Manveer Heir, Senior Designer at BioWare, will be giving the keynote at Nordic Game Jam 2012. As a warm-up, we managed to get an interview with him here.
Hi Manveer! Can you briefly tell us a bit about your background and how you got into design?
Manveer Heir: I always wanted to work on the creative side of things, since I was a teenager. I decided to learn how to program from books and then went to Virginia Tech to get a Bachelor’s in Computer Science. From there, I worked as a gameplay programmer at Raven Software on Wolfenstein.
Somewhere along the way, we were having a lot of troubles getting that game done, and I found myself regularly going to the creative director and saying “Let’s try this instead” and offering solutions and ways to fix some of the problems we had in the game. Over time, those visits became frequent enough and the ideas, apparently, viable enough that I was asked if I wanted to be a full-time game designer, a role Raven didn’t have at that point. I completed the last year and a half of development on Wolfenstein as a game designer, then became the lead designer on an unannounced game before I left to join BioWare Montréal as a senior designer on Mass Effect 3.
Continue reading ‘Pre-Interview with Keynote Speaker Manveer Heir’
