Upcoming Chat With Randy Smith

JumpinBlackjackFlash on 16/4/2019 at 03:23

A level or two of Thief 2X, maybe St. Lucia's from The Dark Mod, and The Kill Factory as a silly closer? I think that should cover some high points (and one GLORIOUS point) of the Thief modding community and impress him with what the community has made over the years.

Those are my recommendations. I've barely tapped into the more "vanilla" fan missions outside of Thief 2X because let's face it, that's already a lot of content I've just mentioned.

McTaffer on 17/4/2019 at 02:50

Why not pick a few from the 20AC? That would probably be most topical, especially if you're focusing on TDP primarily.

Amorphous on 18/4/2019 at 00:54

Yeah, I was thinking that would be best. I haven't played them all, though.

Darkness_Falls on 24/4/2019 at 05:51

I haven't seen those videos yet, but will watch someday hopefully soon. I've tried to come up with some questions I'd be curious about, if you haven't already done the interview?

Since you're much more familiar with the videos you posted and probably other interviews he's done, my questions may be repeats or not desirable to ask; so please feel free to use or not use any or all of the questions however you see fit.

Obviously, for each of my main questions, some of my follow-up/sub-questions could become irrelevant depending on how he answers; as I tried to ask fairly open-ended questions for most. If you prepare yourself well and know my questions beforehand decently well, you can help avoid awkwardly asking questions that he's already answered ;) ... or be able to tweak the follow-ups in a way that won't generate confusion.

I'm also sorry I haven't watched in-game credits or read Internet articles recently about Randy Smith, to learn more about his Thief contributions :( I was more in-the-know when TDS and Thief 2014 were in development. (I say this mainly because of my Question #10.) If you feel my questions are not well-suited for who he is and his role in the games... or if they don't address things you want addressed... then please don't ask them. I don't want to waste his time with questions he would find boring or non-applicable to his roles. I just learned about your post an hour ago, so I've scrambled to make some questions before I go to sleep. Good luck with your interview and have fun! It's nice you are doing this, as I think it's important to hear about Thief-related perspectives and moments like this that mean so much to the Thief community.

My proposed questions...

1) When you look back at your days at Looking Glass Studios (LGS) during Thief development, what are some of your fondest memories?

2) What were some of your favorite levels, map areas, or environments that you worked on; or do you even have any that stand out in your mind?

3) What were some interesting developmental challenges you and/or your team had to overcome?

4) Do you ever find yourself playing Thief 1, 2, or 3 to this day? If so, what is it like? What do you think? Do you use HD mods?

5) What was your average work day like while working on Thief games at LGS?

6) Do you remember the very first time you went into the Thief 1 game world (i.e., the first dev build) and looked around? What was that like? What did you see? What did you do in there? Do you remember if there was any audio?

7) If a new Thief game was being made, would you want it to be set in the existing Thief 1/2/3 universe and time, or a different time/place/setting?

8) Have you seen The Dark Mod and Thief2x? Have you played them? What are your impressions? Your work 20 years ago helped inspire so many fans over the years to make things like this and many other Thief-inspired creations; how does that make you feel?

9) While at Looking Glass, did you get to talk with Eric Brosius much, or work with him directly? Any meetings or audio-related things that stand out in your mind? Did you realize during development just how iconic he and his team's audio creations would be?

10) Did you voice any of the characters in Thief 1, 2, or 3? If so, do you remember which ones, or remember any of your lines to this day?

11) While in the LGS days, do you remember having any thoughts about Stephen Russell's performances as Garrett and other characters he voiced (like, "Wow! This guy's good!" or similar)? Do you still keep in touch with him? Do you remember if any other people auditioned to voice Garrett?

12) Did you play Thief 2014, and what did you think of it?

13) Has stealth in gaming evolved over these 20 years to where you thought it would? How do you see stealth evolving in the next 10 or 20 years?

Amorphous on 25/4/2019 at 19:31

The chat has ended, and I did cover some of the questions here. I appreciate the suggestions. I had a ton of fun, Randy is such a cool dude. If anyone missed it and still wants to watch, it's up on (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvDJQHvO7g8) YouTube now.

Moghedian on 27/4/2019 at 01:06

Thanks for posting that on youtube. It was interesting hearing about Thief from one of the builder's perspective.

Darkness_Falls on 13/5/2019 at 07:31

Thanks for posting, Amorphous. I look forward to taking a full listen soon.

I did listen to the first 20-30 mins a couple weeks back already. At first, I felt a little sad for Randy that you dove so quickly into bugs and issues with the game so quickly, rather than taking at least a bit of time to appreciate the final product and his contributions more. He seemed to take it quite well, though, and rolled with it, no problem... so who am I to say? Maybe you guys had talked quite a bit about your adoration of the game and his work before the recording began. It just seemed odd to me that right off the bat he was, essentially, getting a bug report list and being asked to comment on them 20 years after the game was developed, when bugs often need to be tested, replicated, analyzed, hardware configs considered, etc. :) He just rolled with the punches, though, like it was no big deal and seemed to enjoy the dialogue; so maybe you were speaking his developer language and you guys were entirely on the same wavelength.

Either way, thanks again for doing this. As I said before, it's always nice to hear from the creators of Thief!

john9818a on 7/6/2019 at 09:05

I watched the first hour or so and I found the interview to be very insightful. I'll watch the rest when I have more time.

The bug where the player can go through thin walls can be done without jumping. In one of my past missions I had a elevator with shaft walls that were too thin. If I tried to walk backwards against one of the thin walls while I was going up I would end up outside behind the wall.

Since the player hits and player camera dropping are motions, I was under the impression that the leanings were motions as well.

vfig on 18/6/2019 at 17:19

Quote Posted by john9818a

Since the player hits and player camera dropping are motions, I was under the impression that the leanings were motions as well.

Not sure what you mean by “player camera dropping”—you mean the camera falling to the floor when Garrett dies? Or do you mean the headbob as he walks? I’ve never looked into the former, but headbob and leaning are both driven by code, not motions.

Something that caught my ear during that chat is that Randy inherited the geometry of Escape and The Haunted Cathedral (not Return, which he did build) from other designer(s). This makes sense to me, because the style of their construction is dramatically different from RTTC. But the only per-level design credits I’ve seen are (https://thief.fandom.com/wiki/Designer_Credits) those on the wiki and some of the old threads here that were a source—but no mention of who started those missions. Anyone know who might have been the original builders of these levels? I’m thinking it’s probably either Jeff Yaus (July 1997: “we're giving a few interested parties tryouts on level editing to help fill the gap left by Jeff's recent departure from the team”) or Steve Canniff (September 1997: “we got in … a good part of a new level (thanks to the brilliant work of Steve Canniff)”, which is the last mention of Steve (https://thief.fandom.com/wiki/LGS_TDP_Diary) in the dev diary, shortly before Randy’s joining is mentioned in the October 31 update). Not that it matters particularly. I’m just curious because Haunted Cathedral is my second-favourite mission (after Lost City) in terms of geometry and layout.

Amorphous on 19/6/2019 at 11:54

Sorry, haven't really been paying attention here. About Darkness_Falls post, yeah I get how it might seem a lil weird. But we went into it with the understanding that I'm a speedrunner and break the game regularly for fun, and it was kind of an unofficial focus of the chat. He had plenty of time to mentally prepare for a "bug report" and seemed excited to see some of the sillier stuff the game does.

And yeah, I was surprised to hear that Haunted Cathedral wasn't entirely "his." I thought it was funny he still remembered specific bits of geometry that he disliked but didn't want to change because it was someone else's work.