| Unofficial credits for Knights of the Nine | |
|---|---|
| (link) | |
| Medium/Format | Blog |
| Date | January 23, 2007 |
| Creator(s) | Ashley Cheng |
Credits are one of the main reasons why we make games. We want everybody to know what we did. Due to the way our downloads work, we can't include credits for our downloadable content. With Knights of the Nine doing really well, I thought I'd acknowledge the folks who worked on it.
It is likely I'm missing some people, but I'm pretty sure I've got all the principle developers responsible for Knights. Primarily artists and designers worked on Knights, since it was meant to work with Oblivion without new code. Programmers mostly helped debug and troubleshoot bugs (hence, no lead programmer, per se).
Knights of the Nine Credits (as far as I can remember it...seems like it was only last summer...)
Lead Producer - Jeff Gardiner. Jeff did a great job helping everybody get this project done in a very short amount of time. I mean SHORT amount of time. Super short. Like 3 days. With no bathroom breaks. Everybody peed into a jar Jeff carried around with him to save time. Seriously.
Lead Designer - Kurt Kuhlmann. Kurt knows a lot about Elder Scrolls lore so he was a good choice to come up with the overall design of what Knights was going to be about. He was also the designer responsible for the main quest in Oblivion, and he does a great female Argonian scratch voice.
Lead Artist - Matt Carofano. Matt is an amazing artist who has been the lead artist for our past two Elder Scrolls games - Morrowind and Oblivion. You can see him get arrested by homeland security for take pictures of public buildings in Washington DC in the Making of Oblivion documentary in the Collector's Edition of the game.
Designers - Brian Chapin, Erik Caponi. These guys did a great job implementing the quests in Knights with Kurt. Chappy (Brian) is to blame for the Mages Guild questline, and is to be avoided when playing Eve Online because he role plays as a con man and will grift your ass. Erik is our resident wiki master.
Additional Design - Emil Pagliarulo, Bruce Nesmith. Emil took a break from fathering 40 kids and wrote some conversations. Bruce took a break from not writing Ravenloft role playing games anymore and helped with game balancing.
Level Designers/Dungeon Artists - Mike Ryan, Frank Ward, Robert Wisnewski, Joel Burgess, Jeff "Living the Dream" Browne. There are several big dungeons in Knights, and I think they are some of the best in the game. When not doing exactly what Joel tells him to, Jeff moonlights as a topless cover model for game development school ads. Robert spends most of his day commuting back and forth from his home and work. Frank and Mike are both dead to me. Dead.
Character Artists - Christiane Meister, Jonah Lobe, Gary Noonan. Christiane made the new armor and weapons. Jonah created the new Aeylid creatures you fight, and Gary get their animations working.
World Artists - Grant Struthers, Tony Greco, Megan Sawyer. Grant created the amazing cloud area in Knights along with other cool special effects. After finishing his work on Knights, he went back to do another pass on Cloud Ruler Temple. Tony made several quest items; his test cells are the coolest in the game if you ever find yourself in our test areas. Megan, who built lots of environments, enjoys receiving my personal emails that I send to my fiancee, who has the same name, though spelled Megen (wierd huh? Turns out my future father in law did not know how to spell Megan, so he wrote Megen on her birth certificate. True story.)
Interface Art - Natalia Smirnova. She made the cool quest icons that appear in your journal. She's responsible for all the interface art from Oblivion. The art for the Monk class is my favorite because she modeled it after me, though I was having a bad hair day.
Concept Art - Adam Adamowicz. Adam created some awesome concept for Knights and for Shivering Isles, as well.
Sound and Voice - Mark Lampert. Mark made lots of new sound effects -- using his own voice -- and served as the voice director. He is the coolest guy in the office. Besides Scott Franke.
Programming - Mike Lipari and Ahn Hopgood were essential to making Knights work as well as it did. They troubleshooted, debugged, cajoled, begged, massaged and pinched our tools and engine in all the right places. Also, most of the programming staff looked at bugs here and there to help figure out workarounds and such. I would list them here, but well, I think I've done enough typing.
QA - Kevin Kauffman. QA did a fantastic job with testing the game across 50 different platforms and 30 different languages. We have a big QA staff now, so apologies if I don't list everyone. But know that you all have a place in my heart.
Special Thanks - As always, special thanks to Kenny MacDonald, our resident chef, and his entire staff for keeping us fed every day. If you ever visit, try the cajun salmon with rice, my favorite dish, or the cajun chicken pasta, the house specialty.