Jangjoon Cha is our latest Inside the Vault profile.
What’s your job at Bethesda?
My job is to do whatever the character department needs me to do. So far I have been tasked mostly to do animations, but I have done some model and texture work on some clutter items and weapons.
Very few trends this week in what people are playing. Hmmm. I’ll bet dollars to donuts (it is Donut Friday) that a bunch of these guys are going to end up playing countless hours of Peggle on Xbox LIVE.
Brent Krische, QA Tester: Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures, The Darkness, and watching my girlfriend play Cooking Mama: Cook off and Order Up!.
Cody Shumway: Gears of War 2, Devil May Cry 4, Resident Evil 5, and Lost Planet
Sean Palomino, QA Tester: Street Fighter IV (360) and Prince of Persia (360).
Fred Zeleny, Back in the (Raptor) Saddle Again: Looks like I’ve resubscribed to World of Warcraft again. One of these days, I swear I’ll keep playing long enough to get a character to top level…
Dan Ross, QA: Empire: Total War and painting Warhammer minis.
This week we’re looking at the music our developers are listening to, which is fun for me, because it gives me new bands to research. Given I rarely listen to the radio anymore (outside of Pandora), I’ll be sure to read up on some of the artists mentioned (looking up Ratatat as we speak). Oddly enough, most of my music purchases these days are based on reading about a band — not listening to them..
Speaking of bands I’ve read about, I had heard good things about The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. I took a chance on it, and ended up really liking it. If you’re a fan of The Stone Roses, you might like it too.
Here’s what everyone else is rocking out to…
Nathan X, Associate Producer: Red Fang, Kyuss, Mastodon, Knights of the Abyss, Within the Ruins, Darkest Hour, The Hives, Spinnerette, Koffin Kats, Black Star, The Who, The Subways, The Go! Team, and Bad Brains.
Marisa Lyon, QA Tester: Eels, Gogol Bordello, The Indelicates, and the new Decemberists album.
Cory Dornbusch, QA: Carbon Leaf, Neal Mccoy, Brooks and Dunn, Hollywood Undead, Tool, A Perfect Circle… I don’t know I hit random.
In case you missed these, here’s plenty of stories you can read up on…
At last week’s GDC, Emil participated in two events. On Wednesday, he joined Shadow of the Colossus/Ico creator Fumito Ueda (Team Ico) and No More Heroes creator Goichi Suda (Grasshopper Manufacture) for the developer panel “Evolving Game Design: Today and Tomorrow, East and West Game Design.” You can check out some of their discussion at Shacknews. Additionally, on Friday, Emil had the keynote for GDC’s Game Career Seminar. There’s a pretty good recap of the address here at Gamespot.
In case you didn’t already know it, The Pitt takes place in a post-apocalyptic version of the Steel City. With the news of a game taking place in their town, Pittsburgh Station KDKA talked with Jeff Gardiner about the game’s take on the city.
Last week IGN Australia held their awards for the best games of 2008 — where Fallout 3 captured the IGN Select Award for Game of the Year, as well as Best PC Game. The game also received Runner Up honors in several categories — including the all-important Best Widow Maker category.
In our final update on the March Mayhem Developers Showdown, we bowed out of the competition after losing a very close matchup (51% to 49% ) to Turbine. You may recall that Turbine ousted us in the Final Four of last year’s showdown.
Here’s the latest on The Escapist’s March Mayhem Developers’ Showdown.
Voting has commenced for the third round. This round we’re paired up against the #1 seed of the North Bracket, Turbine Studios. If you’d like to vote on this matchup, or any of the other current matchups, head here.
GDC is currently going on in San Francisco, and at last night’s Game Developers Choice Awards, Fallout 3 came away with two awards — Best Writing and Game of the Year.
If you’d like to watch the awards, check out the video on Gamespot. At the 18:30 mark, Emil accepts the Best Writing award, and several members from the team accept the Game of the Year award at the 47:20 mark.
Today’s Inside the Vault = Fred Zeleny, designer.
What’s your job at Bethesda?
I’m a Quest Designer, which means I spend most of my time writing quests, dialogue for characters, and occasionally get to have a hand in systems and mechanics designs. “Designer” is a very vague term, and every company defines it differently. The only part of the job description that every company seems to agree on is that designers have two vital tasks:
This week many of us will be saying farewell to a good friend, as the final episode of Battlestar Galactica airs tonight. If you’ve noticed over the past few weeks, a number of devs have been playing the Battlestar Galactica Board Game for Thursday Night Game Night. As a Galactica fan myself, I checked out Jeff Lundin, Chris Esko, Ryan Salvatore, Jay Woodward, Nate Ellis and Jon Paul Duvall playing the game. In the pic above, these Final Five Six were in denial about their Cylon heritage and trying to accuse our Brotherhood of Steel of being a Centurion model.
Outside of the BSG board game, here’s what everyone else is playing…
Chris Esko, Gameplay Programmer: Dawn of War II, Madworld, King’s Bounty, the Battlestar Galactica boardgame.
Jay Woodward, AI Programmer: Some sort of improvisational Battlestar-finale drinking game (drink when something explodes! Drink when someone dies! Drink six times when a Six dies or Adama says “roll the hard six!” Drink one thousand nine hundred seventy-eight times for the colonial anthem!), the Battlestar board game (of course!), tabletop 4th ed. Dungeons & Dragons, and GTA IV.
Mark Teare, FX Artist: NHL 09, Prince of Persia, V-smile Baby.
Jon Paul Duvall, Designer: BsG boardgame, Dominion, Tribune, D&D 4th Edition; video games: WoW (yeah, damn that black hole, I thought I had escaped…)
After a long hiatus, we’re back. We’re here to talk with Matt Killmon, video producer. His most recent work, the trailer for The Pitt, can be found here.
What’s your job at Bethesda?
I’m the video producer at ZeniMax Media, which means I do all the video work for Bethesda’s internal and external projects, as well as other games published by ZeniMax’s mobile gaming division, Vir2L. Trailers, promo footage, b-roll for news organizations, even in-game video… anything that’s video is my responsibility.
No, this isn’t like that episode of the Brady Bunch where Peter sings “Time to Change.” Designer Erik J. Caponi is talking about “mature games” in a new Kotaku feature “Growing Up Games: When Will Mature, Mature?” Here’s a snippet of him discussing different definitions of what a mature game is:
“The word really has two meanings when we apply it to media. One is ‘not appropriate for children’ and the other is ‘exploring subject matter in a sophisticated fashion,’” Caponi explains. “Ironically, the word mature when applied to games tends to have a very childish connotation.”
Elsewhere, be sure to also read CG Society’s new interview with Fallout 3 Environment Artist Rashad Redic — previously featured here for Inside the Vault. Given that the interview comes post-release, you’ll get a chance to learn a little more about Rashad’s role and what he worked on for Fallout 3. Here’s an excerpt:
In what ways did you take Fallout3′s day/night cycle into consideration, so that your work looked consistently good in all the various light models and times of day?
Rashad: We use these full screen image processes similar to how film is tinted to color grade our environments, and we actually spent a lot of time tweaking the day and night cycles along with these image processes to give us the look we wanted. In our editor you can scrub through the different times of day and see how the color shifts affect the art, and we were very mindful of our color palette and art style throughout that process.
I guess I missed it when I put up Pete’s Gametrailers interview from D.I.C.E., but there’s also a new one with Todd. Watch it above.
More news after the break…