Dev Bio: Dave "Crowley" Javier

Posted on 14-Oct-2004



Who are you?

I'm Dave Javier, lead designer on the Asheron's Call: Throne of Destiny expansion pack. And lo, have I walked this road before. I spent two years on the AC1 Live team, from ship to fall of 2001, with ten months as the lead designer there.



What do you actually do?

My day is long and varied. There is time spent wrangling the schedule, discussing issues with the artists and engineers, consulting with my fellow designers. We're responsible for the content going into the expansion pack – from spec'ing and implementing quests to height-mapping the new archipelago chain, not to mention thinking up a bunch of names that sound sort of French and sort of Italian but aren't really... Part of my task is also to aid in the ongoing archive project, where we assemble all the game knowledge that used to be part of a vast and sometimes complicated "oral tradition" and put it into documents for future team members' use. We've also put in time coordinating the cinematic intro.



How did you end up here?

I got hired the old-fashioned way: exploiting the Old Boy network! I was fresh out of college, my summer job was about to end, and I had spent more time playing in and running role-playing games than was healthy. One of my college friends, Justin Quimby, had been working at Turbine for a year and he told me that they were shipping this crazy new "massively multiplayer" game soon, and they were going to need people to put together quests and stuff for monthly updates. I submitted an application, complete with a sample dungeon on graph paper and quest write-up, and got an interview. They liked me enough to make me an offer, and I started on the Live team a week before the game shipped.



After my two year stint on the Live team, I moved on to spend a year on AC2 development, where I did most of the terraforming for the Lugian continent and contributed bits of landscape and lore work wherever else it was needed. After that, I went on to the Middle-Earth Online team, where I did things I probably am bound not to discuss by NDA. After about a year and a half there, the opportunity came up to work on the Throne of Destiny expansion pack, and I leaped at the chance.



What is your favorite quest in Asheron's Call and why?

Drudge Fight! The first rule of Drudge Fight is that you don't talk about Drudge Fight, but finding the gem on a Drudge Stalker's corpse gave me this thrill of the unexpected... which going into the Drudge Fight dungeon reinforced with some fast and furious action. I love my new championship belt!



What is your least favorite monster and why?

Any critter that starts furiously healing and draining as it gets low on health. Invariably I end up screaming at the screen, "Fight like a man, punk!" Which I follow up a minute or so later with, "Oh, not so tough without all your mana, huh? Huh?"



Where did you get your nickname?

This is the nickname I used when I first joined the AC Live team five years ago... I needed a nickname to post on the original Crossroads of Dereth boards, and a handle for use on the Zone. Without putting much thought into it, I went with "Crowley." A lot of people think I am channeling Aliester Crowley, the turn-of-the-century English occultist. In reality I just stole the name from the novel "Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett – which is kind of a British humor version of the Apocalypse. Crowley was the name of a minor demon that'd been sent to earth to make a little trouble, and had been on the job so long he'd gone native. I loved the character, found him very witty and entertaining, so I used the name. Now, I recognize that his name may well have been derived from the real-life Crowley, but I figure it's an important distinction that I took my cue from Gaiman and Pratchett, not from English occultism.

