Good grooming and being awesome – but seriously, I think my career development at Obsidian can be marked by a few people having a lot of confidence in me, and giving me opportunities to excel. The first of these is the most awesome Kevin Saunders, who was the lead designer on the console title I started out on at Obsidian (rest its sweet beautiful game-soul), and who took over supervising my work on NWN2. I’d sort of been chucked onto the project haphazardly, and spent my first few weeks playing randomly through areas and giving feedback – Kevin gave me direction and a hefty responsibility when he gave me complete control of handling all the items in the game. At first I was kind of poleaxed (hurr hurr get it), but managed to get things in control and organized, and sort through a mess of several thousand items. I figure I did a good enough job there that the Powers That Be went “boy howdy, her head didn’t explode! Promote her!” and so it was.
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It was a trick balancing the two games, particularly because my tasks on AP were so demanding, but basically after the standard work hours were done, I worked on MotB stuff, as well as coming in on the weekends. I have to emphasize that nobody made me do this, and actually at one point I had to assure the then-lead designer for AP that my work for MotB wasn’t endangering anything else. And it was a really interesting experience, and I’m glad I had a chance to contribute to it – and once again I owe props to Kevin Saunders for giving me such an opportunity.
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Writing for SoZ was a unique challenge not only because Mask of the Betrayer was such a hard act to follow, but because of the nonlinear nature of the game and that I was specifically forbidden to do a lot of stuff that fans of the series expected – deep story, companions, etc. There were a lot of things I wanted to go into detail on, but there was a design directive to make conversations “wide” (i.e. a lot of decisions) instead of “deep” (a lot of nested dialogue). Shaping the story was something that was really done as a group, so there are more situations where I came into things with existing conversations and edited them into a final format rather than shaping them myself… adding personality and such to an existing conversation skeleton that is basically​