User:Josh Petrie

About Me
My name is Josh Petrie. I work at ArenaNet.

I began my career as a graphics programmer at Big Huge Games, working on Rise of Legends. After that I switched gears, working at Raytheon Solipsys doing interesting projects for the Department of Defense and the Navy. Then, around March of 2008, I moved to Washington to take on my current role as a tools programmer for Guild Wars 2.

About My Job
In a nutshell, I help build programs that designers, writers, artists and even other programmers can use to create content for a game. These sorts of programs vary widely in their size and scope: we have little tools that provide periodic or on-demand statistical reports (for example, how much text is in the game?), to complex content creation tools like the ones used to populate a map with NPCs, wildlife, quests and other things.

Tools development is very much a process of iterative optimization: we look for bottlenecks, places where other developers are spending too much time doing something manually, and then we write a program to help automate that process. It's very organic, and perhaps a little unglamorous (after all, players will never see the programs I build), but at the same time immensely satisfying for me.

Contacting Me
Feel free to leave me a note on my talk page, and I'll try to answer as soon as I can. You can also track me down in-game. I have a character under the name "Josh Petrie," and although I don't play him often (he is, in fact, still at level 1), if you happen to see me online I am probably available to chat.

Obviously, I can't talk about Guild Wars 2 yet, but I'm more than happy to answer any questions you might have about game development from a programmer's standpoint or the games industry in general.