We often mention our team in terms of "Amplidudes and Amplidudettes", but we decided we should give you folks an idea of who we mean. You've guessed it, it's time for another instalment of our (semi-)regular feature, Meet the Team! If you want to know more about us, or your nephew wants to learn more about the career path of a game developer, or if you're just curious, read on.
Meet the guy whose puns changed the way we envisioned community interaction, Adrien aka Tichau!
Who are you and what do you do at Amplitude?
Hi, I am Adrien, I come from a (very) small village near Brittany. I work at Amplitude on the programming team. I’ve done a lot of very different things ^^ like audio, gameplay, pathfinding, tools. I also worked on AI with Florian. Speaking of AI, since November, we are both 100% on ES2's AI… and as Florian said, there is a lot to do!
What were you doing before you joined Amplitude?
Amplitude was my first job as graduate programmer. ^^ Before that, I did several internships in other video games companies, Spiders Games and Eugen Systems, based in Paris.
When did you join the studio?
Quite a long time ago now! I joined the studio in 2011 (several months after the start of Endless Space). I worked on Endless Space, Endless Legend and now on Endless Space 2.
What feature have you worked on that you're super proud of?
Tough question, ^^ I’m quite proud of the work I did on pathfinding (especially in Legend). There were some very tricky design rules that were not very easy to implement. ^^
Another thing, I also had a lot of fun working on the diplomacy. On Endless Legend we had a very positive work loop with designers on that part. Introducing a new resource focus on diplomacy was not very easy to design ^^. The research around that feature was very constructive and I'm quite proud of what we did.
What are you currently working on?
I’m currently working on AI in Endless Space 2 with Florian. We are rethinking a lot of stuff to try to progress past Endless Legend AI problems. I hope it will work.
I'm also working on the audio part, we've raised our expectation on Endless Space 2 in terms of sound quality so it creates a lot of problems for me
What's your favorite game of all time?
I don’t have one favorite game but many.
I’ve started to play Civilization II when I was (very) young and enjoyed it a lot! I don’t know how I played because at the time I was not able to read English, ^^ so I probably made some pretty random decisions. ^^
I also played a lot of Heroes III, Morrowind, Civ 4 and 5, Guild Wars (1 & 2) and the Witcher series…
Is there anywhere on the Internet where I can see more of your stuff?
I work on personal projects in my spare time, that I share on my github account: http://github.com/Tichau.
I am currently working on a small piece of software to convert files, you can find it here: www.file-converter.org
I also took part in several game jams, I recently put all my projects here: http://tichau.itch.io
What's your favorite faction or character in our games?
I like to play Sophons for their gameplay and Automatons for the lore in Endless Space. In Legend I loved Drakkens and Vaulters.
Is there a funny story that happened to you at Amplitude?
Back in the beginnings of Amplitude Studios, on Friday evenings we would usually go drink some beers with Florian, and we would try to get people to come with us with funny e-mails. One day, I called it « beer 2 gether » … It stuck as "the day we’re going to drink beers after work", and now we’re doing Beer2Gether events with you.
I’m quite proud of this too!
What's your favorite junk food?
Burgers!! With a lot of French fries made with real potatoes.
What's the most played song in your music library?
I listen to a looot of music. As a musician (I play drums) I love rock music (Led Zeppelin is one of my favorite bands) and funk music (because it is awesomely groovy!).
You should listen to Electro Deluxe! It’s an awesome French band: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy7LDDdM-Wg
What's the dish you cook to impress people?
It’s not to impress people ^^ but I love cooking and especially making all stuff by hand.
With my spouse we’re making a lot of food from scratch for example bread, beer, cheese and it tastes good!
That's it for Adrien! We hope you found this interesting. Comments or additional questions, feel free to comment, but Benjamin won't answer for a while, since he just left on paternity leave. Good luck to him!
If there's a question you would like us to ask the interviewees, let us know!
