by Karen Hertzberg on Dec 05, 2007
Your backstage pass has
arrived!
To look behind the scenes is every person's dream. You hear about
"backstage passes" and "behind the scenes" documentaries, and people
are always willing to pay hundreds of dollars more for these perks. The
editorial staff at Ten Ton Hammer feels exactly the same way, so we
devised a set of developer questionnaires that we've been methodically
sending out to the various MMO teams to see how their past has
influenced their present experiences. In this week's developer profile,
we sat down with Lineage 2's producer, Tim Tan, to see what made him
into the leading MMO developer that he is today!
Tim: My background is actually in electrical
engineering with a minor
in computer science. That sort of schooling helps, but when I got my
degree I had no idea that I was going to be doing gaming in the future.
However, the degree did give me the sort of problem solving skills
necessary to figure out ways to get around common problems. It
especially helped in the quality assurance field because you're looking
for defects and issues. You really have to know how to reproduce the
steps to get to the problem and possibly fix it.