re heavily armored, they are something that a marine has trouble dealing with.

Dustin Browder: Alright, thank you.