With day two of Confetti’s Industry week underway I was excited to attend my next guest lecture with Tom Goodchild who was introduced to myself and the audience with one of Confetti’s Game Design Lecturers Chris. This was because this lecture was going to take on a more question and answer based system. This is good! I thought to myself as it makes things easier for the audience to understand as we are given the reasons and logic behind certain points in this man’s history and career that will be relevant to our future. With that said the ball began rolling so to say after both Tom and Chris sat down after being introduced and humbled with applause. To start with Tom was asked about his early years as a quick summary of who he is and where he came from, this began with Tom explaining that he always had a love for video games in his early years putting in time on his Commodore 64. From this he moved on to talk about his first job working for his father doing washing up, he stressed his lack of affection for this job which was shared by the audience. But then he explained how his mother had informed him about a course at Dundee University which was a four year video game design course, from this he quickly spoke about moved onto a job working for Viz as a junior designer.
This brought us to Toms’ first point and piece of advice for the audience, You need a degree if you want to succeed, stressing this point very passionately. This, albeit somewhat obvious advice, is still good to hear from an industry professional as with the figures of university drop outs at an all-time high it is certainly relevant. At this point Chris asked Tom about getting his foot in the door in the games industry to which he replied with advising a career in programming and design as it is a perfect foot in the door for this type of profession due to its accessibility. This was very refreshing to hear because by knowing information like this when students like me finish with our degree we will know of a potential opportunity in this field might very well be our ticket into this industry.
He went on to tell us that the industry is very much a reputation based machine in the sense that it’s not what you know but who you know. If you are working with notorious contacts and even staff who will recognise your skills then all the better. From this he went on to talk about titles he had worked with such as Narc, I had never heard of this title before but Tom and Chris did a brilliant job of explaining what this game was all about and how successful it was. Narc was essentially a clone of the widely famous Grand Theft Auto series; Tom showed his lack of enthusiasm for the fact that the game was simply a clone and nothing more. From this Chris asked Tom about how the industry has changed from then till now to which Tom replied straight away with you have got to know what you are doing a lot more what he meant by this was that that amount of staff needed to design a game was much fewer back then as now you are required to have a much more specialised job role, hence more jobs and bigger teams.
Chris proceeded to ask Tom what advice he could give the audience about getting in the industry doing a job like his. To this he replied by saying an example of a well-structured piece of code, which is something that employers will be interested in. Good data management and a well thought-out piece of code are the key to this success, knowing that one day I could very well be in the situation where I am applying for a job like this one I was very thankful to hear this bit of advice. Tom proceeded to talk about how once you get in the door it will not be an easy ride, getting into an industry such as this one is filled with long hours and thankless work. After working full time for a large portion of my teenage years I was not surprised by this however for audience members who don’t have the kind of work place experience I do this information is like gold dust.
Tom began to expand on this and talked about how as mentioned before having a degree is key as it shows your employers you can work off your own back and how committed you are to this industry. He also added about how the British game industry had seen better days so because of this, working abroad could be a much greater experience offering a lot more in terms of work.
It was here that Chris then asked Tom more about Narc and why it wasn’t seen as being unsuccessful during the production process. To this he replied that the director had no idea of what the final product would be, which is not the case with modern games. The game had a lack of progression in its gameplay he went on say, comparing Narcs gameplay to that of famous titles such as Half-Life picking up on how as you progress through the game you are given greater tools to tackle a greater challenge but in Narc the whole game was accessible from the start.
With that said Chris then asked Tom about his work with Moto GP and it’s licencing. Tom explained how when working with a licenced sport there is not a lot of freedom when designing the game itself, there are a lot of restrictions and core mechanics that are set in stone due to that fact that the sport is a well-known real life event. Tom had a lot to say on the topic of Moto GP as it was a title and franchise he was very fond of, I knew this based on how excited he became when talking about the titles life as well as him actually mentioning it at one point too. Whilst still on the topic of Moto GP, Chris asked if the designers such as Tom where subject to riding real motorcycles to help them understand the concept better when implementing it in game, to which Tom replied by saying no initially. However he has found himself purchasing a bike for himself to give him a better understanding, although in my opinion I feel that maybe Tom was also influenced into this purchase because of an interest in being a biker! The leather jacket was a bit of a giveaway.
When asked about his work with AIs in Moto GP Tom explained how he would create a spline on the track to which the A.I’s would follow and that the process involved lots of trial and error based variables when making this realistic for the player. To follow on to say that after the beta stage of testing the game was taking to another team and finished.
It was after this Tom was asked about his work at a local company to Nottingham called Climax and his eventual move to Free Radical where he worked alongside Rob Yescombe on the game ‘Haze’. If you would like to hear more about this, Rob Yescombe was a guest speaker earlier in the week and I have written a blog detailing his lecture. As expected when the topic of Haze came up it was not long before Tom was discussing its downfall, Tom started to explain how the first problem he saw with Haze was the fact that it was using a brand new engine on a brand new console. Chris responded by asking Tom how he coded the A.I with Haze, Tom replied but saying how he didn’t actually work directly on the code for A.I’s but he knew how they used a super smart A.I that drastically slowed down the games frame rate, yikes! Tom expressed how the super smart A.I was never a good idea as making the enemies in video games too smart just brings down the whole gaming experience and also introduces a crushing difficulty.
Something which I really admired about Tom was that he expressed how even though he was working on a title that was not up to scratch like Haze or something he just wasn’t interested in, he was happy to work on it despite this due to his love of this industry, this is the attitude I share with Tom and I hope stays with me throughout my journey into the games industry. At the end of this Chris asked Tom about how strict Sony was being the investor during the process of making Haze, to which he responded by saying that they keep the game on track with a checklist of certain assets and targets the game has to maintain during the production process and it cannot deviate from this checklist or it will not be published.
Tom expanded on this and talked about a bug that was present in Moto GP where the game would crash when a Guitar Hero controller was plugged into the console during gameplay which would be very unlikely to happen but despite this it was an issue that needed solving. Unfortunately Tom went on to explain how his time at Monumental was ended much like a lot of other companies he has worked for, this is not uncommon with the video games industry due to the process in which games are made.
Finally Chris asked Tom about what advice he could give to the audience and as well as some of his favourite games, Tom was very impressed and fascinated by Dark Souls and stressed how it is his favourite game. He expressed a lot of interest in the way the game works with online multiplayer with no communication via headset. Tom’s advice was to keep on working on what interests you and to demonstrate good skills with what you know, always keep up professionalism and confidence. Chris finally opened the room to some Q and A to which was regarding what titles Tom is looking forward to and his favourite titles. I have learnt so much from Tom Goodchild and I am beginning to feel a lot better about my assignments and my future with video games after hearing such relevant, detailed and passionate advice.
By Samuel Johnston, FDSC student in Games Technology.
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