SB Lead Programmer Q&A

Waylander-SB

Ala Diaz, Lead Programmer Q&A
May 21, 2004

One of the new additions to the Shadowbane Team during the acquisition from Ubisoft was new Lead Programmer Ala Diaz. Ala is a seasoned industry veteran with over a decade of experience on many different game titles. We wanted to introduce Ala to the fans and player community since he was one of the primary figures on many of Shadowbane's recent improvements and patches. Ala is one of the leaders of the new Shadowbane Team.

What is your current position, duties, and responsibilities at Wolfpack Studios? How long have you been on the Shadowbane Team?

My current position is Lead Programmer for Shadowbane. My duties include overseeing the technical development on Shadowbane and making sure that we are on track for our deliverables. In addition, I help determine the future development direction of the game in conjunction with our other leads. I've been on the Shadowbane Team since the end of November, for about 6 months now.

How long have you been in the games industry? What is your professional background like?

I've been in the games industry for 12 years now, and have worked for companies such as Sega, EA (Origin), GT Interactive, and Midway. Games I've worked on include Spy Hunter, NFL Blitz, Wing Commander Prophecy, and a number of Sega Genesis games including both Eternal Champions games.

What is a typical day like for the Lead Shadowbane Programmer at Wolfpack Studios? Walk us through a normal day working on Shadowbane.

There really is no typical day for me. On any given day I could be dealing with a live issue, fixing bugs and/or exploits, working on a new feature, scheduling out our development plans, assisting other programmers with technical issues, or working with design to make sure our goals are reachable while still achieving our design goals. Due to my range of duties, I rarely have a set routine for a day.

What are your primary short-term objectives for Shadowbane right now? How about in the Long term?

Our primary short-term objectives are to fix existing issues with the game as well as introducing new content. In the long term, our goals are to improve the game on a more fundamental level to improve performance and graphic quality.

From a technical standpoint, what will you and your team be doing to improve Shadowbane? What would you like to do?

Well, some of this is still up in the air, and I don't want to give away too much of our tentative plans since they may change. Broadly, we want to improve certain aspects of Shadowbane such as the graphics engine, server-side lag (which we have made large strides in, but there is more work to be done), and client-side dynamic loading issues. We will also be implementing new game play features that design requests, such as the resource system, which should give players more content to play with and fight over.

What are some of the challenges of being the Shadowbane Lead programmer?

The main challenge is supporting the live service while simultaneously continuing development on the product. Our team is a live support team, so there is a lot on our plate and it is a challenge to meet all of our objectives.

Can you give us a road map to improving Shadowbane's stability and performance over the next few months?

Basically continuing down the path we are following. We had Patch 2.5 to address many stability and performance issues. While we didn't achieve as much as we were hoping on some fronts, we were able to identify many of the worst performing areas of the game on both the client and the server. We will continue to address these as well as known sb.exes and memory leaks.

What are some of the things that you have already improved in Shadowbane? How have they turned out?

On one level, I think I have improved our processes, which allow the programming team to have a better understanding of what we will be doing for each milestone (patch). This has allowed us to focus our time on areas where we feel we can get greater gains and has overall improved the pace of development on Shadowbane. On the game level, I've fixed various sb.exe's, memory leaks, bugs and exploits while adding some small features. Most of my bug fixes and changes have worked out well, although in the case of sb.exes and memory leaks there is still quite a ways to go.

What are the fun parts of being Shadowbane's Lead Programmer?

Working with the team here at Wolfpack. We have a great group of developers here, and I have really enjoyed working with them over the past half year.

By: Vosx

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