Developer Interview - LoCarb

In our third interview with the Defiance team we ambush LoCarb as he peeks out of his bunker following the latest announcement that he is replacing Trick as Creative Lead.

Can you introduce yourself briefly?

My name is Carble Cheung I am the new Creative Lead of the Defiance game franchise. Most players that may have interacted with me will know me by my handle LoCarb. I've been with Trion since 2007 and my first Trion project was the original Rift game. I joined the Defiance team as soon as I had the chance to hop on over - well over a year ago.

What was your previous position and what did you do?

Prior to Creative Lead I was a Game Designer something that is a little more generic of a title that meant I could tackle making new content or systems. Though I have been known to mess around with the art pipeline in the game. I helped put together the Grid Enemy set so that it worked it game correctly - which is kind of in the Technical Art field, something I have done at a previous studio. On Rift I helped set up the data pipeline and made a bunch of quests, rifts, & a sliver, etc.

Fun factoid for the DD site: Before I got in to the video game industry I tried my shot as a comic book colorist, it only took me a few weeks before I realized it wasn't for me.

With your new position as Creative Lead, what does this change about what you will be doing?

 The new position of Creative Lead means I get to help guide the overall direction and tone of the game, which in short is story and content as a whole. Right now I'm working with the rest of the design team and looking at where and how to bring the player along the story arc. - Sorry if that doesn't sound too exciting, but I'm trying not to bring up any spoilers ;)

Outside of Defiance, and excluding Trion products, what type of games do you enjoy playing?

It goes back and forth a lot. It really depends on how much time I get to myself. In general I do enjoy many genres; I do tend to jump around a lot. On PC usually, FPS, MMOs, Simulation & Strategy games. On portables, puzzles and old school RPGs. On consoles I tend to lean towards Action/Adventure and racing games. As for a favorite game series I will always fallback on the Final Fantasy. Playing that series helped to drive me here where I am today. As a kid I never in a million years expected I'd be making games for a living.

Have any other interests that you would like to share?

I just enjoy collecting stuff, toys, cards, comics, etc. It’s more about the chase than the actual collection. Since I'm not a California native I tend to find myself exploring more that way and discovering new towns, it's quite fun. I've been known to drive 90 minutes in all directions just stopping by every comic store, & big box store hunting for that "one piece" I'm missing. My current hunts are for Amiibos, I have since resorted to buying some of them from eBay from Japan. It really saddens me when I have to hunt for toys online, the story of the hunt isn't as exciting when I do that.

What is your typical workday like?

My workday now is kind of inconsistent since I'm still adjusting to my new role, there are so many more meetings now. I can break down multiple days throughout this past week so you can get an average day.

So typically I get up at 6:30 and get my kid ready for school, once that is done I hop on to the forums really quick (I'm a lurker) as I check my email & Skype to see if anything crazy happened over night. Then I get ready and head out. If I'm early I'll hit a Target store (remember I'm a toy hunter).

I get in around 9:30 -10 depending on traffic and my toy luck. First I try and catch up on some new emails, and see if Rich (Phantasie) has anything for me to address. If nothing is "on fire" I'll take look at some bugs or look up an issue someone mentioned in the forums (from earlier). If all is normal I'll check in with the rest of the team to see if they need anything from me. I believe this week Fuzzy found a couple of things on PTS for me to deal with when I got in, I still don't know when she sleeps. Though, recently it's all been things from PTS in general.

Before I know it, it's lunch time. (If it's Thursday I head to Toys R Us - yup toys again). When I get back the rest of the day gets set up for whatever big task I want to hit. Whether is issues on PTS, or prepping the upcoming updates past Alcatraz. It usually ends up being a big mix of everything. Yesterday I grabbed some of the designers into looking what we might do for future content updates that could tie in with the TV show on SyFy. We've been getting season 3 scripts from SyFy recently. BTW the first episode is insane, insane!!! I can't wait to see it.

From your contributions to the game, what are you most proud of doing?

The Holiday Events are definitely up there, they are really fun for me to make and even more so I enjoy watching players out there on LIVE playing them and having a good time. I really wanted to put in some seasonal content for quite some time. It wasn't until the DLCs were done before I could do this. I was also super stoked about getting the reindeer contracts in for the Solstice Strike event, more because it was something different to do in Paradise. I really enjoyed all of the players shouting around the locations when it finally went live. It really did make it feel like the game was at launch again.

The other thing I would say was probably one of the first things I did on Defiance. It was working on the Sieges, I patched up some existing bugs and made a new siege at Serenity Academy. Sieges really helped me learn a lot about how the data is structured in this project. Working with Sieges eventually led to Incursions which was great because it was combining what players were doing with death marches and capping them off with sieges. I even got a chance to talk with some forum members about some bugs that were eventually resolved, it was my first interaction with the Defiance community if I recall correctly.

I have to ask, what's with the colour orange?

Here’s a pic of me and my daughter both rocking an orange hoodie.

Growing up I never really wore anything flashy since I grew up in what could be considered a bad neighborhood. I always had dark colored jackets, colors like black, brown and navy blue so that I never stuck out. One day (about 5-6 years ago) I saw this orange hoodie and it was just calling me, so I picked it up. My family knowing how much I liked my orange hoodie decided to get me 2 more over the years. The funny thing about being known as the orange hoodie guy is that when I take it off people have walked right past me as they are coming to see me. It really throws people off when I don't have my orange hoodie on. Now that I think about it, I'm due to get a new one soon so that I can put it in to the rotation.

How did you start working for Trion?

One day in 2007 I bumped in to a former colleague who worked at Trion and told him I was looking for a new gig, I landed an interview the next day and I started working within a week's time. The best thing was that during the interview I saw a lot of former colleagues that I trust and respected, it really convinced me to join the team then and that one aspect continues to keep me here today. We really work with great people here at Trion, I feel quite fortunate about that.

What is different about working on Defiance from other projects?

So I’ve worked on console games (PS2, Xbox, PS2 & PS3) and I've worked on Rift a massive online PC game. Defiance is combination of both! We are adding content on a continuous basis to an online game simultaneously across multiple platforms PC, Xbox360 and PS3, and it’s free to play. I can't really think of any other games that do that. Just from that aspect alone Defiance is a very unique project to be on.

What's the hardest and most rewarding things about working on Defiance?

Working on an existing game is really difficult; every time you add something you are inherently changing the whole game. It’s a pretty challenging situation to be in constantly. The great thing is that we have some really talented people on the team. Seeing things finished and out on the LIVE servers is always as rewarding as dealing with the challenges we faced making it.

What's on your desk?

My desk is pretty messy, I have the scripts from the SyFy show, my notebooks (you know – the paper kind), a slew of post it notes (it’s how I track small tasks, or wishlist tasks, and keep track of seldom used information).

Most colleagues would point out the tower of empty boxes (it’s almost Jenga like) I’ve been known to take home empty boxes to sell off my toys to make room for new ones. I won’t share pictures of that mess of cardboard.

As for the fun stuff, I have a few Lego sets, a train with hellbug plushie passengers, & the Milano spaceship from the Guardians of the Galaxy set. My Japanese Amiibo figures that I just got in from eBay. There is a Transformers statue featuring Soundwave and his cassette minions. I also have a pretty cool crochet chameleon I bought off of etsy - I had the creator add magnets so I could have it cling to parts of my desk. I have a fondness for chameleons, I almost considered getting one as a pet, but decided to stick with an easier to care for, never die on me option. Finally there is a signed copy of the Rift CE from the original dev team that I was part of.

Bonus - Those Girl Scout cookies over there are my way of not consuming the entire box on my own. I put it up to share with the rest of the team, Scapes helped contribute to that. We’re so evil….

If you could introduce one feature to the game, what would it be?

OK - so you’ve seen me mention toys a few times, and I know it’s not exactly a game feature. I’d love to see some physical stuff, figures or statues of some kind. Something along the lines of an action figure of your character that you could customize and pose. A gun replica collection would be sweet too. Oh man I want that now so badly. I’d totally make a siege diorama of me tearing through some Volge.

What's your favourite weapon or outfit?

I haven’t found a favorite weapon yet; I just keep going through them because they all have their pros and cons (as it should be). Though my current loadout has a legendary Piper from the solstice event, I just love how it feels, plus I like the model too so that may skew it a bit.

For the outfit I am really digging the combination of the CODA Commando Outfit with the Ekaru Predator Helmet. I have a few other combinations, maybe I’ll share that with you in the future, I just don’t want to out my secret play character ;)

Where does the name LoCarb come from?

The name came from my former studio, a co-worker took my nameplate and just gave me the nickname “LoCarb” using a few stickie notes adding the “Lo” and covering the “le” in my name. It was one of those late nights (like 3AM late) where people do fun things to keep things in perspective – “we’re here late, but you still have to have fun” - the don’t forget to live life type of things. I just left it on and it stuck with me all of these years, the stickies might still be on my nameplate which in a box somewhere. It must have been over 10 years ago, during the beginning of the Low Carb diet movement.

Another DD tidbit: Some of the seniors devs here calls me Carbalicious, and some refer to me as Carbomb, yup all a play on Carble.

Do you have any amusing tales to tell from behind the scenes of development?

Actually there was one recently, it’s probably more amusing as a dev - you had to be there moment. As you know for Alcatraz we changed the MAX EGO rating from 5900 to 6000. Upon searching where we have that in code, one of our engineers stumbled upon an odd file in the game named stars (or something to that effect), it just happened to have the value” 5900” in there. He basically said “what the heck is this file?” and “what are all of these numbers for?” they were obviously locations. After a little bit of digging we discovered that all of the stars in the sky in game are real locations of stars if you were actually in the San Francisco area. It is not a texture map of stars in the sky they are real locations that twinkle. So the next time you are in paradise look up at the night sky and appreciate the awesomeness of code.