Since many members of the original StarCraft/Brood War Development team has left to pursue other careers, I thought it would be deemed appropriate to have a thread with all confirmed job positions for current employee's responsible for the in's and out's of the game's overall production
However, after searching the internet I was unable to find a complete compendium of positions, and searched through threads and google for the people responsible. So far I have
Officers -------- Blizzard President & Co-Founder - Mike Morhaime - Blizzard Vice-President & Co-Founder - Frank Pearce - Chief Operating Officer - Paul Sims - Vice President of Creative Development - Chris Metzen Role on SC:BW: lead design, story, script, voice production, direction and casting, scenario design, manual design and layout, manual artwork, "Strike Team" - Director of Communications & Community, Europe - Julia Gastaldi
He has worked in the video game industry since 1995 at a variety of companies, including Activision, Electronic Arts, and Simon & Schuster Interactive. He has experience in developing real-time strategy games, most notably as Lead Designer for Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 and Command & Conquer: Generals, and as Game Design Director for The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth series.
Previously he was the lead designer of World of Warcraft. In 2006, he was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Held the position of Quality Assurance Manager during Brood War development.
Lead Writer - Andy Chambers *Seen here congratulating the winner of 40k at KublaCon
Andy Chambers is an author and game designer, best known for his work for Games Workshop. He worked extensively on various Warhammer 40,000 rulebooks and sourcebooks, and also authored at least one fiction novel set in the same universe. [1]
In 2003 Chambers joined Mongoose Publishing as the lead designer of the company's development team for the Starship Troopers tabletop miniatures game.[2]
Chambers is currently the Creative Director of Blizzard Entertainment, working on Starcraft II. [3]
Working with Blizzard from the beginning, he started out as an art director for Lost Vikings 2 in 1994 while proving his talent and working on every major blizzard project from Diablo to Lost Vikings to currently StarCraft 2.
Map Editor Designer - Brett Wood
Balance Designer - David Kim
A little more information about David Kim for you folks:
David Kim is korean, born in korea, and moved here to go to school. He was a competitive SC player back in the day, playing with CuteBoy[gm] as well as ZeuS. His favourite sport to watch on TV is Starcraft. He switched to Warcraft3 when war3 came out, but SC was still his favourite RTS (and is to this day).
I worked with Dayvie for over a year. Out of everyone i've had the pleasure of working with in the Game Industry, i feel he is the most qualified to handle SC2 balance. (other than me of course. lol)
I'm confident he'll do a great job.
edit - oh right, i think he also placed in the top 8 for Korea WCG qualifications in 2000. i think.
That's a good question, I'm not sure but possibly. This thread will be updated with links and more info as time progresses, I just wanted to get the ball rolling and start gathering information! =)
This is a good idea I think it would also be cool to have some kind of chart that shows which members that *did* work on the original SC, are on the current team.
Thanks for the kind words AcedAgent! Moby games is an excellent resource! Ya there's no official list of employees that I have seen on any one website and a lot of the information is scattered around which makes it difficult.
Haha what a funny picture of him, I'll be sure to add that in
Chris Metzen: Vice President of Creative Development
Role on SC:BW: lead design, story, script, voice production, direction and casting, scenario design, manual design and layout, manual artwork, "Strike Team"
I don't know if these work on starcraft 2 but they worked on the original sc and basicly on all blizzard titles and from what i know last they are still at blizzard, so yeah here it goes: Shahram Dabiri Bob Fitch - lead programmer Matt Samia - cinematics and director of blizzard film Joey Ray Hall - Cinematic Technical Artist/Video Engineer
Metzen's pictures in SC handbook (I know everyone over D+ must have read it) were great. Good thing hes working on 2nd starcraft. Maybe in competitive 1v1 it doesn't matter, but guy's art made single player world and SC background a lot more interesting and deeper.
Good question. I think Blizzard's definition is different from other companies because they don't seem to have a timeline/release date for any of their games in production and the lead producer usually makes every team meets their deadlines for release.
Offtopic, but I like LVL70ETC, so I couldn't resist to post another one of their songs. The soundquality is alot better here, the clip is pretty lame, and the lyrics are funny!
I love to one-shot mages I live to two-shot priests When I see ya I'll PvP ya Spanking n00bs, that's my favorite cheese
Rogues - Do it in the darkness Rogues - Do it where the sun don't shine Rogues - And with a little drop of poison
Rogues do it from behind.... Gonna creep inside your backdoor
I wear Bloodfang leather Bonescythe and Netherblade Chop-chop the level-7 warlock Gonna take him out with Perdition's Blade
Rogues - Do it in the darkness Rogues - Do it where the sun don't shine Rogues - And with a little drop of poison
Rogues do it from behind
Sinister Strike, Eviscerate, Cheap Shot, Backstab Slice and Dice, Ambush, Rupture, Blind Sinister Strike, Eviscerate, Cheap Shot, Backstab Gank you Thank you Now I outrank you! With dagger, mace, and sword We are Alliance or the mighty Horde! Not your everyday type prankster Call me and ICE-T, Original Ganksta
You'll never hear me coming When I creep across the floor With deadly force You're dead, of course Now I'm gonna camp your corpse
Rogues - Do it in the darkness Rogues - Do it where the sun don't shine Rogues - And with a little drop of poison
Lead producer is responcible for seting tasks on the developers, coming up with promotion campaigns, talking to all people making they have what to work and so on...
Where I had work short period as game programmer (6 months for Nintendo DS), lead producer was responsible providing projects to our team (and getting new ones with better funding) while controlling lead designers. For programmers work was pretty standard, if you don't know what to do next (as gameplay wise, not code side) you can always ask designers and they have answer shortly :D. And then we just abused artist to give us art. If we didn't have clue what to do next, we just play some games to get some ideas (researching ideas), of course keeping up deadlines.
Deadline days were the worst and nice, normally I would be first programmer of our team to arrive at work (10:00 AM and get all problems to solve aka "why this doesn't work") but deadline days I would arrive little later maybe 10:45 to 11:00 and leave maybe 02:00 to 04:00 depending if QA approves our latest milestone.
Maybe little off topic but yeh one artist guy of my team had 70+ hours weeks 3-6 times in row (first there and last to leave lol) and no extra money paid (monthly salary) for going over 40 hours.
Guys don't choose game industry. Especially season times are nightmares. Christmas is chaotic time at work, though after that its painfully boring 2 months waiting for new tasks but summer gets hurry again. Fricking game seasons...
Since I think a lot of people missed this the first time it was posted, some info on David Kim:
On January 15 2008 06:23 Mora wrote: A little more information about David Kim for you folks:
David Kim is korean, born in korea, and moved here to go to school. He was a competitive SC player back in the day, playing with CuteBoy[gm] as well as ZeuS. His favourite sport to watch on TV is Starcraft. He switched to Warcraft3 when war3 came out, but SC was still his favourite RTS (and is to this day).
I worked with Dayvie for over a year. Out of everyone i've had the pleasure of working with in the Game Industry, i feel he is the most qualified to handle SC2 balance. (other than me of course. lol)
I'm confident he'll do a great job.
edit - oh right, i think he also placed in the top 8 for Korea WCG qualifications in 2000. i think.
On February 22 2008 22:58 BluzMan wrote: Just to add 2 cents since there's a talk about Dawn of War balance.
This game was dominated by Eldar from it's start to the release of two expansion. Right now, with ridiculous 7 races (and 2 more to come with the THIRD expansion pack) balance isn't really an issue anymore, but back then when it was only four of them, it was Eldar > SM ~ CSM > Ork and an alternate balance pattern of CSM Defiler tech > SM & Eldar & Ork. I've kinda played DoW ladder and I must say the balance issues with it were SO evident that I had no idea why nobody was doing anything. Eldar had close to 60% global winrate on ladder, Orks had < 45%. Basically, there was a thread about Warp Spider unit spawned every single day on the strat forums and another one about Defilers with some minor rants on Word of the Emperor/plasmarines since people at least had ideas of how to counter it. Seriously, balance in DoW was abysmal.
So, funnily enough, I can't say that "Dawn of War balance team leader" is a good resume point, their balance team had quite a bad reputation. Nevertheless, it might have to do something with the game's core mechanics, being close to impossible to balance "the right way", so that guy might do better at Blizzard. Otherwise, dunno, I can't probably be considered a StarCraft expert, but I'm one of those few who do understand something about the game and are content with MBS at the same time.
I seriously think that there are much more time-consuming tasks at SC than clicking buildings (it seriously takes like 1-2 seconds to click them all and order units), and warpgates simply won't work without MBS. Autoclone, at the same time, is a terrible feature, and if not limited to workers, it WILL ruin the game.
Someone needs to take a test and analyze a pro FPVOD to see how much time is being devoted to different tasks. I won't be surprised if actual production takes a little time and most of it is invested into micro, rebinding (seriously, I was amazed when I saw a Reach's FPVOD at how much time he spends to proprely assemble his control groups) and constructing buildings.
For your information, David Kim only worked on the last game, Dark Crusade, which you say is pretty balanced :-)
i would like to further add that none of the balancers who worked on DoW or WA worked on DC. DC had newly recruited talent in Stefan Haines (#1 on WA ladder), the Felhand (2 or 3 year WCG finalist), and 4 months later, a recruited David Kim. David Kim had no prior experience with DoW whatsoever, and within two months became the best Necron player on the team.
you must also understand that the balance process is extremely difficult. It's not just a matter of playing the game and figuring out what's imbalanced, putting in changes, and having a finished/polished game. It takes extensive testing, particularly in stages of pre-release where gigantic bugs hinder the testing. Invincible unit bugs, game crashing after 6 minute bugs, the UI disappearing for a half-day bugs, all these influence efficiency we can balance. The general reaction to DC balance was phenomonally good - much better than any other RTS relic has put out. It is an extreme testament to the balance team for achieving such balance, especially considering the low manpower and challenging work conditions.
I would like to put forward again: David Kim is an extremely apt, dedicated individual who loves the e-sport that is Starcraft. I believe that SC2 is in good hands (as far as balance is concerned, as i have not worked with any of the other developers).
EPT![[image loading]](http://img28.picoodle.com/img/img28/4/5/19/f_10132438660m_02f111d.jpg)
