Diary of a Game Dev:

I love making video games!

I can’t believe I’ve almost been 24 years in the games industry! My career has been full of ups and downs - sometimes I feel the downs outweighed the ups. But I love making computer games and that is why I am still trying to make things work. That’s also why I thought it would be nice to do a dev history of how I broke into the games industry and how things went (I hope to publish them as a weekly thing or at least try to).

I am currently the Co-founder and Art Director of a studio, things have not been easy to say the least and we are still looking for funding for the games we have been working on (www.redmarmosetstudios.com). I am therefore also looking for remote work as the bills continue to come and I have a family to support (https://imito.artstation.com).

So if either you like the sound of our studio or the games we are making and see the potential in them and would like to invest, then awesome please ping me :) or if you would like my services at your dev studio in any artistic way then also please get in touch :)

Dev History Diary 01:

So, let’s start from the beginning! I always loved sketching and drawing as a kid. I didn’t like painting though, I didn’t like the mess lol, so I never got into it. My love of art and the Renaissance period though influenced me to want to become an Architect.

At school me and my friends loved coming up with our own video game concepts. But we never thought a career in games was a thing. I didn’t have a games console as my parents thought it would affect my studies (which looking back at it, I agree with). So the only time I actually got to play video games was when a friend came over or when I went over to theirs. Playing on the NES or the Master System and later on the Megadrive and PlayStation.

When I finished school I got a place at Bath University to study Architecture. As part of my architecture course, I learnt both Photoshop and 3DStudio Max. This started my interest in computer graphics. Four years later I graduated as a part one qualified Architect. It was whilst living with one of my house mates at University that I ended up playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was this game that changed everything for me!

I soon found work at a local architects firm, where I had the opportunity to do some architectural visualisation. This helped me gain more 3d experience and pushed me further towards a career in games. Although I still had a love for architecture, I now felt drawn to the games industry. I needed a change of direction in my life and this was the time to do it!

With a new interest in 3d and graphics. I signed up for a very expensive masters degree in computer animation. We had some great teachers that came from the London Computer Graphics circles. The main issue with the course was, being one of the early CG courses meant that the end result was a bit meh. Most of the portfolio work ended up being done at home in my own time, as the stuff we created in class wasn’t good enough on its own to show off.

The computer animation course included a period of work experience. This I knew was gonna be tough! So I started sending out my portfolio. In early 2000’s posting your portfolio by mail was the thing in those days. You had to burn a CD with your work on it, make a nice label to go onto the CD and create a cover for the case. It was a lot of effort in making everything look attractive to potential employers! So having sent out my stuff to a few companies that I had seen in the back of Edge Magazine, it was time to wait and see.

Some companies would never get back to me. I did manage to get three interviews though. Two in London and one in a small city called Wells in Somerset, England of all places!

Yes, I got the job in Wells, a small company called Pukka Games. I was so over joyed and full of enthusiasm!

Wells was a beautiful City and small, it has one of the oldest Cathedrals in England and was located not far from Bath and Bristol. So if you ever get the chance to go there, I highly recommend it! Plus it was in the movie Hot Fuzz!

Getting there on public transport was a pain though! I used to travel on Sunday afternoon by train to Bath and take the bus to Wells, although the final bus was at 5pm. It was the same travelling home on the Friday. If I didn't catch the last bus to Bath at 5pm, I wasn’t going home for the weekend!

During the week I used to sleep on my bosses sofa, and the walk to the office was lovely. Passing fields of cows (whose eye’s seemed to follow you as you passed), a castle and a moat and the cathedral, and if you saw any passers by they would say hello!

Anyway, back to Pukka Games, the office was a wonderful listed Georgian building and was full of light that came through the huge sash windows. I would be working on Gameboy Advanced titles, as that was their core work. But with the release of the original Xbox the company wanted to break on to the console market. They were working on a few projects for the Xbox. A space racer and a prototype for a Warhammer 40,000 game for Games Workshop on their own 3D engine. The team were amazing, it felt like family rather than a studio and I learnt a lot. With Pukka Games being a small studio I was able to gain experience in different areas of art. I did concept design, 3D modelling and animation, and sprite work for our GBA games. I even got the opportunity to design a GBA game from scratch with help of the Lead Designer. It was the dream job!

Space Racing game Character concept art.

Racer Boy game character concept art.

Puk and the Lost Toys GBA game concept art.

We not only had a good time working together, we had lots of fun outside of work too! Shooting some pool, going to the cinema and having parties such as for Halloween! A lot of our design meetings were done at the local pubs around the studio, since most places were just a few minutes walk away.

But things weren’t meant to last. I returned to my animation course once the work experience period was over. Pukka Games were happy for me to continue working for them in my spare time, with the option to come back full-time once I graduated. However, as I was coming to the end of my studies, I got the sad news that the studio would have to shut down. We were all made redundant due to financial reasons. So there it was my first game job and my first redundancy all rolled into one.

I was tearful hearing the news and I knew I would miss the team, but things had to move on. I had now graduated from my Computer Animation Course and I needed to find work again!

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