By Aimee “Ashlanne” Rekoske

It’s time to highlight another diverse employee here at SOE! You’ve met the Community Team on the forums and at Fan Faire. But what about our fine folks in Finance, Human Resources, Development, Legal, Quality Assurance, Office Operations, Public Relations, Administrative Assistants, and Marketing, just to name a few. We have people from all walks of life here at SOE.



The Community Team would like to introduce you to those people in a monthly feature titled, “SOE Employee Spotlight.” Each month our spotlighted employee will also appear in some fashion on the Official SOE Podcast. This month you will meet Alan VanCouvering, Assistant Lead Designer for the EverQuest Development Team. Take a moment to find out about what a typical day in the office is like for him, what his favorite SOE game is, and other fun tidbits. As a special bonus, we’ve included a screenshot from his favorite SOE Game for you to download!



Question: Tell us about yourself! What’s your name and what do you do here at SOE? How long have you been working at SOE?

Answer: I’m Alan VanCouvering, Assistant Lead Designer for EverQuest.* I’ve been with SOE for 10 Years 10 months 10 days as of the day I am writing this.

Question: How did you get into the industry?

Answer: I was the editor of an EverQuest story site, where we printed stories based in Norrath. This was about two years before the game actually launched, so all of our stories were based on information released through press and the web site. We were noticed by the folks on the dev team. This, combined with the fact that they knew me from the Tanarus beta appears to have been enough for them to consider me for the Community Manager position when it opened up.
Basically, right place, right time. This is not the best way to go about it, for those that are wondering.

Question: Tell us what a typical workday is like for you.

Answer: This is an interesting (by “interesting” I mean difficult) question. How about I just discuss what today was like for me. It seemed statistically average-ish.
First thing in the morning was our scrum meetings. We have our teams broken up into two groups, and each group meets in the morning. It’s a short meeting where we go over what we accomplished yesterday, what we expect to get done today, and any issues we might foresee that could prevent us from accomplishing those tasks. As the assistant lead, I attend both meetings.
Then, a gallon of coffee to help erase the fact that I worked rather late last night and am running on about six hours sleep for the third day in a row.
For the rest of the morning I was working on figuring out the reward structure for our expansion launch event. This required several emails and a few impromptu meetings with the items guy and our design lead. Having figured out what to give out and what would need to be done to earn it, I set about building the NPC that would give the rewards and the mechanisms for doing so. This took longer than it should have because it isn’t something I do very often.

While working on that I also noticed an issue with…something I can’t talk about. This led me into a somewhat convoluted discussion with our spells guy about some world scripting he developed. And then suddenly it was lunch time, and I hadn’t accomplished a single thing that I said I’d get done in the meeting this morning.

After lunch I went back and finished up the reward vendor guy, then hopped in for a play test on one of our expansion raids. This ate up the remainder of the early afternoon.

Now, it’s about 5:30 pm and I’m writing this because I need to get our Community Manager off my back.

Later today I’ll be fixing bugs in an expansion raid that I built based on feedback given to me last week during our play testing. Since the list for that is pretty long, I’ll be here until pretty late, assuming I don’t start to nod off at my desk.

This is pretty typical of my days. I know this is true of all the leads and assistant leads on the team. Our job is to do a lesser portion of the workload that our team members do every day, and pick up whatever comes up and deal with it so that they don’t have to stop their work. A lot of my day is meetings (today is a meeting-lite day) and various sundry random items, like the one I couldn’t talk about above.

Question: Let’s talk favorites… What is your favorite SOE game title? What is your favorite location, favorite thing about that game? Do you have a favorite memory or moment from that particular game?

Answer: Tanarus. Really. I loved that game. I loved that the play sessions could be short or long, depending on your play time. The gameplay was simple and skill-based. And it was fun because I played with friends. I have memories of my teammate, Crop Circle, and his complete inability to listen to chat. We’d make sure to tell each other where we found enemy mines, for example. I still remember typing and yelling “Mines! Crop! Mines on that ramp, don’t…” Then we’d just hear a loud explosion.

Question: If you could be any fictional character, who would you be?

Answer: Really? This is starting to sound like a bad first date… Um, any fictional character… Does it have to be one everyone knows? Fiddler? Oh, I know: The Onion Knight, Davos Seaworth. Otherwise… Batman. ?

Question: If you could have any superpower, what would it be?

Answer: Easy, Invulnerability. Not getting shot is great. Heck, not being able to stub your toe on a table in the middle of the night is even better.

Question: Let’s get real! Hobbies? What’s last book you read? Last movie you saw? What do you do to unwind after a busy day?

Answer: I read and listen to a lot of books. I’ve been a huge fan of audio books for a long time now. Currently I’m listening to The Stress of Her Regard, by Tim Powers. Powers might be my favorite author. His mythology is fantastic, wild and still very consistent. I highly recommend his work. I’m reading (with my eyes rather than my ears) The Crippled God, by Stephen Erikson. This is the… I dunno, thirteenth book in a great series. In a lot of ways it’s a typical fantasy book. But he has created an interesting world that is not typical fantasy with a magic and myth system that I like very much. In fact, there’s a paper RPG based on it. Look up Malazan on the Interwebs.

As for movies… I can’t remember the last one I saw in a theater.* Going outside is not one of my hobbies.* I did recently watch Battle for Los Angeles, which I discovered was NOT the one that was in theaters recently.* Possibly the worst movie I’ve seen recently, despite having a chick with a katana that was cutting alien robots in half.* I did watch Skyline, and I didn’t hate it.

I unwind lately playing Terraria.* I’m in an SOE Bloodbowl league and keeping to my usual inability to actually score a goal.* I read a lot.* If I had time I’d be working on some scenarios for my RPG group, but I just haven’t had any creative juices left by the time I get home or on weekends lately.

I also play a lot of board games and Magic: The Gathering with the folks here at work and pen and paper with my old friends from the O.C.
Enjoy this screenshot from Tanarus Alan’s Favorite SOE Game, which he misses dearly!



We hope you enjoyed meeting Alan and will take a listen to a future Podcast where he will be featured. Return next month for another SOE Employee Spotlight.

Employee Spotlight Archives




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