Dev Diary April 13th: Tony "Teesquared" Tyson

Hello my name is Tony Tyson and I'm the Technical Director for Star Wars Galaxies. I post on the boards as Teesquared and that is also my character name on TC Prime. For my first Dev Diary I'm going to share with you a little about me, what I do, and our publish process.

I was a late comer to the game industry. Before getting into video games, my programming career started in 1992 after I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. Over the years I gathered a wide range of experience from programming device drivers to web application development but I always messed around with game programming in my spare time.

In the summer of 2002, I finally gave into the lure of the game industry and got a job at Origin where I worked on Ultima X Odyssey. Having grown up playing the old Ultima games it was an amazing opportunity.  When the summer of 2004 rolled around, the studio closed before we could finish the game, but it was a great learning experience and I can say I had the opportunity to create worlds. In the end, I did get closure on the experience by getting to meet Richard Garriott at the second Origin farewell bonfire. So what do you say to Lord British when you meet him for the first time? Well you say "JOB" and "HEAL." After that, I did find a job and it was with SOE. I started as a programmer working on game engine tools. I wrote an NPC editor and a quest editor. Eventually, I moved onto Star Wars Galaxies full time and implemented more content tools and game systems like the quest helper.

In my current role, I'm a programmer manager. I make sure the programming team is able to deliver the features and updates needed for the game. I also work on pick-up tasks that come up when our team members are all busy working on chapter features. These tasks are in addition to my important responsibility of keeping the live service running.

So now onto talk ing about our publish process. Throughout the year we do full chapter releases and incremental chapter updates to address important issues that come up. The publish process starts with figuring out what to work on. We gather input from the community and team members. We look at the resources we have, what changes the technology can support, and the direction we want to take the product. In the end, we always have a long list of possible features and changes to choose from. After going through the challenging task of deciding which changes we're going to do next, the team leads assign team members to implement the features and documentation begins. Next, the documentation is approved and a task list with time estimates is generated. Once all of that is completed, the implementation begins.

As is standard in the software industry, we use version control to allow multiple developers to work on the product. To manage the different workflows, we have copies of the game called "branches".  The branch called "current" is where our full chapter work happens.  Right now that's Chapter 6. Next up from that is our "test" branch. This is where updates are worked on (Chapter 5.6 for example). Eventually, after testing is completed, the changes go out to the "live" branch which is on our production servers. Before changes move to the live branch, development must be completed. Once all the chapter features are completed and issues are addressed, we are "locked-down" and the changes are moved forward.  This is when you will see the full chapter publish on TC Prime. There, external testing occurs (along with the internal testing that constantly goes on ) , and we continue to work on issues that come up as well as polish features as much as possible. Once all the issues are resolved, the chapter is complete and we push it to live for you to enjoy.

Now I'm going to get back to working on Chapter 6. See you all in my next Dev Diary!