Paradox Development Studio Advent Calendar #2 Tegus

[Captain Gars]

The second picture has obviously been photoshopped, where's his programmer beard?

 

[podcat]

So you have a dream job and you have people to play Netrunner with? I'm so jelly right now.

We are something like 8 or more people playing netrunner at the office now I think. Its a pretty good game although Tegus cheats a lot and wins.

 

[Tegus]

What does the Zetter in Zetterman mean?

I'm not sure, actually. If I google it, it most likely is dereived from the word 'säter' which in turn could be related to http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sätesgård or http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fäbod or mean 'a far away pasture'. Or it could come from a town in Sweden called something that ends in '-säter/-sätra'.

Unless I actually do some research about my relatives to see when and where they adopted the name, I probably won't find out the exact meaning.

 

[Tegus]

I'm actually a bit confused by your job. What is it that you actually do? I've obviously never made a game (since I don't know what a engine programmer is - do you design the new systems, like Clausewitz?), so I don't understand everyone's jobs when it comes to making a game, but I'm curious as to what you've specifically done for Victoria 2 (still my favorite Paradox game). Also I hope that secret project your working on is Victoria 3! Merry Christmas!

It means that I work as a coder but I don't work on a specific project, but more with lower-level systems. For example, one of the things I've made as an engine programmer is to replace a third-party animation system with our own in-house version. Since all our games use the animation system, it can be considered part of the 'engine'.

In general, systems that are shared between projects are what I program on.

As for Victoria II, I worked on it as a general programmer(on that project only). I did a bit of everything(interfaces, AI, some market stuff(quite unavoidable in that title), the generic country name system, optimizations etc), but I haven't really done much work on the expansions.

 

[Kallocain]

I don't know... We live in the photoshop era, probably only the moustache is real. :-x

I can assure you, the facial hair is all real. It is usually a lot more of it.

Good to see more behind the scene stuff. I guess there are a lot more people involved in the games we love than we think so.

Well, since Victoria II was mentioned here, I'll link to those credits:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/victoria-ii/credits
This list is accurate. The people down halfway, until Lead Tester are the ones that have actually created something for the game and worked in the studio. Below are freelancers, PR, financial and marketing. Also crucial people that you may not think about as a player.

Since Victoria II we've hired a lot of people though. We have two entire QA teams for example. One PDS that just tests our games and one PI that tests all the games Paradox Interactive is a publisher for as well.