ever do it and i had not been humble enough to take advantage of that before i moved into this role where i worked very closely with sid he would design something and i was the gobetween for him and the engineering team he would want things to work a certain way and the engineers wouldnt understand why because it would make programming the engine hard i could mediate between the two and say well its really important because of this gameplay reason i was so interested now in how sid worked i was his advocate to the team i was playing the game constantly just like sid was and really thats the most important thing youve gotta eat your own cooking youve got to play it no matter what state its in then think about whats bad about it and try to make it better the next day what was it like to streamline civilization for consoles i was never a huge civ guy and i think that helped me there were a lot of designers who contributed to what it is today from brian reynolds to soren johnson but sid made it and sid was then able to distill it for me that was definitely my favorite civ i had played at that point because it was so distilled and it was really neat to see him do that im 100 per cent a designer today because i worked with sid on civilization revolution and watched how he worked sid deserves to have an ego but he doesnt he just wants to make the game better hell listen to feedback and accept it as fact that has always steered me rightxcom enemy unknownimage credit 2kdeveloper firaxis games publisher 2k games format xbox 360 android ios pc ps3 ps vita release 2012sid advocated for me after we did civ rev and the question was whats next he was like i think jake deserves a chance to try xcom again im very thankful for that you have the setting and you know what you want the player experience to be but constructing all the elements of the systems to work with each other and produce the player experience you want is enormously complex i had no experience of system design in that regard id seen sid do it but id never done it myself we spent the first year at least working on a prototype that looked pretty cool but was very much the original enemy defense id taken that and then piled all these systems on top of it classes different weapons for people who were familiar with the original game it was awesome for everybody else it was the most complicated spreadsheet thing theyd ever played the reaction when everybody played it was like oh no this is not good the feedback was pretty unequivocal and it was so disheartening and deflating because i knew they were right its hard to overstate how difficult that period was