What Makes a Great RPG? | Simon Carter

In order to get that signal marker to appear in the right position, you have to generate that planet and the patch of terrain around it, and then the buildings that are on that patch of terrain, because that building will flatten the terrain, then you have to go and work out what type of the terrain is, generate all the terrain and the, um, generate all the noise in order to then go and work out the position and whether or not that marker can even actually exist there.

A lot of the time when people are deciding to do that, they're doing it, they're, they're making the wrong decision.

They don't actually know if it's gonna be generalized yet.

And then at the opposite end, you've then got people accidentally creating a key piece of technology which they initially wrote just as a throwaway, throwaway prototype-y piece of code, which then ends up being this load-bearing system that lots of other people are using, but the internals of it have never actually been coherently thought through.

This is a conversation with Simon Carter.

This is my best British pronunciation.

Simon worked for the famous and cherished game studio from the UK, Bullfrog Productions, and went on to founding Big Blue Box with his brother, Dean Carter, the studio that made Fable games, that made games Fable, Fable franchise.

We talk about technical side of making games, both the hardcore development for early Xbox, 64 megabytes of RAM, but also how his work changed when he was in charge of the tech for the entire studio.

Simon Carter, everybody.