Joe Riedel has been in the game development industry since 2000. He was involved in the development of the Abducted Engine. Joecodegood.com is his site which contains two articles about the engine.

Please tell us about yourself and your career as it relates to the graphics and gaming industry

Hi. My name's Joe :) I've been in the industry since early 2000. Basically my entire drive in the industry is to try and make the greatest games possible. I want to move the bar forward in graphics, and gameplay, and I love to write the engines that do that.

You spent some time working on Abducted, a known commercial game. How did you influence its development and what was involved in designing the game engine?

I left Contraband Entertainment awhile back, and I haven't been privy to any new Abducted developments. I can however, share with you the early days.

At the very beginning of the project, Richard Cowgill and I talked about a number of ideas, and they all were focused on making the most of this new tech that I was making. We wanted to focus on something that took the most advantage of the new types of moods, and environments that would be possible. Richard is a much more diverse gamer than I am. He loves a wide variety of games. I am a much more narrow minded person when it comes to games. I like a few select types, and they usually involve very involved mystery, plots, and lots of impressive detail. Our goals became set at trying to produce a mystery game, that had horrific scenes of violence, and was punctuated by graphics and puzzles a lot like Myst. We wanted to build a place where, similar to Myst, a feeling of suspense and fear could be created, simply through atmosphere, and then deliver on that with real action.

The design of the game engine really just involved me sitting down and coding, usually on a mainly nocturnal schedule. Game engines are not rocket science. Anyone with a good grasp of what types of things will be needed, will be able to design it in a flexible, and modular type fashion, especially if they've written one or two before. I'm not discounting design, and good coding practices, and techniques. I am, however, very aware that games are not NASA mission software, and they aren't business software where reuse, flexibility, and maintainability are forefront goals. [more info on the engine can be found here]

In what direction is Game Development industry heading towards and what is its future?

The industry is becoming increasingly alarmed at how expensive and big games are starting to become, without any end in sight. The immediate future is a lot of panic, and much, much more bitterness.

Game costs will continue to rise because games are just becoming more complicated (bigger environments, cool physics). Publishers will react by wanting to take no risk what-so-ever, and only publish or fund titles that are based on some kind of known license. If a title has made money before, you can be sure they will milk it (as they should). However, the problem becomes stagnation. It will be harder to get an original title the same kind of funding as say, an XMen game, so it's going to be a hard sell in the future. The sad thing is, originality is our life-blood. Hopefully, we will find a balance in the next few years.

What new 3D technology in software or hardware do you see arriving in the future, and what do you hope to see?

Things are going to flatten out in terms of hardware. With the advent of NV30 level pixel shading, you can pretty much do anything, so the next leaps are going to really have to do with pure instructions and textures per pixel. The ability to do hardware accelerated filtering and composition operations on the frame-buffer is going to be crucial to really bring us to the next level. Right now, to do any complex filtering of a scene, you still have to rely on the CPU.

Any comments or advice you'd like to share with game developers?

Make the best games you possibly can, and share your methods and processes freely with your peers. We can all learn from each other.