I read over at Planet Baldur’s Gate [archive.org backup] that Khabal Gaming has interviewed [archive.org backup] Danien Chee, programmer for Black Isle Studios. Here’s what he had to say about working at BIS:
What do you do in Black Isle? What’s it like working there?
Working at Black Isle is like no other experience I’ve ever had. A typical programmer day goes like this. I come in just a little late and sneak in through the door furthest away from Feargus Urquharts’ (our division president) office. Start email, get the latest source code and start a compile. Off to get my daily chrysanthemum tea fix (Yeo’s has gone international! Whoopee!) and some cookies or bread for a quick breakfast. If the compile is not ready when I’m finished, up comes Internet Explorer and off I go scouring the net for news about the world, check out what kind of games fans want Black Isle to make, and garner info about other games. When the compile is finally done, I either start implementing new features from designers Chris Avellone (Planescape: Torment), Josh Sawyer, John Deily, Steve Bokkes (Icewind Dale) and all the other designers, or fix outstanding bugs.
As the original source is on longer available, we’ve replicated the interview here for posterity’s sake [images missing]:
Want To Make Games?…Stock Up On Cookies!
From an orchard farm in Bukit Timah to the offices of Black Isle half a world away… Find out how programmer Danien Chee found his dream career in game development.
“I luv snowboarding!” (Danien is on the extreme left)
Tell us a little about yourself. (ie. a short personal history, some of your likes, dislikes, hobbies, interests.. AND.. Are you single?)
I’m your typical average guy but my name’s not Joe. I grew up on my grandfather’s orchid farm in Bukit Timah, or rather in the forest behind the house since I spent a lot of time there.
Anyway, when I saw my first PC game, Burger Time, on my cousin’s IBM PC XT, I was so amazed at the EGA graphics that I begged my dad for one. Since we weren’t that well off, and these things cost like $5000 back then, he got an Apple ][e compatible instead, a Cubic 99 by Creative Technology and thus began my hacking days with my trusty 300 bps modem.
Bulletin Board Services (BBSes) ruled the day before the Internet came along and to be L337 (“elite” in gaming lingo), you had to know how to write code, so I picked up Apple Basic programming.
Eventually, the PC XT that I wanted came, and I picked up a book on 8086 Assembly Language Programming by Prentice Hall Publishing, my first serious programming book. After reading it, I felt like I could do anything with a computer. Eventually, I ended up supporting my addiction with software and books earned as payment for various freelance jobs that I took up.
Later I got into Ngee Ann Polytechnic (NP) because junior college seemed too academic and I preferred a more technically based course. I originally wanted to get into Computer Studies at NP but at the time, it was only open to A Level students so I opted for Electronics Engineering instead and it turned out to be a rather fun course.
After graduating from Ngee Ann, I was dragged screaming and kicking into the army where I later got lucky and was offered a database programming position in the Ministry of Defense (MINDEF). While I was in there, I attended Informatics and got my Advanced Diploma in Computer Studies. When they finally released me, they told me to go do something useful for society now that I am a man and a true citizen. So I took their advice, went on vacation and did nothing.
Months later, I applied to a few multimedia companies but none of them really appealed to me so I ended up working for a local database applications company until something better came along. After about a year or so, my boss offered to start a partnership franchise with me but I declined since I didn’t know how to run a business. It was tempting to be my own boss but it didn’t feel like the right path for me to venture down at that time. I had so much more to learn and didn’t think I could do a good job and it wouldn’t be fair to the customers and the employees if I got shutdown after 2 weeks.
I eventually got sick with the whole database thing and decided to take the biggest step of my life: get a Bachelor’s in Computer Science and learn as much as I could from the experts in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. Luckily, my parents supported my decision and after borrowing a ton of cash from my mom, I enrolled in the University of San Francisco (USF) since UC Berkeley had met their minority quota for that year.
Luckily, I had enough of an engineering background to transfer most of my requirements to my CS course so I ended up doing mostly general education curriculum (GEC) courses like philosophy, politics, religion, literature, etc… Looking back, I think I enjoyed my GEC classes quite a bit, especially the discussions with the professors. But the thing I loved best was being able to write again since I like literature. I almost did a double major in English Literature, but the Asian Economic Crisis soon put a stop to that. School ended up costing almost 4 times what was budgeted so I’m pretty much in debt for the rest of my life.
After graduation, I went to work for Interplay, and that’s where I’m at now.
Likes:
Learning stuff. Not so much “knowing” stuff because I sometimes forget things, but just the process of learning.
Dislikes:
Forgetting stuff and not knowing stuff.
Hates:
Spam (the email kind, coz the meat kind is kind of tasty) and spammers!
Hobbies:
Snowboarding – riding on fresh powder that has fallen through the night and being the first one on the slopes – sweet! Programming; some 3D graphics modeling; playing computer games, mostly role playing games and car racing, some adventure, action, simulation, and strategy; soccer; table tennis; reading sci-fi and fantasy books, the occasional non-computer and non-fiction book; writing (and ranting, as you can tell by now); playing the guitar (80’s music is still the best!); hanging out with friends; watching movies; hoping to go rock climbing and learn oil painting; trying desperately to keep my desert plant alive in a little flower pot.
Marital Status:
On vacation.
Arriving at the snowy slopes
What were you doing before you joined Black Isle? Did you have any prior working experience in the gaming, computer or multimedia industry?
I’ve worked as a database and field engineer in Singapore doing mainly human resource management programs using DBase, Clipper, and FoxPro. Did numerous freelance programming jobs as well.
I made my first game at 13, an ASCII skiing/racing game on the Apple ][e. The path was designated between two ‘I’s and the skier was an ‘H’ representing the skis. The left and right arrow keys allows you to move the skier away from obstacles such as rocks ‘O’s, and bushes ‘*’s. I tried selling the game in a zip-lock bag at game stores in Singapore, but no one bought it.
For my degree’s final year team project, I convinced my professor to let me do an AI system for a role playing game to demonstrate its potential instead of the typical company sponsored business application. Since no one else wanted to do it, I became a team of one, which was both good and bad for all the obvious reasons. The project was way too ambitious and only the AI part was finished but nevertheless, it got me the grades and resume mantle-piece I wanted. Someday, I might go back and finish it. Right. Sure. Ok, maybe.
I tried to start a game development project with a couple of friends before joining Interplay, but that didn’t go anywhere.
What do you do in Black Isle? What’s it like working there?
I work as a programmer in Black Isle doing general programming work. My duties include coding the various systems that support the game mechanics and fixing bugs. However, the most important aspect of my job is providing chocolate chip cookies for the division so that everyone can maintain a pre-approved sugar level that’s sufficiently high to keep everyone working. I also provide bad jokes and Asian-based entertainment to the team. In addition, I’m head of the Canasian (Canadians & Asians) Coalition, which is secretly plotting to take over Black Isle. The cookies contain mind-controlling drugs, which we plan to activate, when we are ready to take-over.
I did some AI pathfinding and physics on Torn, which involved hours and hours of research, coding, cussing, swearing, keyboard mashing, monitor shaking, and issuing of death threats to the game engine. It turned out pretty well. Hopefully, I’ll be able to do more AI related stuff on future projects since that’s my main interest although I’d like to do graphics some day and draw some pretty pictures.
Working at Black Isle is like no other experience I’ve ever had. A typical programmer day goes like this. I come in just a little late and sneak in through the door furthest away from Feargus Urquharts’ (our division president) office. Start email, get the latest source code and start a compile. Off to get my daily chrysanthemum tea fix (Yeo’s has gone international! Whoopee!) and some cookies or bread for a quick breakfast. If the compile is not ready when I’m finished, up comes Internet Explorer and off I go scouring the net for news about the world, check out what kind of games fans want Black Isle to make, and garner info about other games. When the compile is finally done, I either start implementing new features from designers Chris Avellone
(Planescape: Torment), Josh Sawyer, John Deily, Steve Bokkes (Icewind Dale) and all the other designers, or fix outstanding bugs.
Lunch comes around and off we go to the same usual haunts to fill our hungry bellies and plan how we are going to conquer the entire gaming world.
Fighting off the sleep bug after lunch is toughest in the hot summer, but producers like Chris Parker, Darren Monahan, Doug Avery, and sometimes mighty Feargus himself keep us awake by running up and down the hallways, shouting and brandishing budget reports, out-of-date schedules with expired deadlines, action figures, bb-guns, and baseball bats. Occasionally, they catch one of us and pound the crap out of the poor fella.
To de-stress, we adjourn to the ping pong table in the recreational room, play some foosball (table soccer), or one of the old arcade machines which thankfully, doesn’t require money to play. A trip to the soda room to get some H2O or whatever free soda that’s available and I’m set for the day. Once in a while, we pretend to get lost in the maze that is Interplay and stumble into marketing or HR where all the pretty girls are hiding from us and ask for directions back to our offices. We are careful not to do it too often or else our little scheme might be exposed.
Sometimes, we have meetings where we discuss how we are actually going to implement our ambitious plan of total world domination through games and come up with a game plan. We update everyone as to what’s going on, who’s doing what, and what’s expected of everyone in the coming week. The lead programmers, Bernie Weir, Brian Hendley, and Dan Spitzley are pretty easy going and let everyone pick what they want to do, which usually leaves them the tasks that no one wants. (It sucks being a lead sometimes.) Meetings usually go pretty well until someone decides to start a joke. That usually signifies the end of the meeting, as no one is able to continue. Jokes among programmers are like a disease here. Get one in and it’ll multiply and turn bad really quickly. There’s something about programmers and bad jokes.
Once in a while, we like to go bug the artists. We tell them things like, “Hey, we changed the way the engine works. Could you redo all the artwork again? Yeah, we understand this is the 10th time we’ve done this, but we promise it’s the last time.” or “You know that new feature you asked for in the editor? We put it in. To use it, you need to press ctrl, shift, alt, F1, Q, space bar, %, M, ~ at the same time and then right click two times and double left click 6 times. Make sure you time the double clicks correctly or you’ll need to repeat the sequence. Cool?” Then Tim Donley and Pete Meihuizen (lead artists) and their merry band of artists will promptly edit our pictures into boy band or Britney Spear posters and post them all over the Internet.
At around 7pm, servers for Counter-strike, Diablo 2, Tribes 2, Quake 3, and the latest flavor of the month, start springing up everywhere. Within minutes, limbs are flying, heads are getting sniped, blood is spilt, curses and taunts fill the entire floor, and shouts of “Whose my b*@tch?!” echo through the hallways in a demonstration of brotherly and sisterly love that’s so evident between all the Black Islanders. Especially dangerous are the quiet ones as they silently don their +3 armor, sharpen their +5 swords, or ready their 9th level lightning spells. Sometimes, it gets ugly. Damn ugly.
In between all this nonsense, everyone works really hard, up to 18 hours during crunch time. Overnighters are undesirable but sometimes unavoidable. Thankfully, that doesn’t happen frequently because everyone does their part. Sometimes, it’s hard to get your ideas implemented because the ones that are around are just so good. It just induces you to keep trying harder and come up with better ideas all the time. It’s definitely humbling to work with such talented people who make games that you actually love to play. Everyone here is committed to making the best game that’s most importantly, fun to play for consumers. Even Feargus, Mr. boss man, is a true gamer. Not many top-level executives in the industry are. That and the healthy dose of mutual ass kicking that’s doled out everyday in the various games we play here make Black Isle truly a great place to be.
How long have you been working there?
I’ve been here at Black Isle since August 2000. Before that, I was with Interplay’s strategy division, 14 Degrees East, from March 1999. Hey, I think they forgot to give me my 2-year pin.
For most Singaporeans here, getting into a game development company seems like a million-in-one chance, a dream come true. How did YOU get into Black Isle?
After I finished my degree, I started looking for a job but it was a hassle since I was a foreigner and had to get a work permit. The alternative was to get deported, packed into a box, and shipped back to Singapore in pieces. Most of the game companies simply put me on a generic waiting list and I later learnt that they were all in the middle of their development cycles. Game companies tend to hire close to the beginning or end of projects. At the same time, the lease on the rented house, like time, was quickly running out. Raphael Hernandez, a producer at Interplay, called and offered me a job with 14 Degrees East as a scriptor on Star Trek: Klingon Academy (KA). The project was supposed to be within 3 months of completion.
Pressed for time as I was, I agreed on the condition that a programming position with a better salary and also a work permit after 3 months will be given. Once they agreed, I drove down to sunny Southern California within the week. I prayed hard that the apartment I rented over the phone was at least decent since I didn’t even see what it was like. Luckily, it turned out great.
The 3 months on KA stretched to 18, but I did get my work permit although not the programming position and salary. The best thing about the whole KA experience has got to be the team. My teammates were great professionals and we became really good friends. While scripting KA, I noticed that Black Isle was looking for a scriptor for Planescape: Torment. I wanted to jump ship really badly but since I gave my word to stay on KA till it shipped, I stuck with it. Hmmm. Anyway, 14 Degrees East was reduced to an external development division soon after the game shipped and most of the KA team got laid off. I was transferred to Black Isle where they made me a programmer, gave me a generous salary increase, and I was part of the team that shipped Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter a few months later. 2 titles in 2 years. Not a bad haul. Now, I just need to keep providing them cookies so that they’ll never kick me out. Plus I have learnt that most invaluable skill in programming — making installers.
Have you met other Singaporeans who are in the gaming industry in the US?
One of my co-workers, Eric Fong, is a lead in our Quality Assurance department. His mom is Singaporean and he visits our little island from time to time. There are several other people from Indonesia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Philippines working here. I’m sure there must be lots more in the industry. Man, I miss my chicken and char siew rice, curry, mee pok, nasi lemak, etc. My mom sends me packets of Maggi curry noodles from time to time so I can get my MSG fix. God bless her!
What are your observations of the gaming community and scene in the US? How is it similar or different compared to the gaming scene here, as you remembered it?
The computer gaming scene in Singapore back then was pretty non-existent. We were playing games that were about 6-18 months old compared to the US and we only got games that the US publishers released for the rest of the world. That typically meant only titles that were big sellers. Frankly speaking, I don’t remember too much about it, as I was stuck doing my 9 to 5 database job. I got so sick of computers that I didn’t touch my home computer for months. I could hear the spiders spinning their little webs across my sound card and video card and the flies that got caught. If there was a gaming scene, there wasn’t any place like the Net where communities could hang and talk about gaming. It was probably restricted to small pockets of friends huddling around computer shops or at home playing single player games. Network gaming wasn’t big then. Online communities were on BBSes and games were generally text or ASCII MUDs which didn’t have too many players.
About a year ago, I heard that LAN gaming centres and Cyber cafes were all the rage in Singapore and they were springing up everywhere. StarCraft, Command & Conquer, and Diablo got everyone talking. Then came Counter-strike and the government crackdown on stores that did not have entertainment licenses and that quickly put a damper on the whole thing. Now, there’s some weird rule about cyber cafes having to spend 50% of their resources on food and beverages and 50% on entertainment.
The US probably has the single largest gaming community in the world. Industry reports state that the game industry makes more money worldwide than Hollywood does in the US. That’s probably an exaggeration, but it’s true that most game sales are made in the US. Europe and Asia are fast growing markets though.
The gaming community in the US is older, much larger, and more vocal.
Contrary to popular belief, gamers aren’t all pimple-faced teenaged boys sitting in dark rooms with the eerie glow of the computer screen lighting up their evil grins as they bash the next goblin into pulp. According to demographics, most hardcore gamers are between 18-36 years of age. Many are married and hold full-time jobs. The ratio of hardcore gamers to casual gamers is also much larger than in Singapore. The level of fanaticism can also be extreme at times. Gamers making mods out of games are common. So common in fact, that game developers have started to incorporate level editors and mod-making capabilities in their games.
Game developers’ message boards are always busy with fans asking everything they can about new products, bug fixes, etc. Most of the major gaming magazines and websites are based in the US and we do press tours where producers travel all across the US to do interviews and give product demos to magazine and website editors to generate publicity for the games and to appease the fans’ insatiable appetite for news.
In Singapore, the community is still pretty young and there aren’t many established communities except for a few like Khabal.com. However, the Singaporean gamers do seem to be just as vocal when it comes to games that they are interested in, and it sometimes seems strangely familiar reading posts on message boards from fans. The perennial questions about game release dates, suggestions on how to do this and that, are all pretty much the same from fans all over the world.
Also, in the US, since the impact of the game industry is so immediate, gaming is a much more socially acceptable past time than it is in Singapore where gaming still has the traditional stigma of being childish and time wasting with no value whatsoever. It remains to be seen how the Singapore government will react to the inevitable explosion of gaming when it hits our island nation. It won’t be too far off with the new wave of game-awareness and massively multiplayer online games coming. The looming economic recession can only dampen the tide, but it won’t stop it.
Another important fact is that the US has a tradition of startup companies making it big (i.e. the American dream). Many fans believe that they can make games just as well as the developers and they dare to take the chance. Many big name publishers and well-respected game development companies today started out as small garage companies. This phenomenon isn’t apparent in Singapore. Maybe it’s because we don’t have garages?
There are lots of gamers who would love a job in the industry. Any advice for people who want to follow in your footsteps?
Stock up on cookies. Lots of them. Good chocolate chip ones, not those cheap, generic ones.
I can’t really say what I did right, because I was pretty lucky. However, the most important factors that contributed to the fact that I am working my dream job right now were perhaps the two big life-changing decisions that I made. The first one was when I decided to leave everything I knew to go to a completely alien country to see if I could do more with my life. The second was to defy my Singapore-bred mentality that art and games were merely hobbies and could never be a serious career choice. The second was by far the most difficult.
Being a doctor, lawyer, engineer, those were successful vocations. They were respectable jobs that Singaporean parents would be proud of. Making games wasn’t even an option in Singapore. I had always dreamed about it ever since playing Bard’s Tale and Wasteland in the early 80’s, but I never seriously thought it could happen. And when it did, I worried about how to tell my folks that I was going to be making games for a living.
Anyway, by this time, I knew what I wanted and I took the chance. It has paid off tremendously thus far and the ride’s great. Hopefully, no one kicks me off the boat. Thanks to Raphael Hernandez for giving me my first shot, Brian Christian for being a fun boss to work for and for giving me a good recommendation to Black Isle, Darren Monahan and Feargus for giving me a chance in Black Isle and most of all, to my mom for her support and everything she’s ever done for me.
Most of the programming skills and knowledge I have acquired were gleaned from books and other programmers. Not saying that school isn’t useful but that learning doesn’t stop when school ends. Without the general education I received, I don’t think I would have the perspective on life I do today. I wouldn’t have been able to make the decisions I did. I wish I paid more attention in school during math and physics classes though. Game programming tends to use a lot of those. I can’t remember who it was that said, “The most important thing to learn in school, is how to learn”.
I’d ask anyone who wants to get into game development to start small. See what you can do and see if this is something you really want. There are countless numbers of people who claim to be making a game but less than 10% ever complete the game. It’s much harder than it looks and enthusiasm can get you started but it takes a lot more to get to the finish line. Get a group of friends together who share a common vision and a common goal and try to make a demo. You will learn a million things from this alone. Then decide what you really want to do and go for it. Like Nike says: “Just do it”.
Can you give us a heads up on upcoming titles?
Unfortunately, no. All I can say is that we aren’t being paid to sit around.
(This from Aericura only) Boxers or briefs?
Black spandex and a red cape.
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