australian video game developer. worked on many games. usually credited as something like “systems designer” or “technical designer”. right now, “senior technical designer” at riffraff games. also i make tools and tutorials and resources and stuff. expert in the use of the unreal engine.
hey joe, did you ever have an engineer that truly was wonderful to work with, an engineer that got out of your way when you worked on design, or like, an engineer that specifically helped you thrive as a designer in a project?
A good question, since I am forever bitching and moaning about engineers. Not many, is the answer – although for most of my career I have been on the technical side as well, so some of that moaning is about stuff I’ve seen being done to other designers and tried to thwart, and been thwarted in turn. There are gems though for sure. This will be a Praise Post.
The first one I worked with was a guy called Aaron Ellsworth who did all the code on Shotgun Sunrise, our HL2 mod, who was fun to work with and always gave things a shot, rather than “nuh-uh”ing things on impulse, which I’d already come to expect from coders at the age of 18. Jorn van de Beek is a wonderful dude who did most of the code on the original InFlux and our long-forgotten iOS game Vroom!, and taught me my first Unrealscript, which snowballed into everything I know how to do with code now, and would have been a tough gig in itself. Turfster is another one – we’ve barely worked together professionally, but HammUEr exists because I barfed out a dream on Twitter and he just went ahead and made it real. A fun thing about knowing Turfster is you keep finding out once a year or so that he also made some other obscure tool you used to use that was the only thing in town for that purpose, like extracting files from Prince of Persia or Beyond Good and Evil or Vampire Bloodlines or whatever.
I was technical on Weird West, but barely touched C++, so I was dependent on a few engineers there to let me work, and they were all wonderful; Borut and Jouan and Jeff never fucked me around. Honourable mention for Johnnemann, who I didn’t get to actually work with, but he got me the gig and we shipped his inventory system.
I have probably forgotten to praise some folks here which I feel just terrible about. But also, really good coders really are pretty thin on the ground. Do better ya schmucks
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