From Talented Community Member
to BioWare Staff

It should be no surprise that some of the very talented people who make up the BioWare community come to work for BioWare itself. Hard work, a fevered excitement for games, and more than a little guts to make some big life changes in pursuit of that first job in the gaming biz, have brought some exceptional people to our doorstep. We are very pleased that they all decided to use their experience and training to help us develop some of the best games around.

Georg Zoeller
Designer - Jade Empire

I have been a member of the BioWare community since about the time I found out that Baldur's Gate was in development. When NWN was announced and first word of the toolset hit the internet, I pretty much immediately preordered the game, and when I finally got it in my hands I think I spent most of my spare time (and sometimes more) creating content for the game and making it available on my private webpage.

A couple of months after NWN's release, Rob Bartel contacted me about using one of the script systems I had created in the free Witch's Wake series he was developing for the Live Team. Shortly after, I noticed a forum post about a technical designer job opening at BioWare.

I didn't have much hope about it (living in far away Germany and such) but my girlfriend (and now wife) convinced me to send in an application module anyway. A couple of months and several phone interviews later, I received an invitation to a job interview in Edmonton (man, was I wrong about -20° C being cold). Two months later, I was packaging my stuff into crates to Canada and another month after that I was already working on NWN: Hordes of the Underdark. At the moment, I'm on Jade Empire, our newest Xbox game, scripting levels and working on the rules system.

Before joining BioWare, I had been working as a programmer for a couple of years and was attending university in Darmstadt, Germany in computer sciences.

Tim Smith (a.k.a. Torlack)
Lead Tools Programmer - Dragon Age

When NWN was released, I was interested in helping with the development of content for one of the persistent worlds. Even though I developed some unreleased content, I quickly became more interested in creating tools to help with content development. My treasure table editor was the first program I developed to help module creators manage the generation of random treasure drops. Soon after that I became more interested in the internal workings of NWN. My website was created as a clearing house of information about file formats. The NWN Explorer program was created to help me decode some elements of the binary model format.

When I decided to try to get a job at BioWare, I wrote the script compiler as part of my unofficial technical submission. Once that program was done I sent my resume into BioWare. While I waited for BioWare to call, anytime I received a comment from a BioWare employee about my work, I would thank them and let the know I was looking for a job. After a long six months, BioWare contacted me to set up a phone interview and the rest is history.

Emmanuel Lusinchi (a.k.a. Sentur Signe)
Designer - Dragon Age

I started like nearly everyone else: I picked up a copy Neverwinter Nights with the hope of recreating the D&D modules my two brothers and I wrote and spent countless hours playing in our teenage years. I know some people were discouraged to find out Nevewinter script was so similar to C, but for me, that was a very pleasant surprise. I knew C and felt right at home from the first time I launched the Aurora Toolset.

At the same time, I joined the NWN community and found great tips on scripting there that helped get me started. I haven't visited the community for quite a while (BioWare is keeping me really busy these days :), but I used to go there under the name of Sentur Signe.

My main achievements, I think, were the Psion class, the Blasesinger class, and a 'lootable corpses' system. The Psion and Blade Singer got very little visibility in the community, for various reasons, but I am still quite proud of them: they basically added two new spell-casting classes to Neverwinter Nights, complete with their own spell lists, at a time when this was considered impossible to do by many on the forums. As for the 'lootable corpses' system, it is thanks to it that I started my relationship with BioWare.

In one post maybe a week after the launch of Neverwinter Nights, I read a complaint about the NWN monsters disappearing a few seconds after their death. Having just started scripting, I was really looking for a challenging project and tried to tackle the problem. I believe there were quite a few other systems developed by various people at about the same time to create monster corpses that would not only stick around but be 'lootable' by the players. I don't think mine was particularly better or worse, but it was quite frugal in its 'cpu' requirements: the various scripts would execute but once, and the bodies would eventually decay and be cleared away so as not to bog down the game.

At the same time, BioWare's Rob Bartel was in the process of getting the community's scripts into his Witch's Wake module. Rob reviewed the few 'lootable corpses' scripts out there and ended up selecting mine to be integrated into Witch's Wake. Over the next couple of weeks, Rob and I exchanged quite a few emails, often several per day, as beta testers of the Witch's Wake uncovered obscure bug after obscure bug in my 'lootable corpses' system.

To give an example, a tester found out that when a druid would charm a wild beast and then release it, nearby corpses would mysteriously and suddenly change their orientation on the ground. Needless to say, without very dedicated beta-testers, this bug, and many just as strange, would never have been uncovered. During that time, I also came to realize that I was enjoying scripting for Neverwinter Nights a lot more than performing my day job.

About the time the Witch's Wake was completed, I half jokingly mentioned to Rob that I wouldn't mind doing this (i.e. developing wickedly complex scripts under a tight schedule) for a living. Rob replied that BioWare was hiring and that there was a well established process to apply for a Designer position. After checking the BioWare web site, I found out that 'all I had to do' was create a short module that would catch the attention of BioWare and submit it. I guessed - quite accurately - that many, many people would be submitting modules, and that whatever I would send needed to be pretty good to lend me an interview. At the same time, I realized quitting my current career and relocating from sunny California to the middle of Canada would be quite a drastic change in my life, and of course, in the life of my then wife-to-be.

Over the course of a nice dinner, I casually mentioned to my fiancee that there was a company in Canada that I would maybe, possibly, potentially, be looking into applying to. In less than a hour, my better-half had made a very thorough internet-search on the city of Edmonton (home of BioWare), down to the average cost of living, cost of property ownership, and cultural life. I guess what she found out compared very favorably with Southern California, because the same night, she more or less cornered me and made me understand in no uncertain terms that I *was* going to apply for that job.

We canceled our planned Christmas vacations to France and, instead, my fiancee imposed on me a grueling scripting schedule. As soon as I'd arrive from work, she'd 'lock me' into the room with the computer, feed me around 9pm, and then 'lock' me in for another couple of hours. I make it sound harsh, but she was a really terrific supporter over the following two months and I am truly happy that she helped me maintain such a tight discipline on my whole 'module submission' project. I guess she not only wanted for us to go live in Edmonton, which truly is a great place, but more importantly, for me to go after my dream-job. A month later, we were flying to Canada for my interview. :)

Yaron Jakobs
Designer - Dragon Age

Neverwinter got my attention for two reasons. One, it was a BioWare game. Two, it had a powerful toolset. I always wanted to create my own adventures on the computer and suddenly I had the power within my own hands! Daggerford was always a favorite setting of mine. It was a detailed and fairly large village with all kinds of things happening in and around the place. The module was very large and included a detailed representation of the village, including every house, location, and NPC (and there were many of those!). I initially set up the village and then went on to make my own adventures in that area. I also added areas, like the sewers and surrounding forests, and built an epic story around all of that.

After a series of email and phone interviews, I was flown over to Edmonton for a session of tests and interviews. That was when I got my first chance to see BioWare and Edmonton up close and I must say I was pretty impressed from what I saw. BioWare sure made good use of my time here - I had to build a module during the day while navigating my way through countless interviews and meetings. But, I finally did manage to come up with something that proved to be good enough (I'm here, aren't I? :).

My part in the community was the creation of a relatively large module called Agents of Darkness. The module included the entire village of Daggerford in the Forgotten Realms wherein lots of adventures took place. I found myself at BioWare after applying for a technical designer job opening that appeared on the BioWare site shortly after Neverwinter Nights came out. I expected chances of about a million-to-one of being noticed, but somehow, things did work out quite well and I found myself working on the Neverwinter Nights expansion packs shortly thereafter.