It Seems Pretty Obvious When You Put It Like That – Lessons Learned While Designing a AAA MMO
About the Presentation
In 2006, Bioware established a new studio in Austin, Texas, for the sole purpose of developing Star Wars: The Old Republic, its largest game to date and its first foray into the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game genre. This talk goes into some of the (sometimes hard) lessons learned by one of the design leads over the 6-year course of the project. As the title implies, a lot of common sense will be discussed, but sometimes the simplest lessons are the hardest to recognize, accept, and apply. LENGTH: 40mins DAY: Saturday Jan 21st TIME: 3:10pm
Emmanuel Lusinchi /
Associate Lead Designer
BioWare Austin
Associate Lead Designer
Emmanuel Lusinchi is the Associate Lead Designer on Star Wars: The Old Republic, responsible for identifying and resolving key issues that would stop the design department from meeting its goals, putting out fires, and sneaking features into the game.
Emmanuel joined BioWare in 2003 and was a Senior Designer on Jade Empire and Dragon Age: Origins before moving to Texas to help open the BioWare Austin studio. He has been working on The Old Republic since the very beginning of the project, and held the roles of Lead System Designer and Principal Lead Combat Designer prior to his current responsibilities.
Before joining BioWare, Emmanuel was a microelectronics engineer. Highlights of his career include building the first digital satellite receiver for the Thai market, obtaining half a dozen patents on various digital camera techniques, catching typhus in south–east Asia, and organizing the first terrestrial HDTV broadcast in China.
Emmanuel was born and raised in France and learned most of his English by reading the First Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons manuals – which explains a lot. He sold his first computer game at age 13 for around $150 made for the Texas Ti-99/4A. (The game was published on paper and the readers had to type in the BASIC instructions to play it.)
