Josh Kurtz

From Stargate Worlds Wiki (SGW)

The Development Team
Josh Kurtz
Gender:	Male
Job:	Lead World Builder
Forum Name:	Atrius

Josh Kurtz - Lead World Builder • - by Josh K - Feb 28, 2006 - •

"I moved to Orange County California when I was twelve years old and immediately got into acting and modeling. I?ve been an avid movie buff since I was about five years old and ever since have been interested in the movie industry. I got out of acting the first time I got my hands on a video camera and made my first short film, a real winner called ?Attack of the Killer Yellow Jacket from Mars? filmed at my high school and set to the background soundtrack from Terminator 2. While still in High School, I learned the ins and outs of the Video Toaster software package and the first version of Lightwave. This training led me to work in a number of Hollywood-related fields including Cinematography and Film editing though ultimately I ended up having far more passion for computer graphics and animation.

"After I left Hollywood, I worked as an assistant for a landscape photographer for a few years while building a portfolio and education in computer-related art before finally landing a job at Blizzard Entertainment in QA. My QA experience was short, though intense, and ultimately brought me to the development team working on an at-the-time unannounced MMO called World of Warcraft. As one of the first World Designers on the project I took part in the development of tools for every aspect of World Design starting with World Building and Level Design and moving up to Spawn Tools, Trigger and Event tools, Water Tools and other assorted utilities necessary for building a living, breathing world.

"During my time at Blizzard I encountered the biggest impact my life has ever encountered, a young woman who stole my heart and has changed my life in ways I could never have imagined. She managed to put up with my many shenanigans and stick by my side during some of the most stressful and rewarding times of my life; from waiting patiently while I was working on World of Warcraft and helping to build a World that I am proud of to this day, to bearing me a son who I am far more proud of and introducing me to the job of fatherhood (far more difficult and rewarding than game design as it turns out). She has loved me and put up with me with patience and compassion I can only think of as saintly.

"Shortly after the release of World of Warcraft my family and I moved ourselves from Orange County to Phoenix Arizona where I took a Game Design position at Rainbow Studios as a Gameplay and Systems designer, on a project they have yet to announce. It was about a year after I started working at Rainbow that I heard from an old co-worker of mine from my Blizzard days, Stu Rose. Little did I know that lunch would lead to an opportunity as exciting as the one I am involved in now...

"...which leads my long winded tale to the present where I am heading up the World Design team here on Stargate Worlds and am working to bring as much if not more life and interest to these lands as I have done on other worlds I have worked on in the past."

~ Josh Kurtz

Post from Meet Your Development Team:

"I am Josh Kurtz, Lead World Builder for Stargate Worlds. I come to this company from Blizzard Entertainment where I worked as a World Designer on World of Warcraft. Every day I find myself amazed by the talent and skill shown by my co workers and am confident in the product we are working on.

Outside of games I am a movie fanatic, having seen just about everything I can get my hands on especially Horror or Science Fiction. To both my pride and my immense shame I have managed to see every film listed by either Netflix or Blockbuster Online in their Science Fiction and Horror categories. I am an avid gamer having enjoyed pen and paper games since I was in Elementary School though I think my favorites are Champions and Shadowrun. With all of that I still find time to bicycle, play paintball, am looking at taking up archery, and manage to keep my wife and our children entertained with my endless antics."

Post from To:Cheyenne Staff From:The community :

Thank you for consolidating both of those polls, it helps make responding to them easier and keeps people from missing the responses that may help them out.

The first thing I want to point out is that as a developer, rarely is the question how many or what is the quality. Those answers come out of other questions. First you start with asking what is our story and how many worlds do we need to tell that story, and how many worlds do we need and how large do they need to be to provide enough content for our players to get from min to max level? Once we know those things we can take that minimum number of worlds we need and what their size is and we use that as a base for what we need to build. Now that we know how many and how large as a minimum we have an idea of how many resources we need to build it. Each world takes a certain amount of resources to construct, in terms of time and manpower.

Let us assume that each world is in essence like a zone from your typical MMO; a playspace with encounters, missions, NPC's and other players that you reach through the Stargate. Without going into detail let me say that the creation of such a world which is large enough to contain the content necessary will take about 3 - 4 months. That value includes encounters, missions, terrain, structures, playthrough, progression flow, and polish. What this means is that a single world building team made up of 4 people can construct between 3 and 4 worlds a year if nothing goes wrong.

Those numbers could of course be altered by adding even more automation to the process but that will lower quality and by quality I do not just mean how it looks. Quality covers it's appearance, how the encounters play, how the playthrough is, lack of frustration for the player, the missions, the mobs, and most importantly how much fun it is to play. The more you automate, the less control you have over these things and the less quality you will have in the end. That isn't to say we are not automating anything, we are using a number of tools to help us create and fill large spaces so that we can dedicate more time to the points of interest but that automation is limited to retain quality and has already been figured into the numbers above.