Cities in the Sky

Note that this is all a few months out of date now - I’ll get round to updating it shortly. Or when I feel like it. Or never.

I am currently a 4th year Computer Science student at the University of Warwick. That doesn’t mean a lot, of course; just that I can write Z, specify made up pointless languages in made up pointless logic, and that I know what UNIX is. Just.

I’ll skip to the point - what I really want to do, and what I forsee myself doing as a job when I have to enter the real world in a few months’ time, is game design. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to create games, whether as a result of playing a ‘nearly perfect’ game, which could do with a few tweaks, or after thinking up some outlandish ridiculous idea that I think would make a brilliant game.

Unlike most indie game developers, who were crapping out games programmed in assembly before they were even conceived, I have only been programming properly for a few years. At 15 (or so), I got my hands on Visual Basic and some time after created Warmongrel, a top-down 2D tank game. A few years later, at around 18, I started learning C++ and OpenGL. I have attempted to program a few games since then, but only now are my skills good enough to create anything half-decent.

Cities in the Sky is my first ‘proper’ game, and will hopefully become a rather nice bullet point on my CV over the coming months. It will land me a brilliant job at a spiffingly fantastic games company, whose ranks I shall rise through at lightning speed, until eventually retiring at the age of 25 (after having made my millions) to pursue a proper indie game developer’s life, designing and creating the games I want to play whilst lounging on a sofa in my pants. Hopefully. Maybe most of that is 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 instead I shall focus on my ‘philosophy’, if you want to call it that. I want to create games that play well, and are enjoyable. That sounds obvious, but a lot of developers seem to have lost sight of what games are supposed to be about. I want to drive forward the technology behind games; not graphics or physics, as they’ve had far too much attention recently, but AI. That’s one of the things my university education has helped me with, and I’m keen to incorporate some ‘proper’ AI into games. State machines and A* don’t suggest intelligence to me. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I want to shake off the rubbish game mechanics, controls, stories, and cliches 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 and ignore interruptions, 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.

That’s quite enough about me for now!