Hey all,

Thanks for your interest and continued enjoyment of our little baby. I wasn't able to answer all of the questions, but I picked a selection that hopefully sheds some light on me and our working environment.

Guun: Do geese see god?

Only when they take a big gander.

Bigfootm: Was it a car or a cat I saw?

Do dogs chase it? Does it rumble from within? Do its eyes light up night?

Guardianknight: What's the working enviroment at Three Rings like for you (a synopsis of your daily routine)?

I bike a couple miles through downtown San Francisco and arrive at the Three Rings office. I sit down at my desk, catch up on any work email, and then just start coding. We've always got something going on, so I rarely need to ask Nick "What's next?".

We have a team meeting every Monday, to talk about what we've been working on; what we will be working on; and assign tasks. Other than that most of our communication is via email or instant message, but we'll get up and talk it out like humans if something is a bit more complicated.

These days all the artist-types are in the "cave" and us programmers sit just outside of it, but sort of in a separate area. So we're all very close and it's easy to communicate.

Obsidious: What is your favorite past time?

The summer after 6th grade, when my family got an Apple 2 and I made little games on it all summer long. I had a newspaper delivery job but little else in the way of responsibilities, so the whole summer was spent either programming or swimming in the pool. At the time I didn't know that you could buy software. The school had "Moon Patrol" for the apple 2, and I thought one of the eighth-graders must have made it. I thought everything was either shared around or you made it yourself, I literally had no idea that there were places where you could buy games. So during that first summer I spent all day every day making little dumb games that grew increasingly complex. That was my favorite past time.

Guardianknight: When did you become interested in the work you're now doing (Engineering) and what steps did you take to progress in what you do?

Once I discovered and loved programming, I just figured I'd become a computer programmer when I grew up. I never really thought about the steps needed, I just followed my interests. I learned some more languages in high school and immediately picked my major as computer science when I went to college.

Guun: Do you plan for any more "functional" Guild Hall items like the mist well?

I would love to see more functions in the guild hall. I think it’d be great if guild members had a gameplay reason to visit the guild hall every day-- even if there was no free mist to be had!

Zaderules: What's the difference between 'senior' and 'lead' engineer? Are you just the most experienced one?

A senior engineer is capable of being a lead. I was the lead for a while on some other projects, but I wasn't on the Spiral Knights team until later in its development.

Latisan-Sklay: Which of Spiral Knight's large features has been your favorite to work on?

That's a difficult question. Perhaps the work on generating the clockworks levels. It was stressful at the time, but once I got things working it was satisfying to look at what I had done.

Doom-Xx: Why do you work for three rings?

Because they have a high tolerance for wackos.

Fallenhope: What's your favorite ice cream flavor?

If you're expecting some exotic flower of a flavor you might be disappointed to know that I prefer vanilla. (See, that's funny because vanilla is a kind of orchid.)

Traevelliath: If you could magically yell at the game code to make one small thing work perfectly as intend, what would it be?

I've always thought that the way inventory items are dealt with in the code is cumbersome. Maybe someday we'll go back and refactor it.

Sttelk: Which were the biggest challenges that you faced when making the Guild Hall Expansion?

The biggest challenges turned out to be features that were trivial to describe but turned out to be more complicated behind the scenes.

One example: member storage. From a design standpoint, it's just a place where people can stash items and other people can retrieve them. Super simple, right? Well, it turned out that the item code at the time was all geared around items being in player inventories. So that had to change. We already had a trading interface but that was for two people in the same place. Attaching items to an in-game mail was similar, but it just involves items you as a player have.

So first I had to be able to distribute this list of items so that any guild member could see it. Then I had to make it so that you could add things to your "cart" and remove them, but at the same time any other player on any other node can also try to grab the same item. It keeps track of what's in your cart, but you don't have a "reservation" on the item, someone else can put it in their cart and execute the trade while it's in your cart, and then it gets removed from your cart. When you're ready to trade, you request to do so with the server you're connected to, which authenticates your permissions but then sends the request to the server node that is the authority on your guild's storage. That server will remove the items and then respond back to the other server, which gives them to you and then responds back to you.

It's not rocket science but nearly every guild hall feature involved a lot of coordination between server nodes, and so everything took longer than expected.

Vykhram: Because of what the beautiful [Curio] has said you work on a little of everything. Is it stressful or tiring that they call you from one place to the other with different jobs?

It's more good than bad, I would say. Working on everything gives me a larger perspective and keeps things interesting. The downside is that sometimes we can't work on some of the more complex and interesting features because someone has to get something basic done. For example, during the development of guild halls I had to detour for a week and track down a very nasty bug that was affecting running servers. The bug turned out to have nothing to do with our code, but it still needed fixing, and during that time my regular schedule was put on hold... and nothing got done on Guild Halls for a week.

Thepatriarch: There are no images of the Skylark or Isora, when we crashed in Cradle we lost memory of who we were and we were all noobs (sic) until we reached Haven? Is there evidence that can contradict this statement?

The timeline of the game begins after the skylark was destroyed. You'll just have to take our word for it!