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Brian Reynolds Interview
jyak writes "Over at the Daily Radar, there is an interview with the game legend, Brian Reynolds, about his new company, Big Huge Games. Apparently, Firaxis is now hiring, if anyone is interested."
He hangs out with Sid Meier. That gives him near-heroic status in my book.
there's no doubt that network play adds something to real time strategy games. Attempts to make better strategy engines have been very successful but nothing beats a human opponnent. I thought at one point that a great addition to Internet play would be to open the archetecture. Standardize your unit interface and allow anyone to create units (graphics + code) as well as maps. With strict rules as to what defines strength of the unit, speed, etc, one could come up with a cost per unit in resources that doesn't give any one unit an advantage (eg, lots of little foot solders or one really big tank cost the same). Then one day I had a really strange idea: What if all those "credits" you were spending were actual cash? It would be very much like gambling (except this is a game of skill.. not exactly gambling by las vegas standards). One could envision a scenario where two countries wish to go to war but neither country has an army.. so rather than wreck their economy by recruiting their peasant farmers, they hire mercenaries and agree to pay them on a per-kill-basis. So you buy a unit for (say) $2 and when it is killed, you opponent gets $1.50 (depreciation you know), the designer of the unit gets $0.10 and the rest goes to the game developer (or the server). You could have games ranging from free games to super expensive games where the players are fighting with weapons of mass destruction.
Another idea was that individual players should be able to take over one unit that is a "leutenant". That unit can have other units assigned to it by the commander. The leutenant is paid by the commander to mobilize some of his/her units against the enemy. This way people could participate in expensive games and learn the ropes, whilst getting paid for it, before they enter the paid games themselves.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Eeek, for a minute I thought you meant the Big Huge Games page! I've made my living programming computer games for 9 years now and don't have a C.S. degree (mine are in History and Philosophy). It's really more a matter of "do you have what it takes" than do you have this or that degree, and there is more than one way to spot a good interview candidate. Brian