Of course, even console development is not without its pitfalls. Just ask Travis L. Williams, Senior Producer of "Run Like Hell" for the PlayStation 2. "Developing a game for a platform that is not yet on the market (PS2 was not on the market at the time of this interview) is always worse than developing for a platform, PC or otherwise, that's there already, because you're working with an unknown factor. Anyone who's working on an emerging platform -- there's growing pains, you have to do things differently. Eventually you get used to the system, but not before you make some mistakes in the first few iterations. I can't think of any emerging system I have developed for that was a breeze," said Williams.

"For example, the Playstation 2 -- it's great, but from an artistic standpoint, it's almost the antithesis of everything you've learned to this point. It doesn't have a lot of texture memory, but it can display a lot of polygons, so you find yourself going 'Well -- I guess I don't make a texture of the grating, I just make the grating itself -- in polys. That's something that's a bit foreign. And, then we got infatuated with how many polys we could use, so we started using too many polys, and we had to stop ourselves and come up with a happy medium. It's always harder -- hopefully you just learn as you go on."

"Run Like Hell" will be a third-person perspective game where you do a lot of exploration -- it is being slotted into the survival/horror genre. "That means that a lot of the enemies you will be facing will not be slow-moving zombies like in Resident Evil but rather fast moving aliens which will kill you if they get their paws on you," says Williams. "There's also a 'game-within-a-game' element -- for instance, you may be in the middle of a hallway with a jammed door, and you have to pry it with a crowbar. Meanwhile, there are aliens coming at you from either end of the hallway, so you have to pump a button as fast as you can to pry open the door before they can get to you. The difference between startling someone and really terrifying them is what we are trying to achieve."

Williams also has an interesting piece of advice for those looking to get into the industry. As he tells it, "Several years ago, I was in a store trying to buy the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeoneer's Survival Guide. I had $18 in my pocket -- the guide cost $18 and some change, but I didn't have that, ok? I had $18. Of course, the guy wouldn't give me a break at the store, so I started looking for something else -- I had to get SOME gaming fix -- I'd read all my other books. I found this book called Ars Magica by a Minnesota company called Lion Rampant. The book was pretty crappy, but it was a cool gaming system. I played this game for five years and built up a lot of campaign material." At this point he got out of school and started getting into programming, and found himself living in Atlanta.

TALK ABOUT THIS STORY NOW ON THE DIGITAL GAME DEVELOPER

"So, I sent all of my Ars Magica campaign material to Lion Rampant and I became sort of pen pals with Lisa Stevens at the company. She sent suggestions, and she was the one to let me know that their company worked with an investor, an investor who was requiring that they move to Atlanta! Anyway, when they moved down, I knew their system better than they did, so I worked with them at conventions as the dungeon master, or 'storyteller' as they call it. As they merged with White Wolf Magazine to become White Wolf Game Studio, I was going to school, working at a gas station, and game testing for White Wolf. After Lisa went to a small company in Washington, I was the one who knew the most about computers, and so I started shopping White Wolf's Vampire game around to different companies (including, for instance, Interplay -- which turned me down!). This way I met people in the industry including a guy at GameTek who offered me a position as a game designer. From there I went to Akklaim, from there to ASC Games, and from ASC Games to Interplay. The point is that I was doing all of the things that were preparing me for a Senior Producer position ever since I was 16. So my advice is to spend all your money at the game store, kids!"

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