Nickname: Rulke, from a fiction novel that I really like by an Australian author; Ian Irvine.

Irrational Title: Lead level builder, I think. *laughs* I was lead artist on Freedom Force. They needed someone kind of, you know, someone with a good cross between an artistic eye and technical eye to do level building so they invented the Lead Level building position.

Previous Games: Freedom Force and I worked at a company called BII in Sydney for a few years and they did interactive movies.

Hey Bob... I can see your house from up here

Qualifications: Bachelor of Industrial Design in Canberra. My first job out of uni was working for a company called Video Bytes in Melbourne they sold 3D Studio Max and I was the demo artist. So I got muck around in Max a lot and other stuff. That and playing quake a lot in a little café near where I lived, from that I decided I wanted to get into games from there.

The hardest thing to overcome in development: I don't know, the thing I find the most frustrating is working with technology that is not finished. Back in the days when you'd just be making mods and mucking around with games that had already been released it was all like finished, so everything you could do was there. It's quite different when you're working in the industry because it's always a moving platform.

First Gaming system: I don't know, Nintendo gaming watch, Donkey Kong maybe.

Earliest Gaming memories: Playing pong at my grand fathers place.

Favourite Game: Well I played Quake and Team Fortress a lot.

Games Currently Playing: Just the standard Battlefield and we're still playing DOD. We like it because its quite fast paced, free and we also got a bunch of Half-life licenses from Sierra. Everyone can agree on it whereas in the office not everyone likes Unreal and not everyone likes Battlefield. There are about 5 or 6 of us that stay back after work and play Battlefield all night long. Well we started playing DC [Desert Combat] but then that kinda died I guess after Kev left. Kevin and Anthony were the big push behind that.

Home gaming rig: I can't remember what processor I got in it at the moment. I remember I bought a Gf4 Ti especially for this project because I take work home every now and then and that was what I needed to get the levels running. Nothing fancy though, just half a gig of ram and a 1.8Ghz processor.

Console or PC?: PC definitely.

Singleplayer or multiplayer?: Multiplayer definitely and I'm really keen on coop actually. Is there anything you've played recently which has had really good coop. Well not actually in first person shooter but I've got a bunch of friends that I LAN with sometimes and they don't like first person shooters. So we've been playing a few RTS's. Coop against AI we find a lot more fun than fighting each other. We play a lot of Age of Mythology:

How do you find the unreal mapping tool? Its ok, its very different to Half-life. It's pretty good, it took us a while to work out what buttons to touch and what to do to stop it crashing. Once you work that out its pretty good, you can get what you need pretty quickly, it should be quite easy to map with.

How has it suited the large outdoor environments? Have you made any modifications to it? There are a few things that we've had to do and a few things that we plan to do still. We want to get the terrain tiling so you can see it go off into the distance.

Is there one map in any game that really stands out from others and why?
Nothing really stands out, but I do think the guys at Boston who did system shock2, they really did a good job making it with a really clean Sci-fi look rather than the rusty grimy metal quake look, I think that was quite cool. I can't think of anything at the moment. If you want to talk about what art I really like the look of, I think Warcraft III looks awesome and I'm really looking forward to World of Warcraft, although, I'm not sure about the massive multiplayer, not sure how that's going to work. I was really disappointed with Planetside.

Really, in what way, gameplay or aesthetic?
Both.

I played through it quite a bit and only lasted about a month.
We got into the beta program and you know we faced a lot of problems when we started making Tribes [Vengeance], did you notice that their environments are just really really big and really big empty bases? Well we face those same problems all the time and so there's this constant push to push the game down a bit. I'm a real fan of the sort of the Half-lifes and Quakes where you can tell by looking at someone on the screen who they are rather than having to read a word and it was something I didn't really like about Tribes2 so much. So I have really been putting pressure on Ed [Orman] and Michael [Johnston] to push the game in as much as possible. It can still be fast and still have a lot of speed in the game but be fighting at a range where you can recognise who you are playing against.

So what you're trying for are levels where a lot more action is happening around you?
Yes for sure, it's a lot more personal. Have you guys noticed that yourself?

Interactive levels, one of the things with Tribes was that there was quite a bit of interactivity in terms of lifts and stuff I mean even though they were pretty useless in the end, will there be any features like that? Like any sliding doors … will any map have any sort of interactivity?
This will probably need to go through Ed [Orman]. Maybe put a star next to it to talk to him about it, as far as I know the full scripting system is still working in multiplayer, it's still being replicated.

At this point in time are you working on single or multiplayer?
I'm primarily working on singleplayer. The singleplayer is very time intensive, but they're taking one of my multiplayer maps over for a demo, so I may need to do some more work on that and try to polish it up.

Can you talk about the singleplayer? There's talk about in singleplayer how in Tribes you can jet and what not, how are you influencing where players are going to go via the map design?
The maps are pretty linear, well the indoor parts of the map. The outdoor maps we generally try to keep open. Just to boil it down to the simplest thing, if the objective is to get to three keys and then go somewhere, you can go get those three keys in any order. I guess that's stuff been dealt with especially open terrain like with MechWarrior, but there's still the problem where if you need a player to complete a specific task so if they can jump anywhere on the map then they can jump ahead. Well there are certain tricks, but we're not really at that stage because really the AI is only coming online now so the maps are just becoming playable. There are certainly things you have to do in the scripting system to make sure a player can't break a mission. Like if you have to get three keys then go to the main base, you have to make sure that if they go to the main base first they can't complete the mission. You just got to make sure the mission will work in a variety of orders.

What's the average development time? Can you put a time on a level? Is there a process?
Basically you can do this, you can say we're going to ship 18 missions I think with 4 designers and we've been working 2 years and then we're going to have 15 multiplayer maps so you can do some simple math. We're trying to divide the time up 50/50 between single and multiplayer.

When you're doing multiplayer maps do you just churn out as many as you can? Or do you go in with rough ideas then test and continue building the ones you like?
We've had these levels where Sierra has been expecting to see multiplayer maps and we've been delivering these maps that play but we've only had CTF for a long time so most of the maps are CTF. Mike has been doing some really hard work writing a bunch of new game modes that we're all going to start playing so we can do new maps. Most of the guys on the design team are multiplayer guys rather than singleplayer. They're always trying to get off their singleplayer levels so they can go back to multi.

Cool. Thanks for your time Jay.