An interview with Scott Bilas
Well, it’s not often that we hear from people who made some of our favorite adventure games years ago… unless, of course, you’re from the LucasArts era and you now own your own company. Yes… I know all about those guys. What I’m talking about is developers from such games as Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned and Dungeon Siege. And more specifically, I’m talking about Scott Bilas.
Adventure Classic Gaming did a really great interview with Scott Bilas and we get to hear a little about how Gabriel Knight 3 was created and Scott’s creative process. If you’ve attended a Game Developers Conference, you’ve probably even seen him speak. Right now he’s the Development Director of Oberon Games Studio, so this guy knows what he’s talking about.
Now, this guy is pretty geeky. He started programming at the tender age of 8 on his Commodore 64. That is some hardcore geek:
The first game I programmed as a hobby was awesome. I was probably 8 years old. It was called Phoenix Duel (because ‘Phoenix’ has an ‘x’ in it, which makes it cool), and was all in C-64 BASIC. I didn’t know how to do interrupts, non-procedural programming (frame, input, logic, render, loop), or even do a basic simulation, so if one player shot at the other, both players would freeze while the shot moved across the screen. It was really more of a weak game of chicken, but that’s a feature not a bug - and let’s not forget it was awesome.
He sounds like my kinda guy. The man also saved the Gabriel Knight 3 project from bombing, because apparently, things didn’t go too smoothly during the development:
I originally came on as a grunt to help finish a couple puzzle levels in GK3 so it could ship a few months later. It was immediately obvious that the project was in deep trouble and that I’d be doing more than just some puzzles. The team building the game was experienced, but not in 3D. It was very buggy, few scenes were implemented, it looked bad, etc. Artists would have to wait two to four weeks before seeing their work appear in the game, which made iterating nearly impossible. I met with the producer and the general manager a few times to figure out how to get the game out of the hole it was in. We decided that the game needed to be rebuilt nearly from scratch, and that I should take over the technical lead role to make it happen. This was a big gamble for me - it’s not like I knew what I was doing either, but I thought I could figure it out, and talked them into it.
If you want to read more of the interview, why don’t you go right ahead and click here. You’ll learn a lot about a pretty interesting guy!
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