Developer Interview - Phantasie

This is a new feature we wanted to try on Defiance Data, getting some more communication with the development team focusing on background and environment. Something separate from the weekly development Q&As.

Let us know what you think about this format, if you would like to see more, what questions you might want answered and who should we target next?

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(Interview Target) Phantasie is a paladin and a gentleman. As producer he oversees the entire game as well as the developers, helping focus them and providing beer as needed.

(Interviewer) Fuzzy is an Irathient Female who prowls the new frontier in search of jackpot weapons. During her down time she is the Site Manager of Defiance Data responsible for content, news and keeping Etaew on-task.

Could you introduce yourself briefly?

Hi! My name is Rich Barnes, known as “Phantasie” both on the forums and in-game on Defiance on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC! I started at Trion in 2012, and have been on the Defiance project the entire time. I started in the industry in 1998, though I’ve been making games since I was very young. I have a Computer Science degree and thus a background in programming; I was an engineer for 10 years before switching over to production (the first console I worked on was the N64). 

What is your role on Defiance? What does your job entail?

My title is Sr. Producer, though the actual role encompasses quite a few different areas.I've been running the production side of the project since last summer, and prior to that oversaw pretty much everything related to consoles (which I still do). My main areas of focus are: Liaison with Microsoft, Sony and any other 3rd parties, dealing with certification on consoles, live production (deploying patches, maintaining builds of the game), scheduling and task/bug planning, and most things business related. Plus I fight a lot of fires – I think the most important thing a producer can do is empower the development team to do what they do best: focus on developing the game. So I pick up a lot of the typical day to day things that go wrong, and try to fix them to keep the team productive.

What is your typical workday like?

Well, one of the nice things about being a producer is that your day to day is never the same. Every day brings new challenges, so I thought it would be best to just talk about what I did today! [6th February 2015]

The first problem this morning was that our daily build of the game failed overnight. This is bad, because it can gate our development team from working. The problem ended up being a bad SQL command run against one of the games databases. That got fixed, that relevant portion of the build re-run and it was deployed to our internal servers so the team could work again.

Next I had to deal with our Character Copy tool (which we use internally and on PTS to move characters around when testing). That tool got moved to a new server, and it recently came back online. However the tool was crashing. I debugged that with a Network Engineer and we found that the specific port on the Database host machine was being blocked somewhere in our network infrastructure. A request got made to open that port with our security team.

I had a quick follow up phone conversation with a potential new team addition just before lunch. He’s good, and I hope he accepts!

Over lunch I focused on getting “Alcatraz” to PTS – getting it copied to the server and doing some final checks.

Then I had a dentist appointment because I cracked a filling. I hate the dentist.

I got back to work, slack jawed from the dentist, just in time to catch Trick, Scapes and LoCarb on the Trion live stream, and while listening to that  I went over new bugs our QA team found during the past day and assigned them out to the (unfortunate) team members so they can be fixed.

I spent the rest of the day getting Alcatraz finalized on PTS. And it’s now live! Check it out, and read about it here

[preview]479[/preview]

 

How has interactions with players, on forums or PTS impacted development on Defiance?

I feel the interaction has been positive. I hope the forum members have noticed one of the teams goals we set last year:  more developer interaction with the community. The frequency of dev posts has increased significantly over the past year, we are doing Q&A’s, we’ve added interviews like this, amongst many other things.

And that interaction directly impacts the game: Both myself and other devs have some players on Skype and we communicate with them frequently throughout the day (and late at night) – tossing out ideas, getting their opinion on things, etc. Nothing beats this direct feedback.

At the end of the day we are all - players and the developers alike – in this together: We all want Defiance to be successful, and working together is the best way to achieve that!

What is different about Defiance development from other jobs or video games you've worked on?

While I’ve been on networked/online games before, Defiance was the first live “always on” MMO that I’ve worked on. That means the game can never go down, and if it does, I’m typically the first person called. Trion has a Network Operations Center, and some of that NOC team is in Russia. One of the (heavily accented female) team members called my house at 3AM one morning looking for me because of a problem, and my wife picked up. Things got ugly quick; I’m still not sure my wife believed my explanation. That hasn’t happened on previous games.

What's on your desk?

At previous jobs I’ve had all kinds of game related stuff, but at this one not so much; it’s a little sparse. Right now I have:

• Xbox 360 and PS3 development kits
• A bevy of monitors and TV’s.
• A box of hockey cards I broke last week (I’m Canadian). I pulled a Richard Brodeur autograph, which I’m happy with; he was my favorite goalie when I was young.
• A copy of the game signed by Grant Bowler and Jamie Murray (from a recent visit they made to our offices)

• Pictures of my kids. Unlike me, I think they are good looking, so I love to show them off! (The boy might pay dearly for his photo garb once he hits high school, but right now it’s cute.)

• A Twilight Sparkle painting my daughter did
• And a bronze hellbug statue we gave to every team member at launch

If you could introduce one feature to the game, what would it be?

If I had an unlimited budget I’d love to develop, and then provide, a full API for our external partners (like Defiance Data!) that would allow them to parse all information on the game. How great would it be to have websites with searchable databases of everything: weapons, powers, perks, etc in the game, that update in real time as we patch.

And to go along with that: The more we can promote the association (bond?) a person has with their in-game character, the more successful we can be as a game. Rift (though other games have done it as well), had the concept of “Server First” and “World First”. The first time a player acquires an item on the server, a message is broadcasted indicating that. That’s cool. But beyond that, that information is available in the API (mentioned above). Websites took advantage of this – I could go online, look up my character and see all his accomplishments and compare that to others! It really made me feel like my character was part of this huge world (and gave me bragging rights at work). I love stuff like that, and would love to do more of it in Defiance.

What's your favourite weapon or outfit?

I play a Paladin in all games and love Westerns, so this choice is easy: The “Paladin” outfit coupled with the “Old Faithful” headgear, which you can get from the VBI Gunslinger Cache (in the Gunslinger DLC). 

What's the story behind your forum name and avatar?

The forum name and avatar aren’t related.

The forum name, “Phantasie” might be recognized by some old school gamers. I grew up in the 80’s both programming, and playing games, on the Commodore 64. My favorite game was Phantasie (I, II and III) a fantasy (get it) RPG from a (fondly remembered) publisher called SSI. 

The name stuck throughout the years: It’s been my name for every RPG/D&D game, I used it as my handle way back in the BBS days, and Phantasie has appeared in all the MMO’s I’ve played, etc.

The avatar is a picture of the first “Gold Master” disc for Defiance. We got approved by Sony of Europe first, and when 100 of those PS3 disc’s arrived by fed-ex the next day for us to test internally, it was a HUGE feeling of relief and accomplishment for the team – there’s nothing like the first time you play the game on a retail console that you just dedicated years of your life to (It’s my favorite part of development, but alas it doesn’t happen enough; I guess all good things take time)

What accomplishment by your team are you most proud of?

I’m proud of what we did on consoles. A lot of people don’t understand the enormous technical challenges to get an MMO running on consoles, and we are now approaching our second year anniversary! 

You teased some information in your "Defiance: First Ever"-Thread: Do you have any other stories you'd like to share from before the game launched?

I might as well give one launch story that probably took a few years off my life. The push leading up to launch is tough with any game. On Defiance, it was more than tough.

For Comic Con 2012, we wrapped an entire hotel in our (then) studios home town of San Diego with a banner boldly proclaiming our launch date - and that launch date was tied to a TV Series that was not going to change. No pressure.

We needed to have the game complete and approved (at the absolute latest) 30 days in advance of our release date to meet CD replication times and shipping deadlines to get the physical boxes onto store shelves.


We got our final console build approval 31 days out, save for one rather important thing: the Defiance patcher had a bug that prevented you from patching. Patching is kind of important for an online MMO.

We had to make a choice:

1. Fix the bug and resubmit the game to certification, delaying a minimum of 2 weeks. We would miss our ship date and not launch with the TV Series. A disaster.
   
   
2. Release the current build to the CD replicators, meaning we would burn hundreds of thousands of discs with a Patcher that didn’t work (!), and gamble that we could fix it with a day-1 Sony/Microsoft update. But, if we found out that after the discs had been burned that we couldn’t fix that Patcher bug with just a day 1 patch, it would be the disaster of disasters of disasters.

We ended up going with number two, and doing that was the toughest decision I’ve ever had to make in the games industry (the day 1 fix worked, by the way).

 

We saw you handing out beer during one of the previous livestreams, want to tell us more about that tradition?

Sure (though it pains me to hand out beer, when I could be enjoying it myself)

Working in game development means long hours, hard work, and a lot of stress. But to go along with that we do some great things here at Trion to, in part, thank the team for their hard work. Every Friday afternoon our wonderful office coordinator fills up big buckets with ice and copious amounts of beer and wine and we have a mini social. We wouldn’t want those doing the live stream to miss out on beer, so I’ve started bringing them one.

We do some other fun things too!

Wednesdays are bagel days – we have bagels, muffins, croissants and the most amazing cream cheeses flavors catered for the office.

Our kitchen is stocked with all kinds of snacks, chips, granola bars, fruit, etc. We have cereal, oatmeal, and such for those wanting a quick breakfast. We have fridges with pretty much every soda available, plus the usual array of coffees and teas, etc. It’s an easy way to gain weight.

And recently we introduced Dog Days – we are allowed to bring our pet into work with us. Here are a couple from “Defiance Dog Days” that were prowling the office just now.

Speaking of livestreams, will we ever see you on one again?

Yup! I keep meaning to come on, but then something happens and there’s a different problem to solve.