Bethesda Game Studios Interview: Brett Douville

Bethesda Softworks programmer Brett Douville is the latest employee to be spotlighted in another one of the company’s in-house interviews over at the Beth Blog. We don’t learn much about his role on Skyrim, but there’s plenty of background information to be had:

What other games have you worked on?

I began my professional career at LucasArts on Star Wars: Starfighter, where I wrote all the game logic from the flight model to the artificial intelligence, mission logic, and UI binding code for the front-end. I worked closely with the designers to get them everything they needed to build the fun. It was immensely gratifying to see things moving about on the screen and point and say, (Yeah, I made that move.)

After the original Starfighter I stuck around to act as lead programmer on its sequel, Jedi Starfighter, which was a big personal step in a lot of ways. It was a short project with a hard deadline, but that made for excellent lessons on the value of working within constraints of any kind, and since both of those titles I’ve been a firm believer in the dictum that constraints inspire creativity.

I worked on an unreleased title and then finished up my career at LucasArts as lead programmer on Star Wars: Republic Commando. It has been really interesting to see the fan love for that game continue over the years, most recently re-sparked by its release on Steam.

After LucasArts, I moved to Maryland and spent about a year with Day 1 Studios, in early development on what would eventually be released as Fracture. After that, I worked a couple of years as a consultant, mostly working on Star Trek Online before arriving here at Bethesda to help in the final push for Fallout 3. It has been a wild ride since I left the West Coast, but I think I’ve found my home for a while.