Meet the Team, Vol. II

Good Wednesday Dev-Log readers!

This week we interview Thak from the MMO team. In addition to learning a little about this little seen face of Layonara's behind the scenes effort, he gives us a brief tutorial on what it is exactly he does. Please read below for thoughts from Thak.

rowana: So first we'd like to know (and it's alright to be a bit general if you wish!) how old are you?

Thak: 29. Is that too precise? :) hehe

rowana: *smiles* That's fine! hehe.

rowana: And where abouts do you live?

Thak: Near Zurich in Switzerland.

rowana: Can you tell us a little about who you've played in Layonara and perhaps a fun memory/event?

Thak: I found Layo while looking for an RP online game back in 05. As I dint know the world yet I submitted a Swashbuckler type of guy with a small drinking problem name Trysk Jaeger. Small bio fighter/rogue mix to get approved rather quickly and see what its all about. He evolved quite a bit over the time I played him and I really liked the char so I didn't play many alts.

One of the funnest moments for sure was right when starting out. Came to Hlint and there was this first quest to get some rat hides from the sewers there. I din't know much about the game so I grabbed my sword and fought some of the lil lvl 1 critters down there, almost died and ran for it back into town, still bleeding I sat on the benches. Up to that point I hadn't gotten any rat hides ( I thought they would drop) and I didn't yet talk to anyone still trying to get the hang of playing. Anyhow I sit there all banged up and mangled and across the street sat this Dwarf, Fenrir looking at me for a while before asking if there was any troubles. Trysk said something about trying to skin the rats down there, but it was really hard to skin them while they kept biting me. "Ye should first kill em afore ye try to skin em Lad!" he bellowed and soon I had 3 or 4 other Hlintdwellers that overheard the short exchange laugh it up and some good RP fun. Well after that first impression of the server and the community I was hooked. :) So Thanks again Fenrir for the nice introduction!

Thak: Oh wow hehe that's a whole book sorry :D

rowana: That's perfectly fine! Good story! hehe.

rowana: Alright. So can you tell us, in general, what it is you do for the MMO team?

Thak: I create the 3d and 2d artwork for the game along with other modelers, texturers and animators and make sure things properly import into the game engine ready for the area builders and programmers to do
their thing with the various assets.

rowana: It's so simply said but I bet it takes more then it sounds like to do.

Thak: Heh, yeah its the short version of the basic idea, the processes are quite time consuming and there's lots of niggly bits to take care of. Being creative is very rewarding and seeing the game take form is great.

Creating a creature for instance, first we create the 3d model, then a texture artist paints its skin, while I create a skeleton that will later move the model appropriately, this skeleton is then fitted into the models body and its flesh so to speak tied to the various bones, then the model gets its animations from an animator, things like walking, looking around, scratching its ear or doing any other required thing like kicking biting and punching. At last the creature, has form, texture and movement and makes its way into the game engine, where the programmers tell it how to behave in the game world, what loot to drop etc.

rowana: We've seen a few folks jumping into things like Daz Studio and Poser and the like. Is this something like the basic building blocks of that?

Thak: Its a step before Poser. The models, skin textures, and bone structures are already present for you as a Poser user, you then have a ready model to animate in poser but the creation of said models has already been done by DAZ or the community members that sell them. On a side note Poser is great for webcomics or creating cool fantasy scenes with characters. It's not a tool for games though, as the models have a whole lot more polygons than would be efficient in a game.

rowana: Good to know! Alright, well this all sounds pretty involved. Do you manage some free time between this and your RL work? If so, what kinds of things do you do with that time?

Thak: Free what? :p

rowana: *laughs* I thought you might say that!

Thak: I do sneak in a bit of gametime though here an there ;)

rowana: Always good. What games are you trying out, if I may inquire?

Thak: "Trying out" is a good way of saying that, I haven't finished a game in ages. One I did though: the new Monkey Island Adventure. https://www.telltalegames.com/store/talesofmonkeyisland (shameless plug) Its excellent buy it now! :) One Chapter is short enough to play through in 3 hours-ish so yeh I managed that.

rowana: Alright, I think this about does it for now. Thank you very much for your time Thak!

And we do thank him for stepping out for a few minutes (and rather late for him at the time the interview was done!) to give us a small taste of what is going on.

~row, on behalf of the writing team