Quotes from Ricardo E. Gonzalez as part of the "Meet the Dev" conversations. Originally posted on several threads on Bethesda's Fallout 3 forum. What's your job at Bethesda? I'm a programmer, specifically an Interface programmer. For those of you who enjoyed the interface in Oblivion, thanks!
It's nice to be appreciated! What prior projects have you worked on? I attended DigiPen Institute in Redmond, WA, where I made various game-lets and other graphics projects in pursuit of my dream of being a game programmer. These talents understandably came in quite handy in my first real-world job, programming embedded software, i. I wrote a pretty bitchin' calibration GUI in Python for this one radio antenna, so you may already know my work and if so, I have pre-autographed 8x10 glossies that I'm more than happy to distribute for a nominal fee.
What have you drawn on for inspiration in developing Fallout 3? Books, movies, music, etc would be fine, if you don't want to name any games. A special brand of inspiration is needed for writing post-apocalyptic interface code. Most standard references concentrate on the "look and feel" of a nuclear winter wasteland, the epic struggle of man reclaiming his now-alien environment, etc. Instead, I like to take the books from my coding library, rub them in mud, tatter some pages, and burn a few corners for good measure.
I also like to make sure that my code has that gritty, hacked-together quality. Who has time for comments or proper indenting when you've spent all day finding a clean water source and staving off radiation sickness?
How is the work-environment? Is it competitive or co-op? Do the different teams talk together? It's actually really laid-back, compared to the horror stories that are usually perpetuated about game industry conditions. The UI of any program touches a lot of systems, so I find myself talking to various devs from different teams, and everyone's quite friendly and helpful.
