Developer Interview - Nestor Hernandez

Nov 9th, 2007 - 7:52pm 0 Comments

4 stars (4 ratings)

Nestor: My name is Nestor Hernandez. I am a designer.

SWT: Nestor, could you give the fans a little summary of what you do on a daily basis?

Nestor: Well, usually as a team, we’ll get together in the mornings and have what we call SCRUM meetings which is where we go over the work that we did the day before and lay out a plan for the current day. That usually lasts about 10 minutes or so. Then we get back to our desks and reconnect with what we did yesterday. Scripts and files are always changing so we have to synch up with the latest build and get back to where we left off. Then we just script the rest of the day, or have meetings, and goof around some times.

SWT: How many people are on the design team with you?

Nestor: In the design team we have roughly 10 to 12 people.

SWT: You have some people doing multiple jobs?

Nestor: Yeah, we have designers and then we have what we call object engineers. The designers are the ones that really script out the missions, the stories. The object engineers get the new objects from Art and they’ll add all the functionality and interactions. But they are still considered designers and are still within our group.

SWT: Currently you are working on The Sims Castaway Stories, is that correct?

Nestor: Absolutely!

SWT: How do you like that so far?

Nestor: I really like it. It is really cool. I’ve had a bit of experience working with the Sims on the past two Stories games. It is a really big departure from what we’ve done before. And it is exciting to do something new that the fans haven’t seen before. Because like with The Sims Life Stories and The Sims Pet Stories, people have seen pets, people have seen the regular social interactions that go into The Sims Life Stories. But they really haven’t seen this side of The Sims Stories games. There is a whole island and there is adventure and all the mystery that we are really adding to this game.

SWT: Is there any sneak peek you could give to our audience while not giving away the ending?

Nestor: Of course not the ending. I’ll let you know what I am working on right now. And that is, let me see, I’ll call them ornery orangutans. They are a little bothered by you and they are going to let you know.

SWT: Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? What sort of training do you have and how did you get into the game industry?

Nestor: Well, I went to school here in Austin. The University of Texas. Around the last semester of school I applied for a job at Aspyr. This was back in 2001. So, I got the job and interviewed. I got a call back a month later. So I was doing QA and Tech support for about a year. A lot of my background comes from video production. So after about a year I got an opportunity for a new position. I ended up doing a lot of the game trailers and the game play videos. It was a lot of fun. I did that for about 3 years. And then we got word we were doing development for The Sims Life Stories. As soon as I heard that I jumped on board.

SWT: What kind of games do you play when you are not working on the Sims?

Nestor: Well, I am a little late to the party but I have been playing a lot of Wow thing recently. I’ve also been playing a lot of classic games. I have a Wii. I haven’t been playing a lot of the new Wii games. But I have been playing a lot of their virtual console games. A lot of their oldies like F-zero and Street Fighter II. I’ve also been checking out this Bioshock game.

SWT: Thank you for being with us. Is there anything you want to leave the Fans out there with?

Nestor: Just a thank you. We really appreciate the support and the community which is evolved around these life stories games. It’s great to see that people are digging it, that they are anticipating some of the work that we are doing. We are really thankful for all of that.

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