RPG Codex: First of all, congratulations on your new writing gigs. Many of us here at the Codex are very much looking forward to both Project Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numenera.
Tell us a bit about yourself. How did you got into creative writing and game design? How did you end up as a stretch goal for not only one, but two spiritual successors to some of the most acclaimed RPGs of all time?
Ziets: I’ve been doing game design and creative writing – in some form – since I was 9 years old. I’m old enough to remember the original D&D red box, which was my introduction to role-playing games, and as soon as I got my hands on those books, I started designing my own adventures. Probably should have played more professionally-made modules first, but it’s more fun to learn by doing.
After that, I spent years writing D&D adventures for my friends, building worlds to play them in, writing (usually terrible) fantasy fiction, and designing rudimentary RPGs with Stuart Smith’s Adventure Construction Set. I still see those years as my apprenticeship in game design – I never would have been prepared for a job in the industry without them.
I mostly stepped away from games during college and grad school, then realized that life was pretty dull without creative work and spent about nine months applying to every game company in existence. Fortunately, I’d continued to write fiction in my free time, so I had some writing samples to send… and they’d gotten better over time. Thanks to a games industry recruiter, I eventually got in touch with the Content Lead for Earth & Beyond at EA-Westwood. He liked the writing sample I sent him, so when his writer quit a couple months later, he gave me a call, and I was off to Nevada.
Working in the industry was fun, but the games that I *really* wanted to make were RPGs in the style of the old Infinity Engine games. I got into the industry a little too late for that – they were already winding down in the early 2000s, and I wasn’t able to break into an RPG studio (Obsidian) until 2005. As far as I could tell, NWN2 was the closest I’d ever get to the IE games, and for all its faults, I loved every minute of working on that title. MotB was even more fun because I got to write the story for a real D&D CRPG – which still blows my mind when I think about it too hard.
