Welcome back to another blog entry this time for Tom Goodchild of Codemasters. This lecture was brought to us in interview style much like inside the actors studio. Chris Jackson interviewed Tom constantly throughout this period and provided very valuable information for us first years and even better information for the few FDSc students that also enjoyed the interview.
In the beginning Tom admitted to working for his Dad! And how awkward it was to receive a pay check from his father, this was until his mother provided him with an article that showed that it was possible to study a course in games, and this marked the beginning of his career in gaming.
After this a question from Chris leads Tom to reply that because times have changed it is better to go to University due to the professionalism of the gaming industry. But he spent a lot of money on beer; better not do that in the future! To follow on from this quote from Tom, he said we would lose without a good professional attitude.
He started out as a junior designer on very low pay, which is a constant trend in advice handed to us from previous speakers, if we started lower and worked our way through the ranks of a company we could earn a lot more money. And that it is also best to branch out your services to the USA, as the British game industry is crumbling according to Tom.
Tom mainly worked on racing games. This is by far my favourite genre of video game and I was surprised to hear that he worked on MotoGP and that Codemasters are working on another unannounced game under the F1 licence. Epic news! Could this be a browser based free to play game? Now I can’t wait for that game! All the F1 Games (F1 2010 and F1 2011) have been excellent since the exclusive ‘grapple like’ break from the PlayStation 3. I think this is due to reputation in the industry hence why I believe the Call of Duty franchise was and is so big.
Before Tom admitted that he liked the Xbox 360 over the PlayStation 3 he made it very clear that having good product knowledge is also the key to being successful in the industry! I also agree with this only because I love games and this gives me a bigger reason to play games!
Haze was also a small topic in the interview again; this lead to Tom feigning a hand like gun to his head I agreed the game was that bad! Tom also made it sound like Ubisoft were over controlling.
He spoke about how much more complicated it was to make a game on the Xbox 360 more than the Playstation 3. This is because the game has to deal with invites from other games. One bigger bug that was hardly documented was that if a rock band controller was added to the console during a game of MotoGP the game would crash. This could be because the game was rushed out! This is bad.
Tom had a very good sense of humour throughout the interview and at the end of the interview between him and Chris Jackson he opened the room up to question and answers which were all answered with great confidence from Tom. He gave us more information that was well needed for the future start to our careers.
The quality bar is now very high in the industry and following previous games it is believable. The processing power of consoles now is also very high therefore pushing limitations higher! Which is cool. We are coming up to the next generation of consoles and I can’t wait for this if not only to see what happens with the racing genre! And I hope to see Toms name in future game credit lists!
Tom is a very talented individual and his time coming in to industry means a lot.
Thank you for again reading another entry to www.confetti.uk.com and there will be more blogs upcoming from me!
By Nick Mason, Level 3 student in Interactive games.
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