About

My background:

Realtime Worlds (2004-)

I moved to Realtime Worlds in 2004, and have loved every minute of my time here. My top reasons why RTW is a great place to work:

1. We have great financial security thanks to $80 million in investment. This backing also gives us great creative control over our projects.
2. We only do ambitious, original projects – starting with the number-one, critically-acclaimed, award-winning hit Crackdown and now moving further into online gaming with the hotly-anticipated APB. There is some seriously rewarding and intellectually challenging work here.
3. We have unusually high quality developers, and an extremely positive, open culture where decisions are made on logical, not political grounds. This leads to having the best-managed projects I’ve seen or heard of in games, and a consequent good work/life balance.

After starting out as a software engineer, I became technical lead of our technology team, building stuff for use in all our games: starting with Crackdown and then APB.  After that I worked on an unannounced project for a short while, before moving to APB as technical manager, where I have one foot in the production team and the other in software.

VIS Entertainment (2001-2004)

My first games job was at VIS Entertainment in Dundee, starting out on Tom & Jerry where I did special effects and level events. We actually had a surprising amount of fun considering it was such a cheesy low-budget game. We then moved onto NARC which had some promise for a while but turned out pretty awful.

I made truly great friends at VIS but the company as a whole clearly wasn’t headed for success. Finances were shaky, the games were mediocre at best, management was disorganised, and we got some pretty crappy treatment from publishers. They went under a year or so after I left. On top of the friends I made, I think there was actually benefit in seeing how not to run a games company! It certainly makes me appreciate what we have at RTW all the more.

Data Connection (1998-2001)

While at university, I worked summer jobs for Data Connection. Their pre-university and summer student positions are tough to get into, but well worthwhile. They’ll teach you programming by dropping you into the deep end on real work on their projects, and if you’re lucky they might even sponsor you through university. It’s a good time living in the company house with all the other summer students, and they organise loads of social events so you feel that you belong pretty quickly. It’s an incredibly successful and professional place to work.