@brett_douville

Brett Douville

IS SEV ALIVE ;_;

Sev was indeed alive and well in our hearts. :)
Unfortunately, the LucasArts I knew "rebooted" around the time we were finishing SWRC -- through the last few months of the project, groups of people would be laid off as planned (with generous severance packages, to be fair), and we'd say goodbye to a group of people we had worked with for months or years as we turned to continue finishing the game (mostly getting it through QA and cert). There's no telling whether a sequel would have gotten made, because projections for sales of SWRC were very low (and it outsold expectations considerably, which makes you wonder how it might have done had it had real marketing muscle behind it).
So, now it can be told. Our plan had been to do a sequel called "Rebel Commando," where the central idea was that "a Rebellion starts with one man," and that one man was Sev. (We had discarded another scenario where Delta Squad was active in hunting down Jedis.) There was some key art we had done as part of the pitch which showed the silhouette of Sev walking away from his discarded clone trooper helmet. But in addition to building on the squad mechanics, the story would have focused on how the Rebellion got its start.
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Latest answers from Brett Douville

what are you in the mood for?

A nice chicken and artichoke dish for dinner, a movie, some reading, and some recording of a podcast. Oh look, that's my whole evening, that worked out splendidly.

What's the best games engine in your opinion and what's your personal favourite?

Whatever engine gets you as close to realizing your vision in the resources you're able to commit. I probably had the most fun working in the engine we wrote for Starfighter, because I knew it intimately and the three senior programmers on it all had a similar philosophy of how to build code at the time, though we've all evolved in different directions I'm sure.

Does your great co-host look a bit like the socialist presidential candidate, Eugene Debs?

LOL, I had never considered that he might be a good match for a 50-ish Eugene Debs but now that you mention it...

Stupid question but i guess as lead programmer who have to a great people person? must have been challenging?

Must have been challenging because I'm not a people person? :) Ha. Yes, in general, being a lead is often more about developing the people you're leading but also about providing technical direction and vision, and acting as a technical sounding board for what the team hopes to achieve. The people aspect of it is one I take very seriously.

Has programming games changed much? become easier/harder? longer/shorter?

It has changed to the most degree with the introduction of concurrent programming, with the addition of GPUs and the PS2’s architecture at the beginning of my career. That’s probably the biggest single change but it’s an enormous one - in a way, you’re often working on problems that at one time would have been problems for operating systems programmers. And concurrent programming is significantly harder than single process programming. So in that sense it’s harder.
Longer/shorter is a tougher thing. It takes longer to make the AAA games, but they’re also bigger (and have the challenge described above). Apples to apples? I can code up Asteroids or something in an hour or so, in C - but I don’t have to think about the hardware to do so (and of course, the design is established).

On a scale from 1 to 10 how weird are you?

I wouldn’t begin to know how to answer that question, which probably places me at the low end of the scale.

Have you got a book in you? if yes what would it be about non fiction,fiction?

I have a number of books I’d like to have written. I don’t know if I can quiet my inner critic long enough to get out a first draft. All are fiction.

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