Brian Hicks on community engagement
From PAX Online 2020 - Survival of the Fittest w/ Dean Hall & Brian Hicks · · RocketWerkz
“I think that being able to have that genuine relationship with the community you also need to sort of temper that with well you know other community going to understand and be able to appreciate what I'm telling them. I'm going to be pragmatic and honest.”
On , Brian Hicks, Senior Vice President of Product Management & Operations at PC CONNECTION INC, spoke about community engagement during PAX Online 2020 - Survival of the Fittest w/ Dean Hall & Brian Hicks on RocketWerkz.
About Brian Hicks
Brian Hicks, known for his work as creative director on *DayZ* and executive producer on *Icarus* at Rocketwerks, has discussed the challenges and design philosophy of survival games. In a September 2020 PAX Online panel with Dean Hall, Hicks stated that a major trap for survival games is scaling, and emphasized the importance of clearly defining a game's pillars and experience. He noted that *Icarus* aimed to give "real treatment to those core survival mechanics" and that the team had been "tracking really well" by sticking to milestones and testing assumptions. Hicks also reflected on *DayZ*'s development, saying that "it wasn't just about throwing money at the problem" but about getting experienced people, and that he considered being able to say "Thanks, I hate it" to identify mistakes as his most important role on a project. In earlier appearances, Hicks discussed technical and community aspects of game development. At a 2019 Elm conference, he gave a talk on designing good APIs for user interfaces, recommending a "with-star" pattern for view code. In a 2018 interview, he expressed regret over starting *DayZ*'s status reports, calling them stressful and demoralizing for contributors. He also stated that he would not remove third-person gameplay from *DayZ*, as it was "not our right to remove it," and suggested that starting every player with a radio and battery would improve player interaction. At E3 2015, Hicks announced plans for a single-player *DayZ* option and the public release of server-hosting tools upon the game's beta.