I was about 9 or 10 years old, and my mom had bought a 386 33 MHz machine. It was like, a state-of-the-art machine at the time. And I would play a lot of PC games, and my favorite series was the Ultima series.

I got an internship at Microsoft at the Direct X group, and I was really excited to be there, and I learned a lot, and I was actually an engineer at Microsoft.

I wanted to get back into PC development, because I was building the tech for it, but I wasn't actually making the games, and so I was like I really want to make games, especially PC games.

One of the founding principles of oxide is that we wanted to build technology specifically so that we could make the games that nobody was making, uh, specifically to make the games that there was a hole in the market because off the-shelf engines weren't able to do it easily.

The goal of ARX was to build a game that nobody had ever built before, and they needed an engine that could handle a world of unprecedented scale and complexity. The problem with using an off-the-shelf engine is that it would limit their creative possibilities and make it difficult to achieve the level of customization they needed.

One of the key features of ARX is its procedural generation of maps, cities, and animations. This allows players to experience a unique game every time they play, and it also allows the development team to create a vast amount of content without having to manually design each element.

To facilitate the development and customization of ARX, Oxide Games created a custom data language called ZNO. This language allows artists and designers to create game assets and level data using a straightforward and human-readable format.

When asked about advice for game developers who want to follow in their footsteps, the presenter emphasized the importance of staying focused on the game they are making and not getting too hung up on technical details.

It's probably like technical artist and uh you know Graphics engine programmer like the best paid most sought after positions but very very few people I think are able to really get through that process.

I really liked math so when I was in school I got a degree in CS and I got a degree in math uh and that degree in math was invaluable more than the I didn't even need to get CS degree like I would just get the math degree I would take CS classes but the Cs classes didn't teach me a program

especially designers I was just talking about it today how much especially in the strategy space comes down to solid understanding of of mathematical relationships how much actually ends up being differential equations how much ends up being these relationships