Rob Wells, Programmer & Chris McCoy, Game Designer: Custom Engines

Today’s lecture was a duo; Rob Wells, Programmer at Playdemic, and Chris McCoy, Game Designer at 360 Studios. Both are Bolton University graduates, so, as always, it was nice to hear about their stories coming out with a degree and their experience of getting into the industry.

Rob Wells, being the more recent graduate, spoke more in detail about his employment process. While studying at Bolton, he happened to do one week of quality assurance (QA) at Rare, which gave him some experience on his CV and helped get his foot into the industry door. Before graduation, he handed out 20+ CVs, but only got 5 replies. After an interview process, he had two job offers before graduating, which he explained was due to his experience in QA and how well his CV was tailored to the role he applied for.

One topic Rob discussed was the use of Playdemic’s in-house engine, Ideas Engine. He explained how using the in-house engine was incredibly flexible with it’s visual programming and as the man who made it was just down the corridor to ask questions to. The question then laying on my mind was: Is it better to use an in-house engine than a pre-made engine?

Sean Lindskog, Lead Developer at Firedance Games claims that “There’s a massive educational value” which I can agree with as you teach yourself the engine as you build it. He also boasts that you “aren’t trapped in the ‘sandbox’ of how another company’s engine is designed to work.” This is a statement that I fully agree with, as from personal experience, engines such as Crytek’s CryEngine are incredibly biased towards the creation of first person shooters.

With the recent changes to royalties on engines such as Unreal Engine 4, I think that more small companies will start using these as there is no longer a huge upfront cost.

References:

CRYTEK. (2006) CryEngine. Frankfurt: Crytek.

EPIC GAMES. (1998) Unreal Engine. North Carolina: Epic Games.

Freeman, W. (2015). Why a plucky band of developers build their own game engines. Available: http://www.develop-online.net/tools-and-tech/why-a-plucky-band-of-developers-build-their-own-game-engines/0205448. Last accessed 10th May 2015.