Fallout Developer Profile – Dan Spitzley

No Mutants Allowed has posted another one of their Fallout Developer Profiles, this time featuring Fallout/Fallout 2/Fallout 3 programmer Dan Spitzley.

Q: Tell us a little about your role in the making of Fallout 1/2/3 (Van Buren)/Tactics?

A: Fallout and Fallout 2 were both developed concurrently with Planescape: Torment, on which I was the lead programmer. Near the end of each of the Fallout game dev cycles there was a lot of scripting that needed to be done and very little time to do it. I was pulled from Torment for about two months on each of them to do area scripting. I don’t really recall all of the work I did on Fallout 1, but I know I reworked pretty much all of the Hub. On Fallout 2 I scripted all of Vault City and the bulk of Broken Hills and Navarro. In addition, I did a bit of design work in Broken Hills which probably felt really out of place. I came up with Mickey the midget treasure hunter, the Professor and the scorpion, and running over the ghoul with your car. The area was pretty sparse near the end of development and something needed to go in there, so I did what I could with my programmer brain.

Fallout 3 was a different beast. After Baldur’s Gate 3 fell apart, we started to work on Fallout 3 with that engine. I wasn’t on the project for long before I left Black Isle, but I was programming on it rather than scripting. At the time, I’m pretty sure I was working on a status effect editor that would allow designers to set up various states on a character, permanent and timed, and parent them in certain ways for lifetime management. Not very interesting stuff, especially as it was originally written for BG3 which needed a far more robust effect management than Fallout would due to D&D spell complexity. I also built the path searching system for BG3, which would probably have been rewritten for Fallout 3.