Cities in the Sky

The Present

I’ve been a software Engineer at Rare Ltd. since 2007. I’m currently very much in the role of ‘gameplay programmer’, but I enjoy AI programming greatly, and also like to get involved with build systems, asset management and those other ‘meta-development’ things. So far I’ve had approximately zero games released, but I’ve been a part of some very interesting and innovative (but cancelled) titles that are so super-duper top secret that I can’t even tell you their code names.

In my spare time I’m working on Cities in the Sky, as well as a couple of other game concepts, but I shan’t go into detail here since that’s what this whole site is about!

The Past

Before all this, I was at Warwick University studying Computer Science, which I graduated from in 2007 with a first class MEng. Where there were choices, I took mostly AI-related modules. In my final year I worked with a team on a cross-platform plugin-based lightweight music player written in C++, which was a huge challenge but very satisfying. My third year project was entitled ‘Modular Artificial Life’ and was an artificial life simulator in which little creatures lived and evolved in an environment. The twist was that their brains were made up of modules, which limited the harmful combinations and accelerated evolution, but prevented truly unbounded possibilities.

Before that, I had nothing but a copy of Visual Basic (yuck) and a borderline-healthy appetite for games and game design. I coded a few games both in Visual Basic and C++, none of which are really worthy of note. I also filled up a lot of notepads with game designs, most of which I intend to produce concepts of one day!

The Future

Eventually (once I’ve made my millions), I’d like to work for myself, living the indie dream, designing and creating the games I want to play whilst lounging on a sofa in my pants. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking, but I’m certain I can achieve the pants thing.

As to the kind of games that I want to make: There are too many specific ideas to list here, so I shall be quite vague instead. Top priority is making games that are fun – it sounds obvious but too often do I see games that prioritise technology over gameplay, or games where ‘fun’ has been clouded by political or marketing decisions. Second to that, I’d like to drive forward the technology behind games; not graphics or physics, as they’ve had far too much attention recently, but AI. State machines and A* are all very clever, but they don’t suggest intelligence to me – I’d like to model awareness, understanding, attention and so on. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I want to shake off the rubbish game mechanics, controls, stories, and unnecessary clichés in general that games seem to have accrued over the years. Sure, hitpoints were a good idea years ago when an integer per character was all that could be held in memory, but why does it have to be like that now? Granted, it’s easy to make conversations with NPCs pause the world, ignore interruptions and take one of a few set paths, but I’m sure we can do better. Bad dialogue, Magic Swords +1, Experience points – I think it’s a shame that these things are so ingrained into games that we seemingly can’t get rid of them, and I want to make a change.