Star Trek Online at Ten Ton Hammer

Jeff – Alright, well thank you for that Ben, but the real news of today is Star Trek Online and, again, we have with us Executive Producer Craig Zinkievich who, before he came on board with Star Trek Online was a serious mainstay of former Cryptic properties City of Heroes and City of Villains.

Craig, can you talk a little bit about your past? I know you have a very technical background, both with the early parts and then going on to produce City of Heroes and City of Villains and getting them out on time and on budget.

Craig – *laughs* On time and on budget – isn’t that the dream for everybody?

Jeff – That’s awesome, it’s there in your wiki article…

Craig – Isn’t that nice…

*laughter*

No, I came onto Cryptic Studios about six years ago. I think I was like employee 13 for City of… and pretty much sat in a room with Michael Lewis and Jack Emmert and kind of redesigned CoH from scratch. I was the Technical Designer on the project, which really meant that I got to help software pretty much design all of their systems – Make sure that the systems were there, they were extensible, they let us do what design really wanted to do in the game and could expand in the future in an MMO setting. You know, you always have to add stuff, you always have to add new features, new content.

And so, ended up working really closely, making sure the design was on target and software was on target, and started working with art to make sure that they were scheduled and built stuff right so it would fit in the systems correctly. And then all of the sudden we realized that, hey, guess what? That’s what producers do!

*laughter*

So I ended up getting the title, and ended up producing CoH and CoV, and since then I’ve been doing Director of Production level work – did some work on Champions and stuff like that. But it’s cool to be E.P. on Star Trek where I really get to get back down and really touch game again. It’s a whole lot of fun; it’s really what I love.

Jeff – Outstanding. I guess, speaking of redesign, my earliest memory of Star Trek Online was when it was with that ‘other company’ at GDC two years ago. Just seeing the kinds of stuff they were able to do with environment design – I mean, they were sitting in a room designing planets, and it reminded me of that scene in Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Can you talk a little bit about what you were able to use from them, and where you’ve kind of expanded upon what they’d done?

Craig – Yea. So we got the license about a year ago, and at Cryptic Studios (I don’t want to get too boring) but we have a massive amount of tech. That’s really one of our strongest points is we have really proven, really mature tech pipeline back-end; the engines, the database, the graphics engine, the editors – everything within in the game for CoH, CoV, Champions…

Jeff – The editors are phenomenal. *laughs*

Craig – Thanks. Yea, I know, people get really, really spoiled being here…

And so, when we got the license we didn’t really take anything. But they had a huge amount of beautiful, beautiful concept art, and they had done a whole lot of work on that side. But on the tech side, to toot our own horn, our tech is far more advanced, the team here is far more familiar with this. We just weren’t gonna go to somebody else’s engine at that point in time – our engine rocks.

And really, anybody who’s listening, you guys, if someone said “here you go, here’s the Star Trek license, go make Star Trek Online”, are you gonna look at anybody else’s design? No! We all like sat in a room, we were like “what do we want to make about this game? It wasn’t just, you know, picking up somebody else’s design and implementing to it. I mean, it’s a chance of a lifetime basically.