It's been a long time since I've done one of these fellas, but GarageGothic encouraged me to make a new entry in the Twelve Interviews series. He even suggested the topic and interviewee! So GG, this one goes out to you.
Pieter Simoons (a.k.a. "Radiant") is the proprietor of Crystal Shard Games (http://crystalshard.net/). In the past two years he has released several innovative and fun adventure games such as META (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=detail&id=653) and Warthogs (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=detail&id=817). More recently, he accomplished the thing that hundreds of doe-eyed amateur adventure gamers attempt and fail to do: He released a huge, epic, and high quality adventure game. During the creation of A Tale of Two Kingdoms (http://crystalshard.net/atotk.php), Pieter led a team of dozens of people on a quest that took over two years to complete. This installment of Twelve Interviews focuses on the difficult task of leading a team through the development of an amateur adventure game.
You can read the interview on my blog (http://xiigames.com/2007/10/03/twelve-interviews-4-pieter-simoons/), and if you have any questions for Radiant, I'm sure he'd be happy to answer them right here in this thread. Leave a comment here or there if you enjoy these things!
CLICK HERE TO READ THE INTERVIEW (http://xiigames.com/2007/10/03/twelve-interviews-4-pieter-simoons/)
PREVIOUS INTERVIEWS HERE (http://xiigames.com/category/twelve-interviews/)
Nice interview. Don't have much more to say:)
Thank you, Vince!
Some good advice there in the interview, I wonder how many people actually pay attention, though? That's one of the reasons why I've only done one interview, since it seems like people just want to hear your voice but not what you're actually saying. Maybe I'm wrong?
Frankly I don't know, but I figure the advice doesn't hurt. Besides, I'm still around in these forums (including the technical one) if people have more specific questions. As are, of course, a lot of other people.
Are these kind of like a new version of the podcasts? I only recently discovered those and was disappointed when I learned they weren't doing any more. Who else are you planning to interview?
Yeah, I think people usually think of interviews as being for informative purposes (TV or print news) or publicity purposes (celebrity interviews), but with these interviews, at least from the second one on, I've tried to focus on one specific area of game development and explore some areas that might provide good advice or at least inspiration to aspiring developers like us. I hope that each one of these can help out someone who might be struggling with the topic on their own project.
Hopefully someone can get some insight from this one into what it takes to lead a large team on in the creation of an epic game and either be encouraged to downscale their plans to something more realistic, or find some good advice that can help them accomplish their lofty goals.
Of course if you just enjoy reading it, that's fine too!
Thanks again Radiant, I appreciate you taking the time to A my Qs.
And SilverTrumpet, I don't have any plans! I just kind of do them when I feel like it or when inspiration comes.
Thanks for the read. I was involved in a team project a couple of years ago and the team lead certainly could have benefitted from your advice. I particularly like your suggestion to section off the project into reasonably sized bits. That's a great way to keep the person assigned the job from losing motivation or getting discouraged. I can testify to that. You see, I was assigned a task that was too big and I, err, lost motivation and got discouraged :)