General:Mike Lipari: Team Profile

This is a developer diary focused on Mike Lipari. The diary was originally posted to the old elderscrolls.com website on 8 December 2003.

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Mike Lipari - Programmer

1. So what's your role on the Elder Scrolls team?

I'm a Designer, one of the folks responsible for all those words on the screen while you play. Specifically, I'm responsible for the Mages Guild quest line.

2. What's your typical day like on the team?

When I wake up, I start thinking about what I'd been working on when I left last night and see if I've come up with a solution while I slept. When I get in, if I've had any revelations, I implement them before moving on to the rest of the day. I get the latest source code and build the EXEs to make sure there aren't any conflicts between what I'm doing and what everyone else has checked in. While the machine is doing this, a regrettably short time now (see below), I check the internet to see if anything important has happened in the world while I wasn't looking. If everything works out OK, then its on to thinking about and working on completing my tasks.

This is normally done to a soundtrack provided by a SomaFM Shoutcast or CDs of Magnetic Fields, Death Cab For Cutie, Built To Spill, Fountains of Wayne, Hum, A Perfect Circle, etc. Interspersed through this period are varied interruptions. There's generally an AI and/or world organization discussion at some point. Someone sometimes finds a problem with the editor (this is often Noah (so much so that he had his own bug filter for Morrowind)).

EXEs begin to crash, data gets corrupted, and I abandon scheduled work for the problems at hand. Eventually everyone goes home and I am able to finish up what they needed done and work on my stuff until I hit a snag worth taking the night to think about. Somewhere in there is eating and sleeping and games and such, then the next day it starts up again.

3. What's your favorite development tool?

IncrediBuild. Its a product that works with Visual Studio to let you essentially setup other machines to be compiler farms for you. Full rebuilds that used to take hours now take minutes.

4. So what do you spend your late nights and weekends doing?

At the moment, playing Final Fantasy XI, though that may change when monthly fees start rolling in. Then it will likely be back to boardgames, Munchkin, Battlefield 1942, movies, the occasional game of putt putt, and, when one is available, a good book. And, of course, more work.

5. What's your favorite game?

Across the entirety of my life, I think I've spent more time playing Mario Kart 64 than I have any other game (with the possible exception of Contra 3). More recently, I really enjoyed the time I spent playing Morrowind.

Its hard to say where it places since I played it in so many different phases of development, but I'd rank it up there with Arena and Daggerfall for favorite (real) RPG. For favorite pure action FPS, I think I'll go with Battlefield.

6. What games are you playing now?

Right now I'm trying to get as much play as possible out of my free month of Final Fantasy XI. Before that, and likely after, there's a lot of Battlefield 1942 being played. In addition to the regular and expansion maps, both Desert Combat and Eve of Destruction get a lot of play time. A lot of my enjoyment of this game stems from the fact that my wife Rachel is a big fan too. As far as public couple activities go I have yet to find one anywhere near as enjoyable as shooting Nazis.

7. What game do you hate that everyone else seems to like?

I'm not a big fan of the strategy computer games. I seem to be alone in this though, as rarely a day passes that someone I know doesn't extoll the virtues of some new top-down, map-view, unit-clicking monstrosity. I don't like playing with Civilizations, desperately avoid Crafts both Star and War, and Ages of Empires or Mythologies or Mythological Empires just bore me to tears. If I'm doing hard-core strategizing, I want it on a table with a board or tiles and brightly colored pieces of wood (or at least some nice cards).

8. What's the craziest game idea you've had?

A while back I had an idea for a game that starts with you waking up in bed in a hotel. You do what you want, wander around, take the elevator to different floors, break into other people's rooms and see what's going on there, or perhaps try to get past the police who you find preventing anyone from leaving the hotel.

After 30 minutes of this, the hotel explodes and collapses killing everyone inside, including you. After the explosion cutscene plays, it begins to rewind and you see flashes of important people and places in the hotel at times leading up to the explosion and then you wake up back in your bed in the hotel with this whole Groundhog's Day thing going on.

The idea is that the hotel is a closed system with completely dynamic actors moving through it who, if left to their own devices, bring about the destruction of the hotel. The main goal of the game is for you to interact with the world and these actors so that their combined action produces an acceptable result.

For example, you push all the buttons in the elevator thus altering the inter-floor transit for all actors in the game for a short period so at 3:17 when a man with a bomb in his suitcase gets into the elevator he finds himself sharing it with an off-duty police officer instead of entering it alone. However you can choose to do whatever you want. You can stay in your room and watch porn for your half hour of life (though the next half hour it will be the same show). You can explore the hotel finding out more about your fellow guests (like the congressman and his mistress in room 312 (and his rival's private investigators in room 314)).

The game is about exploring a world that is not large, but incredibly complex, and learning how to interact with it to produce your desired results. Its not exactly the game for everybody, but I'd love to play it, even if I have to make it to do so.