A Brief Background

I've just finished almost five years of teaching elementary school English in Japan, and am now in the process of lining up an American visa for my wife, so she and I to travel back to the states. Before coming to Japan, I was the IT Director for a PDF conversion business in Oakland, CA. Before that, I was doing lowly production work in the same company, manually scanning pages to be OCR'd for eight hours at a time. In any situation I find myself in, I'm rarely content to just 'get by', and instead look for ways to improve work flow or generally find a better way to go about things. At Document Solutions, that lead to people realizing I was being wasted manning a scanner, and I was subsequently promoted up and out of general production. After being put in charge of more intricate projects that I would handle from start to finish, I eventually wound up overseeing the entire production floor's hardware when the previous IT Manager left (consisting of about 30 workstations, various Windows, Linux and Novell servers, and general networking hardware). In the teaching position, that meant consolidating the English teaching materials across seven schools in the district so when teachers rotated every semester, we all followed a consistent plan, and could pick up where the other teacher left off; something nobody had bothered to do before I showed up.

When joining Document Solutions as a production staff member, though, I had intended to do 'just that' for a while. I didn't imagine it would see me taking over the whole workfloor's hardware and equipment needs; but as those opportunities came up, I rose to the occasion. Again, in Japan, I visited a friend here on vacation with my severance check when DSI shut down, and was blown away by the country as a whole. I went back home and looked for a job teaching here, but didn't imagine it would lead to me organizing the entire district's English teaching schedule and materials (I also didn't imagine I would be here for 5 whole years, but yeah... falling in love and having a kid do that). I took charge when it was apparent that it needed to be done, but wasn't something I set out to do before coming here.

It's time for me to think about what I really want to do in life, and start 'setting out to do' something premeditated. That's why I'm writing this all out here. I want to work on MMOs. I want to join the team that makes the dungeons/encounters, quest lines, and events that make the world a living and breathing place. If that means coming on as a lowly member of the production team (QA, whatever) until I can prove myself worthy of being promoted, then so be it. I'll do what it takes to show that I'm a worthy addition to the team.

In my spare time over the past years, I played a number of MMOs as both an avenue for native English communication and unwinding at the end of the day, as well as an overall fascination with the genre itself. In the various guilds I've been in over the years, I keep finding myself promoted to class leader or officer positions, because I tend to be one of the people organizing the website for the guild, or generally 'getting things done'.

WoW is the game I'm most familiar with, and I feel there's a growing consensus among the 'hardcore' of WoW that Blizzard is catering to casuals, or generally dumbing the game down to appeal to masses. This is something I really don't believe is true, and that disbelief is a constant theme on my blog. I've come to compare those who are fed up as "having a kitchen full of best chefs in the world making breakfast, lunch, and dinner for them everyday... and yet they still have the audacity to complain that their potatoes aren't golden brown enough." I don't consider myself a hardcore raider, but enjoy the PvE side of the game -- raiding with 40, 25, 10 or even 5 man groups -- the most. More importantly, I love the direction WoW is going, recently. The vocal minority will complain the loudest, but allowing more people to see this content that the art and design departments have so worked so hard on, rather than tucking it away for 2% of the playerbase... I feel like it's the right thing to do. This seems to be the direction the genre is going; the 'opening' of MMOs to the masses, and while the hardcore elite may turn up their nose, I've been with WoW since day one, and feel like it's a refreshing change of pace.

I have a complete lack of experience in the game industry, but you have to start somewhere, and know that I could prove myself a worthy addition to any department I worked in. I think that if I can travel halfway across the world to a country where I didn't even know the language before coming, then traveling back to the states to get a job in a new field is totally doable.

I'm a visually oriented person, and don't have a hard time banging out mockups in Photoshop or 3dsmax to get certain points across. My father is an illustrator of 40 years, and my brother is a photographer. Creativity runs in the family, and I feel like one of my biggest strengths is the ability to sit down and crank something like this site out from scratch. I can express my ideas clearly, and knock out a rough sketch of a room layout or concept if it would help. With that understanding, though, the diagrams on this site aren't an art portfolio I'm submitting to join an art team, they're sufficient enough to get a design point across, without requiring me to spend 8 hours on a single element.

While I also can't sit down and churn out C++, if it was a requirement, I would have no aversion to learning. Code doesn't scare me, nor does scripting. I have no fear of computers, and while I might not walk in the door with the knowledge of everything needed on day one, I'll do what it takes to prove hiring me isn't a mistake. I only need to be told something once, if at all. I pick up key game elements quickly, and can immediately turn them around and apply them in interesting new ways. I don't have a shyness about speaking my mind in a constructive fashion, either. If something sucks, I have no issue with saying it, but won't do so without a list of reasons why it sucks, or how it can be improved upon to remove said suck.

The links to the right represent a culmination of "final encounter ideas" (among other things) for a World of Warcraft dungeon that have been refined over time. I basically wanted to challenge myself to design an entire raid dungeon from the ground up, and posted initial encounter designs on my blog asking for feedback from my readers to simulate the back and forth that I imagine the real encounter development team goes through. I've built up a solid readership over the 3 or so years I've been writing on the internet (about ~250 views/day now), first at a tongue in cheek MMO parody site, and later branching off to my own blog. I take it upon myself to review upcoming MMOs on the site as a service to my readers, and as a result, I enjoy dabbling in a little bit of everything the genre offers... Warhammer, Age of Conan, Darkfall, A Tale in the Desert, Lord of the Rings Online, EVE, Free Realms... even smaller projects like Wizard 101 or entirely different genres like puzzle games, FPSes, or RTSes (which I'm especially horrible at, admittedly).

Over time, certain encounters of mine have grown to influence others, and the final 'interplay' of all of the encounters is summarized here, with whatever lore and back story I could come up with on my own. The location headers ("Wing 1", for example) try to describe the trash mobs located in each section of the dungeon, and general pacing or overall feel of that particular area. The sub-headings describe the actual boss encounters themselves.

Itemization of loot drops and hard numbers are intentionally omitted in favor of showing basic fight themes. The idea that "the boss hits like a truck on plate", or "melee receives a flat percentage based reduction of attack speed" are favored over "the cleave hits clothies for 8500". The reason for this is that the time range for implementation of this dungeon would be up in the air, and player health and armor values change from day to day and patch to patch. I've also tried to keep the fights simple. Most bosses have two or three distinct moves, but general flavor attacks could be filled in or compounded to tune the fight.

Many of the boss encounters have a distinct 'hook' that sets them apart, and with a little wiggle, could be applied to any genre from space aliens to steampunk to wild west themes. That I've set it in WoW is just a convenience to get my points across to my blog readership, which is mostly WoW players.

As I mentioned, I'm still in Japan, but heading back to the states as soon as my wife's visa clears (we're hoping late May to early June). I realize this is a little ways off, but my friends in the industry have assured me you can't apply for a position too early.

Thanks so much for reading, I look forward to answering any questions you may have!

Richard Ericksen
rericksen@gmail.com