| Gordon Ludlow |
| dot com |
Career
My previous career was in market research. Now, I make video games.I started as a video game programmer for Manley & Associates in January of 1994. Originally, I was hired to work on a game called Wolf that Disney was publishing. I was to write the educational portion. A couple of weeks after I started, Disney cancelled the game. Fortunately, they kept me on doing some tools work, fixing bugs in an in-house paint program. Then I wrote the Windows version of Rand McNally's Quick Reference Atlas. Another programmer simultaneously wrote the Mac version. One of the senior programmers at Manley & Associates was a mac-tavist, so we did everything the Mac way. I learned more about Mac font resource data than I ever wanted to know. An atlas isn't a game, even when you make it at a game company, so I was glad when Sanctuary Woods picked up the Wolf game and I was able to work on it after all. And I was even happier to work on PGA Tour for Electronic Arts. They even made me a lead. I was even happier than that to work on Need for Speed. Now that's a real game! I did the front end for the Saturn version of the original Need for Speed. When I started, I didn't have any art, so I used the art from the PC version. And I wrote it so that the active menu option vibrated (like an engine) and when you picked it, it flew in your face until the entire screen was one texel. It was kind of a cool transition effect, the button flew at you and when it went away, the next screen was there waiting for you. But, alas, the producer and the art lead weren't impressed, so we used the art from the Playstation version when it became available. It was still a blast to work on a game console and on a fun game. After Need for Speed Saturn, I worked on Need for Speed II, Playstation. By then Electronic Arts had acquired Manley & Associates, renamed us EA Seattle and moved us from an industrial park in Issaquah to an office building in Bellevue. For NFS II, the EA Canada NFS team did the game and the EA Seattle NFS team did the front end. I got to do the Playstation memory card support. That was good fun! After NFS II, I got to play lead again. This time on Need for Speed II SE (NFS II ported to 3Dfx with more cars, another track and some feature tweaks and enhancements). In addition to being leaderly, I did the HUD for NFS II SE. The NFS II HUD was very 2D and polygonal, so I recreated it mostly with 2D untextured polygons and very little art. Back then, texture memory on 3Dfx cards was at a premium, so we did anything we could to reduce the amount of art needed. After NFS II SE, I worked on... you guessed it... Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit. I had hoped to work on cop AI and getting mip mapping into the game after knocking out the HUD, but the HUD transformed from a simple task into a delightfully complicated feature with the innovative drag-and-drop functionality. After NFS III, my career took a suprising twist. Well, maybe not that suprising. That's right, Need for Speed: High Stakes. We called it NFS 4 internally, but EA didn't because around that time, they shipped an externally developed game called Need for Speed Rally. So that was the end of version numbers for the Need for Speed franchise. On Need for Speed: High Stakes, I was able to work on AI, which I had been longing to do. I made a nifty ingame speed line editor that used computational geometry, voronoi regions and convex hulls. I'd tell you more, but it's secret. After Need for Speed I worked a little bit on a massively multiplayer online Need for Speed game that didn't last as long as it should have and on another game that didn't make it to market at all. Then I was laid off with about a third of the EA Seattle employees. About 6 months later, the EA Seattle studio was closed. A few people moved to Vancouver, but most former EA Seattle employees are still in the local game development community. I landed at Amaze Entertainment. I was hired to work on a PS2/Gamecube game that was cancelled. Hmmm.... history repeating itself? If so, another published should pick it up. =) I moved from Amaze's Adrenium Studio to their Blackship Games studio and was lead programmer on Digimon Rumble Arena 2 for Bandai. I did lots of cool stuff on DRA2, most notibly the memory management trick that lets you digivolve from one character to another without having all of your forms loaded all the time. |