Meet the Team

Andy, Senior Software
Engineer

Can you provide some background about yourself and how you ended up in this particular line of work?

Well, I started with computers before college. My dad bought me a book on microprocessors when I was about 13 or 14 and I was dead determined to get it read because I found it quite fascinating, and even before then I was building computers out of relays and bits and pieces.

Is that something you still do today – build computers?

Not out of relays! But I still quite enjoy building things.

How did you find your college course – did you find it stimulating enough?

I chose a non computing course for my college course – I deliberately went there to learn something new. It would have been too easy to do a computing course at college. I wanted a more mathematical course so I chose physics.

Why IT and not another industry?

I don’t know. I guess I was just born for it. I’ve always enjoyed electronics and computing; it just seems a natural thing that I enjoy doing. There were other times when I thought of becoming an architect when I was younger, for example, but I think because my dad was an electronics engineer it felt like a natural course of action for me.

Did you ever go to work with him to see what he was doing?

Yes, I used to work with him. He’d make the hardware and I’d write the operating systems and basic interpreters and things to go with it.

The BCS is very keen on promoting professionalism in IT. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think there is an increased need to professionalism in the industry? Do you think there should be greater certification of potential employees so would be employers can better understand who they might be hiring? Or should industry just be left to sort itself out?

My generation within the games industry was largely self-taught. A lot of people just didn’t go to university because they were already doing the thing they loved. But more recently there are so many people applying to join the industry  having some form of qualification, be it a degree or otherwise, demonstrates to an employer that the person has already made a commitment to the IT profession. We do get a lot of CVs and reviewing the details of college courses and experience is part of our filtering process.

Some people, including someone I recently interviewed, feel that the government shouldn’t get involved with IT qualifications and certification and that the industry should be allowed to vet itself. What’s your view?

That’s all very well but it’s very difficult to get a foot in the door when you’re starting out. A few of the younger guys I’m working with at the moment have come from a university background, with degrees in computing and it’s definitely given them a start. We wouldn’t have considered them if they couldn’t have demonstrated a certain level of experience and through their qualifications they were able to do that. So things are different now to how they were in the early days.

For prospective people trying to work in the games industry - what sorts of experience and qualifications do they need? How might they achieve the level you’re at?

Well there are many roles within the games industry from highly technical, like I do, to the more creative and artistic. People come in from a whole variety of backgrounds. Throughout the industry people come in from arts backgrounds and become programmers, and people from programming backgrounds becoming artists. However, you do usually need to demonstrate some sort of passion for the industry to get in. Typically working on your own game at home is the way of demonstrating this; e.g. having some experience of running a MUD or writing flash games or something similar.

Looking back is there anything you’d have done differently given the chance, within your career or on projects that you’ve worked on?

I’d have liked to have spent more time studying academically. It would have been nice to have continued my formal education a bit longer. For instance, I left university after my first degree, but now I’m going back to it studying for a Master’s degree. It would have been nice to have carried on after my first degree to do a Master’s straight away. I was lured away by the crispness of the bank notes!

Project failures are a big subject in the UK – you hear all the time about IT projects failing. What have you yourself learnt from working on projects over the years, which could possibly benefit others?

Many projects fail or are pulled before completion and of those that do get released not all of them are profitable. The profitable ones tend to be those that are less complicated. The best projects are the ones that started off the simplest, even if the project itself is very complicated. Starting simply is usually the key to success.

So do you think that people tend to make things too complicated just for the sake of making it complicated?

Yes, they’ll start off making the most complicated AI and the most complicated graphics engine and try too hard – putting in too much too soon. Really the best games projects were the ones which started from quite humble origins, which were then built up to be more complicated projects; and started with quite small teams which slowly grew, as they went along, with successive releases of the game.

BCS is celebrating its 50^th anniversary this year. What, for you, are the most significant developments in computing and in the games industry within the last 50 years? If you want to pick out something from more recent times, which is core to what you do, that’s OK too.

For us the advent of massively parallel hardware has changed how console games work in particular. All the current generation of console games have many CPUs or in the case of PlayStation®3 (PS3™), Cell Broadband Engine™, and it means you have to programme the games in a very different way and think about problems from a different perspective. It’s not something that’s particularly new but it’s something that’s hit the industry in the face and we’ve had to adapt to it.

What about graphics. Is that a key thing?

Yes, but in many ways graphics is one of the least changing things within computer games recently. The graphics hardware has become very powerful and delivers a certain result. But what's also hugely important is the focus on aspects such as AI, physics and all the other sundry elements of the game. Graphics will steadily improve and become more photorealistic but the graphics alone don’t make a game. The game is the sum of the whole of its parts, the artwork, the AI, the character innovation, the story; it’s very much an art production, rather than just a technical thing.

Have you ever wanted to get involved with the story telling side of things?

Yes, and I certainly enjoy writing. I have friends who are what we call ‘the concept designer’ of the project. And often these guys are comic artists and they start by drawing the story boards for the games, and I quite enjoy that sort of initial story writing and setting a plot for the game, although I haven’t had the opportunity yet to do that in my professional life. It’s more of a side issue at the moment but maybe some time in the future I’ll do more of that. At the moment I’m too focused on the technical side of things.

The games industry is considered to be quite a cool industry to work in. What do you think the IT industry as a whole could do to improve its reputation as being only for nerds and geeks?

Here in Bristol, we have very flexible working hours and some people telecommute from around the world. The games industry is well known for its flexible work practices. I have friends that take their dogs into work and I can remember the animators trying out their moves on each other.

Do you find working from home beneficial? Are you more creative when you change your working environment?

Beneficial, yes, but on the whole I find I’m more creative when I’m working with other people. You do rely on the people around you to feed you with problems. When you’re working from home you can feel quite isolated. Although it obviously helps having things like video conferencing and new technologies like this, and the availability of high bandwidth communications cheaply is just fantastic. But there is really no substitute for going along and talking to people.

What would you say is the hardest part of your job and what’s the most rewarding?

The hardest and most rewarding part really is solving technical problems, although dealing with people can also be very challenging too. In any job you do there will be a very large component of working with other people and listening to their ideas and sharing their information.

Are there many arguments between gaming personnel over which way a game should be developed and over the direction the team should take?

Absolutely, people always have their own opinions. The games industry is full of people who have strong personalities. I could tell you a few stories…but we couldn’t publish them! There are some quite interesting characters in the industry, many of whose names you’ve heard of. Certainly the creative feel of the industry does attract people of quite diverse backgrounds and diverse life styles. Unfortunately, it’s still a very male dominated industry and it would be very nice to see more women in the games industry. There are a lot of female artists, but not that many working as programmers.

Why do you think that is? Why do you think women aren’t attracted to the IT industry as much as men?

Perhaps because it may seem to be a very geeky and cliquey working environment. I’ve worked with some very talented female programmers in the past and it would be nice to see more diversity in the industry.

How do feel about the way the media portrays games and the games industry? Do you think it’s got it right or is it completely ‘off base’?

The media does tend to focus on the more sensationalist aspects of games, the violence or the sex or whatever. But these are fairly unrepresentative parts of the industry. If you talk to a gamer they won’t talk about those things, so much as the plot and the immersiveness of the game. If you talk to people who play games a lot they talk about the excitement of a racing game, the general feel of a game, which draws them in.

What do you think are the biggest issues/challenges that games and the gaming industry, as a whole, face both now and in the future? What are the most significant hurdles the industry has still got to get past?

I still think the games industry has a credibility issue to get past. Very much like the film industry in its early days when people thought that the sons and daughters of gentlemen shouldn’t have anything to do with it. I think the film industry had that kind of issue. If you were an actor you didn’t want to work in the film industry because of it being a perceived low status activity next to the stage. The games industry is in a similar kind of place, where if you have skill and talent it’s perceived that you are ‘slumming’ it rather, instead of doing a proper IT job, if you chose to work in the games arena; a  misuse of one’s talent, perhaps? You should be working in medicine or for NASA instead!

The reality is that the technology used in games is now used in every other field of life and the computer technology is largely developed because people want to run better and faster games. Some people buy more advanced computers in order to play better games, not because they want to do spreadsheets and do word processing. So the whole IT industry in a way is driven by the games industry, and a lot of the technology developed in the games industry is then utilised by the rest of the world.

Do you enjoy playing games yourself and do you have a favourite?

Yes, absolutely. At the moment my favourite is ‘MotorStorm’, a PS3™ driving game in real physics. We’ve been working with MotorStorm and I've been enjoying playing the game as well. We’ve also been working with the company Havok, over in Dublin, who have been making the physics system for MotorStorm. We have a very good relationship with Havok.

Have you always played games, including the old style arcade games?

Yes, I’ve always enjoyed playing and making games. I wrote a lot of arcade style games when I was in my teens, and used to enjoy playing them. I had an arcade machine in my bedroom when I was a kid and I used to run all the rompacks, the rom sets, like Pac Man, Galaxians and all those types of games on that machine, which inspired me to write my own games.

Are there any games you’d have liked to have developed yourself but didn’t do?

Yes, it would have certainly been nice to have developed an old style arcade game, one which was more popular than the ones I did. It was just me in my bedroom doing all these things whereas Pac Man and Galaxians had teams of  people working on them so it would have been nice to have spent more time and to have had better arts resources.

Who in the IT industry would you say has inspired you to become part of it?

What brought me back to the games industry was really people like Peter Molyneux and Bullfrog and I enjoyed playing Populous. That’s what really brought me back to the games industry-sitting round playing Populous for hours. You had a landscape where you could raise and lower sections and you had a population, (you were a god) of people running around, and you could kind of torture them (laughs) and get them to fight the other god who was controlling other sections of the map. It was very simple in concept but monstrously enjoyable to play.

Are you a fan of seeing some of these old style arcade games reinvented for a new market? Do you think that’s a good thing or is it better to forge ahead and develop new stuff?

I think we should forge on and develop new stuff. It’s always nice to see where things go to, to see new genres rising. A good example is Media Molecule's title 'LittleBigPlanet' on the PS3™, it's a new concept full of new ideas.

What’s innovative about that then?

They’re looking at user generated content, which is going to a big part of gaming in future to a large degree. Games like ‘Second Life’ – games where people make their own worlds, make their own environments, are the new features for the near future of gaming.

What do you see as being the future of games and gaming? I presume you think it’s going to be about user-generated content?

I think it will be about people customising the world in which they live in, and as technology progresses we’ll be able to work more with the real world through things like augmented reality and customise the real physical space that we live in as well as the virtual space.

Do you think people will use the wrap around virtual world glasses in future?

I don’t know. It’s very hard to predict the future. People back in the eighties and nineties were saying how virtual reality would change all our lives. It didn’t really do that. We don’t wander around with virtual reality headsets colliding with lampposts! And the reason for that is because people do like to live in the real world as much as they do in the virtual world, and it’s important for people to have that foot in the real world.

Finally, do you have any particular advice for anyone trying to get into the games industry?

Yes, certainly; at the moment we are trying to hire compiler engineers. The company I actually work for is called SN Systems based in Bristol, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. We’ve been developing tools since 1988 and have worked on the PSone™, PlayStation®2, PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) and of course the PS3™. We’re actively hiring people – we are looking for particularly bright people. We’re keen to hear from people even if they’re not particularly from a compiler engineering background if they have a genuine interest and enthusiasm to learn about our business.