Dev Diary #5 – The Making of the Making of Quake Wars: Enemy Territory

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GameSpy has posted the fifth edition to the Enemy Territory: Quake Wars development diary. In this part, Jared ‘jRAD’ Hefty, one of the programmers over at Splash Damage gives us insight in to how they go about assembling a massive game like ET:QW, what they use to do it, and why they go about it the way they do.

I'm Jared 'jRAD' Hefty, one of the programmers at Splash Damage working on id Software's Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (ETQW); specifically, the tools used to process, crunch, optimize, assemble or otherwise 'mess with' all of the pieces of data that make up the game. I want to give you an insight into how we go about assembling a massive game like ETQW, what we use to do it, and why we go about it the way we do.

The Job for the Tools for the Job

What is a tools programmer? I think of myself as Splash Damage's Enabler (TM). I'm here to save artists, game designers and level designers (the guys who pull everything together into a playable game) from pulling their hair out doing mundane, repetitive tasks. I'm here to notice patterns in tasks and figure out ways to streamline them before they become a roadblock or a time sink.

I watch my co-workers use the programs that I've produced in ways I'd never expected. "Huh, cool," I say under my breath as I watch a level designer zip around one of the game worlds, tweaking, nudging, adjusting with practiced ease. The level designers at Splash Damage spend massive chunks of their time in tools that I've been working on for years. Read more...

Read the entire new dev diary here.