Since we’re actively looking for interns, I thought we’d do our next Q&A with a former art intern, Daniel Lee. Dan was part of the Oblivion intern class who helped us down the final stretch. Our games are big so we rely on the extra manpower that interns provide. Dan is now a full time artist, working on Fallout 3.
Today’s Q&A is with programmer, Mike Lipari. How important is Mike? Whenever we have a day that Mike has to leave early, we all get nervous that something will go horribly wrong while he is away. Nothing we ship leaves this building without going through Mike’s hands.
Today’s Q&A is with Bruce Nesmith, our Director of Design. I first met Bruce over a decade ago working here at Bethesda (pre-Zenimax). I remember Bruce and Todd Howard shared an office together back then. Bruce did a lot of system design and also worked on the Thieves Guild in Oblivion.
What’s your job at Bethesda?
I am the Director of Design, and a Senior Game Designer. It sounds cooler than it is.
For this edition of Inside the Vault, meet artist, Josh Jones. He is the Lead Character Artist on Fallout 3. Josh is also our resident motion capture specialist — he also spends much of his time fine tuning our animation system.
What’s your job at Bethesda?
Lead Character Artist. I split my time between meetings and animation work. I also work a great deal with character rigging and other technical aspects of character art production.
Today’s Inside the Vault is with Megan Sawyer. She spends much of her time on creating the “living” spaces of the world – cities, towns, and landscapes. If our team were to have super powers, one of them would be the ability to create large, beautiful environments for exploration. Megan helps make that happen. For those who might recognize Megan, she had a feature in the documentary included with the Collector’s Edition of Oblivion.
What’s your job at
I’m an environment artist. I work on everything from houses tolandscape textures. In Oblivion, I made the houses of Cheydinhal, sculpted the landscape around the whole city, created the bridges and cattails, and made the Dark Brotherhood entry door. I also created the landscape textures and overall feel of the Blackwood swamp region. Currently on Fallout I’ve worked on a few buildings, an area for the main quest, a lot of clutter, and am now working on landscape.
At night I fight crime!
Today’s Inside the Vault is with programmer, Brendan Anthony. He’s not responsible for any specific area or systems, per se – its more like we give him a list of cool stuff we want in the game and he makes it happen.
What’s your job at Bethesda?
The standard job description is “I make things blow up.” I’m a programmer and I work with physics, magic, special effects, and lots of general gameplay code. I’m very lucky in that I’ve been able to implement some pretty sweet features over the years — some days, if you were to hang around outside my cube, you would just hear bursts of laughter erupting over and over as I “test” explosions or crazy physics effects.
Today we talk with Grant Struthers, the artist responsible for my favorite location in Oblivion – Cloud Ruler Temple. And, of course, these days, he is hard at work on Fallout 3. If I could pick any cubicle to visit on the team, I would pick Grant’s. He always has the most crazy looking stuff on his monitors — his test areas are always fun to look at. (Grant and his wife, Clara – who also works here – just adopted a new kitten who had been abandoned at Craig “Claff” Lafferty’s – a producer here – doorstep. Leaving a kitten at someone’s doorstep and running away – who does that? Anyhoo…)
This edition of Inside the Vault features Christopher Krietz. Chris was one of our best testers on Oblivion, and is currently our QA Lead for Oblivion Game of the Year. After GOTY ships, Chris will be focusing his ninja testing powers onto Fallout 3.
Chris once won a pie for winning a three way race against Todd Howard and Jeff Browne to finish Oblivion’s main quest (during beta testing). His winning time as of the end of the final cutscene and movie: 02:12:29 (difficulty slider allowed, no console cheats).
Alan Nanes is featured for this edition of Inside the Vault. Al created my favorite download for Oblivion, Wizard’s Tower, and is responsible for many of the miscellaneous quests in Oblivion, including the memorable A Brush with Death, where the player is teleported into a painting.
Another week, another Inside the Vault. Brian Robb is here to answer some forum questions. Before working here, Brian wrote some awesome mods for Morrowind that were more than mods, they added brand new features to the game. Amazing stuff.