Greg Kettell
"Next on the list was Greg Kettell, B2's Lead Engineer. You could almost taste the excitement in the air as Greg was working diligently to put in the next earth-shattering Blood 2 feature! Ok, he was working on the load/save game code. ;) Greg is responsible for the large majority of feature implementation in B2, which includes fun stuff like weapons, inventory items, and spells, and not so fun stuff, like saving your game. He also organizes the B2 engineering side of things." — James Wilson III, Blood II Weekly Updates: Week One
Greg Kettell was the lead engineer for Blood II: The Chosen and The Nightmare Levels expansion pack, and was therefore responsible for game logic and interface programming for the game, as opposed to Mike Dussault who was in charge of the engine programming for the game's underlying LithTech engine. In the game's credits, as with most other staff members, he is given the playful description of "Big Bit-Head, Keeper Of The Code". He replaced the role played by Peter Freese in the development of the original Blood.
He also worked on Claw for Monolith in 1997 in a similar capacity, but left the company after The Nightmare Levels in 1999. The released source code for No One Lives Forever does mention however that the "messaging system" within was "ruthlessly stolen from Greg Kettel."
His is listed as being a programmer/anaylst at KeyBank, and before that was as senior software engineer at DHL from 2004 to 2006, after serving in a similar position at GoDaddy.com from 2001 to 2004. Before working for Monolith he was a senior software engineer at Kesmai Studios from 1995 to 1997, which was his start in the game industry, and as software engineer at GE Information Services from 1991 to 1995.
He attended Wright State University studying for a BS in computer engeering from 1984 to 1988, and is listed as being located in Albany, New York.
Quotations[edit]
One area he publicly commented on within a preview of Blood II released by the Adrenaline Vault was coding in the game's "surface attributes", which allows for a specific surface type (such as wood, metal, stone, or flesh) to be assigned to a brush texture or model, a feature first present in the original game for sectors:
"We can use the attributes to do weapon impact effects and play different impact sounds depending on the surface... one of the levels we are working on will use this feature to define a surface as a steam pipe, and shooting it will cause steam jets to vent from the surface." — Greg Kettell
Another aspect he remarked upon during development was the Singularity Generator:
"It fires a miniature black hole that sucks up whatever happens to be in the neighborhood, including enemies and light, and it stretched and crushes bodies before they cross the event horizon... a spray of gibs after the singularity decays is all that remains. The alternate fire mode should be particularly amusing as well." — Greg Kettell
External Links[edit]
- Greg Kettell on MobyGames
- Greg Kettell on GameFAQs
- Plan file archive on Blues News (contains an anecdote on the Shikari)
- Yatedo jobs profile
