Greg Street (exclusivité)

[Alliance Francophone]  Could you please tell us a little bit about your job at ES?

[Greg Street]  I am a game designer. While everyone at ES contributes design ideas, I am one of the folks lucky enough to get to do nothing but design. When ideas come in, it is my job to evaluate them, prioritized them and then coordinate with programming and art to get them in. Personally, I run most of the playtesting for AOM and manage the database, which makes me responsible for unit balance. I work closely with Ian Fischer, the lead designer on the project, to come up with models for large pieces of the game, such as the way Favor is gathered or the balance of mythological units. Most of the designers work closely together developing the story for our single-player campaign.

[Alliance Francophone]  What did make you move from the job of oceanographer to your current job at ES? Are you still somehow connected to the oceanographic world?

[Greg Street]  When I was in graduate school, I got to spend a lot of time on boats in the Gulf of Mexico or hip-deep in a salt marsh collecting animals. It was hard work for which I was poorly compensated, but a lot of fun. Once I became a real professor, I ended up spending most of my time in front of a computer. Academia rewards scientists who win big money for their university, so I ended up writing lots of grant proposals, spending little time in the lab and almost none in the field. I got so bored that I spent a lot of time on the Internet, particularly at a little site called Age of Empires Heaven. I eventually saw an interview with Bruce Shelley saying ES was hiring designers *no experience necessary*. I worked late nights perfecting what I hoped was the perfect scenario to submit with my application (it ended up shipping as "Ctesiphon" on Rise of Rome) and the rest is history.

[Alliance Francophone]  Could you please explain to us the main purpose of an AI script?

[Greg Street]  The main goal of an AI script is to create a computer opponent who is fun to play against. Usually, this involves making the computer player as challenging as possible. The best AI scripts can change strategies based on what the human player is doing, or just to make the computer player seem as if it is really thinking. The very best AI scripts use strategies that a human can use and don't rely on the strengths of the computer (such as micromanaging many units at one time). These AI scripts feel the most human.

[Alliance Francophone]  You designed almost all the scenario and campaigns since "The Rise of Rome" expansion. Could you please tell us how you get inspired for doing  this task?

[Greg Street]  Starting with Rise of Rome, but to a much greater extent in Age of Kings and The Conquerors Expansion, we wanted to tell stories about famous or interesting leaders from history. My first task was to come up with a list of interesting heroes that I presented to other folks at the company. Some of these heroes, like Joan D'Arc, were no-brainers because they had a great story that could be retold in a dramatic fashion. Other leaders who had some amazing adventures, like Belisarius of Byzantium, or the Mameluke Baibars, had to be cut along the way so that we could focus on a few really good campaigns. The next step was to outline each scenario and decide what the interesting "hook" was for each one. I worked with Producer Chris Rippy to make sure there was variation within the campaign. Most of our scenarios are of the build-up-and-fight style because we know that is a fun part of Age of Kings, but we try to throw set-piece battles or more RPG-style scenarios in along the way for variety. To get inspired, I would order lots of books and try to read everything about the individuals features in the campaigns. You end up throwing a lot of stuff out, since you really have to focus on battles over personal crises and you want to have a climactic ending for the story.

[Alliance Francophone]  How long does it take for you to design a scenario?

[Greg Street]  I spend perhaps a week identifying the events around which a scenario should take place and working that into the campaign story. I also try and figure out how large the map will be, what its basic shape is and how many computer players will be on the map. Often I would sketch them out (this became a necessity once Karen Sparks was doing some of the scenarios for the Conquerors and it is a huge part of the process for Age of Mythology, now that we have much more complex scenarios with lots of people working on them). For Age of Kings, it took me about a day of work to do the the basic map layout and triggers and another day to do the AI scripting. Then the scenarios went through a nearly endless series of playtests, early on to test for "fun factor", then to catch bugs, then to test for difficulty level and length, and finally for minimum system configurations. We kept testing scenarios up until the time the game shipped, so there really was never and end to developing the scenarios.

[Alliance Francophone]  How many people are directly working with you?

[Greg Street]  Age of Kings was basically done with four designers. For Age of Mythology, we are now up to eight designers. Ian and I do the high-level features and decide how the game should play. We also have a designer working just on User Interface and another working just on AI scripting. That leaves 2-4 other scenarios doing nothing but scenario design.

[Alliance Francophone]  Are you running  "hands free" when you design the scenarios for a game, or do you have strong directives from the management/other persons?

[Greg Street]  Ensemble has a pretty flat hierarchy, so there aren't a lot of directives handed down on high except for the vision that we have all worked to develop for a particular game. For example, the Age series has always featured bright colors and detailed landscapes, very different from the artistic direction of, say, a lot of first-person shooters. The designers ourselves decide on the story for the campaigns, though we present it to other people along the way as a reality check. Now that our company has gotten so large, we start with a small group of people, get their buy-off and gradually expand to larger and larger groups, until we know the entire company is behind our design direction. For AOM, we have a story committee that is in the process of reading and approving the script we are using for our ambitions single-player campaign. Once the scenarios are ready to be tested, nearly everyone in the company plays through them at least once (often many times) giving you feedback about what you can do to improve the scenario. That's how we do most things at Ensemble--work as a team. It isn't always fast, but it does keep morale high, and as a natural consequence, leads to great games.