Question: I saw your name so I decided to a little of a research and this old game from back of 2001 kept popping up - “Pool of Radiance 2”. Can you explain more what went into the process of that game?
Mark: Pool of Radiance 2 was meant to be a sequel to Pool of Radiance 1 which came out about 10 years before that. I don’t know how many people are familiar with what they used to call the Gold Box games? This was built on top – well, as an extension of that. We actually made the game we wanted to make, it was an absolute blast. TSR, who was owned by wizards of the coast - the guys that make the magic cards at the time - were switching from second edition rules to third edition rules while we were doing this development. People who know D & D know what that means. In the third edition rules they added a whole bunch of stuff and simplified some stuff and made some things a little more complicated.
But anyways it was really fun because we had a history with SSI who published all of the old Gold Box games and they hooked us up with the Wizards of The Coast guys. Our first goal was to demonstrate to Wizards of the Coast that we knew the D & D property so we wrote up a game design with the story line and we chose a place called Mythgenor which is in the middle of forgotten realms which is a space in the D & D world. We demonstrated that we could do our research and figure out a storyline that would fit into their world. We went back and forth with them on stuff and eventually made a lot of trips up to Seattle where they were at the time and we talked to the guys and eventually convinced them that we did know what we were talking about – that we were D & D guys. After we got over that first hump then it was gravy. We’d have a blast and go out drinking with these guys and they’d send us home with like three cases of magic cards. That’s how I actually started playing that game. Tons of free cards - let’s start playing!
So it was a really good relationship but it was based on our history having done three or four D & D games in the early 80s. We did the original Neverwinter Nights and we did a game called strong hold which was actually a really good game that got very little publicity. Anyways, so we did a bunch of D & D games with SSI before so they knew about us and we knew all those guys so it helped us get on the inside track for the sequel.
Question: Do you guys have any need for database because that’s really what my specialty is? Database modeling, building databases, querying etc?
Mark: Not very much. We have an IT group but the number of openings in our IT group is so small that positions never come up. But the game industry has a whole bunch of IT openings – that would be IT, not games right? We do some stuff in our tools group that sits on top of a SQL server, but again you’d have to be a pretty good coder to get into the tools group to work on that stuff. So if you have C++ skills that’s a possibility. We do occasionally look for tools coders or even interns for our tools group. So that’s a possibility, it’s not great, but it’s a possibility.
Question: When applying, do they have to do the same test as the game programmers?
Mark: You would have to know C++ and you really should know something about 3D stuff. A lot of the tools work actually just supports the game engine and does a lot of preprocessing of the assets. You might have to take a 3D model out of 3D Studio Max and export it into a format we need. You need to understand how it works and how it’s going to look when it gets inside the hardware. There is a lot of stuff that goes underneath the hood that the tools actually have to accomplish, so it requires some of that understanding.
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