Friday Feature - Introducing James "DevShade" Loy

This week, you'll get to know one of our Star Wars Galaxies developers and one of the people behind some of the recent changes!

Forum Handle: DevShade

What is your Real Name? James Loy

What is your official title/position? Dev N00b? No? OK, Quality Assurance /Apprentice Designer.

How long have you been working on SWG? I've been on the QA team since 2007 and Apprentice Designer since August '09. My first Designer task was filling in spreadsheet after spreadsheet with Chronicles information. That which does not kill us makes us stronger, right? It's only been recently, though, that I've started working on big things with high visibility like No Trade and Beast Masters.

Where were you born and raised? "In west Philidelphia I was born and" no, wait, I was born and raised in little town east of Houston, Texas. Eventually the humidity (and an ex-girlfriend whom I still owe for gas) drove me to Austin and now I can't imagine living anywhere else.

Who is your favorite Star Wars character and why? I've always liked R2-D2; he's a robot MacGyver except that instead of just having a Swiss army knife, he IS one! And a hacker, and submarine, and mechanic, and

Outside of work, what do you like to do? I love to cook for my family and any friends brave (or foolhardy) enough to drop by. I also enjoy reading, particularly bedtime stories to my son and daughter though for some reason I'm not allowed to read to them from any of my Stephen King, Clive Barker, Lovecraft, or Brian Lumley books, go figure. I mean, what kid wouldn't want to go to sleep after "Horton Hears an Unnamable Piping?" Also I'm catching up on back episodes of Lost.

What have we seen ingame that you worked on? Let's see at first I did mostly simple bug fixes; typos and such. I did the layout of the defenses (turrets, towers, barricades, and such) and pathing of the offense for the Keren siege. I did a few things with the Nym's Themepark update; my favorite of those were the conversations for Rek "Cool Story, Bro" Thelcar and Grenz. I've chosen and implemented the majority of the items that have had No Trade removed from them (don't flame me!). But it's only been with the recent Beast Master creatures that I've really started "flying solo" on major player-facing issues, which is why you're only now hearing from me. Having reached the "Hey look, are those wolves? *toss*" point in my apprenticeship, this was the first project I did without my training wheels <insert Peter Griffin knee-holding montage here> (was that a mixed metaphor? *shrug*). And yes, as many of you surmised from the BBP announcements and the Vorpal Durni, I am a Monty Python fan. And I'm a Lumberjack. And I'm ok.

What were some of the major challenges you faced in working on the Beast Master profession recently? Those BBP announcements! Striking just the right balance of hint and red herring... and watching the tin hats come out in the forum responses now that was fun! Probably one of the biggest challenges was simply understanding the incubation/mutation system, since I had never played the in-lab variety of Beast Master ingame. I've put in a lot of goodies for the Beast Masters: Creatures from Episode 2, flying mounts, and new mutations are just a few. There are also newly re-enabled creatures to sample and old elusive mutations made a bit more accessible. No matter how hard BBP tries to talk you out of it, guys, keep those incubators cooking; there's still more to find and I'm not done yet!

Click here to give "DevShade" an official welcome!