Full throttle into the games industry

Deputy Editor Elliot Bentley visits the game developers responsible for the Driver series to find out how to break into this competitive workplace

Designing video games is for many of us a childhood dream – being paid full-time to dream up colourful fantasy worlds, gritty criminal empires or high-pressure military simulators. And for a lucky few, this dream is a reality.

For the last 27 years, Newcastle-based Reflections (or, Ubisoft Reflections, as it has been known since its purchase by French publisher Ubisoft) has been developing games known for their character and style – most notably 1998’s Driver and its many sequels.

Although the studio went through a rough patch in the mid-noughties, the studio has bounced back and its latest creation, Driver: San Francisco, has just been released to both critical and commercial success.

On a tour round the studio – a large and surprisingly bland open-plan office spanning two floors – The Courier was given the opportunity to ask some of Reflections’ top talent, as well as their head of HR, what they think it takes to make it into this exciting but highly competitive industry.

The novice

Theo Jalil has been working for Reflections since 2009. He graduated from Teeside University with a first in Computer Games Art, and now works full-time as the vehicle handling designer for Ubisoft Reflections.

You’re the vehicle handling designer – what does that entail?

I was basically exclusively responsible for the vehicle handling. In previous Driver games, the vehicle handling has been handled by Martin [Edmondson, founder of Reflections] but this time the project was just too large. We have 140 individual cars, more than any Driver game before.

How did you get your job at Reflections?

I always wanted to get into games – once I’d left university it was just a case of having to take other jobs in the meantime until the right opportunity came along. I actually started out here as QC [Quality Control], but I was only in the role a couple of months before the position was advertised for the handling guy. And I was like, “Oh, I could so do that!” It’s great, really, since I don’t have a vast amount of previous games industry experience, to be given control over such an important part of the game experience.

How did you develop your skills?

So when I went to college, I joined the modding communities behind Grand Theft Auto – and Driver as well, actually. I got quite heavily into that, wanting to make the vehicles that I enjoyed in order to drive them in GTA – that made me learn 3DS Max, and then I started looking at the vehicle handling side, because there was a system for editing. But when I put my first vehicle into the game, it didn’t handle at all well, because the wheel base was all different and the physics needed completely re-adjusting for this vehicle. So I basically learnt all the background of that.

What do you think clinched you the job?

I think just the enthusiasm, to be honest. Having the passion to want to do the job and to do it well. I always wanted to work for Reflections on a Driver game since Driver 1 came out, and at the time I assumed it was made in America. But when I found out they were local I thought, hey, it’s something I’d love to do.

You can’t just let yourself be knocked down at the first rejection. You’ve got to keep plugging away at it, because a rejection doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not good enough, it just means, more than likely, someone better-posted for the role came along in the interview process. Or, more likely even still, the role was filled internally, because, by law, companies have to externally advertise job vacancies, but often the role is created specifically with a person in mind.

Do you think working in the games industry is tough?

It is, to be honest. You can’t be work-shy, for a start. The games industry favours single males with not too many personal commitments in their social life, I would say. But the plus side is you’re getting paid to do something, day-to-day, that (in theory) you love doing. It’s a creative process… a lot of these people just do it for the sheer passion of things.

The flipside of that coin is that because people are doing it out of sheer passion, there’s a hell of a lot of demand for it and that pushes the effective salaries down, because there’s always someone willing to work for less than you, who might be more talented than you. And that means that the gaming industry is poorly-paid compared to doing exactly the same job, but as a database manager – a generic IT position. In a job like that, you stay until 5pm and then go home – but here, people stay until 9, 10, 11 at night making sure that it’s right, because that’s what they want to do.

The recruiter

Giselle Stewart is the general manager and HR director of Ubisoft Reflections, as well as the chair of the HR panel in industry body TIGA. She is in charge of filtering through the hundreds of job applications the studio receives each week.

Which degrees in particular do you look for?

Computer science, or the variations of that – artificial intelligence or some of your engineering degrees. There’s a professor we have a lot to do with – he is a bit of an expert in, say, online transactions, so we’ve talked to him quite a lot  about how we might be able to use some of his expertise and knowledge and maybe his students, and maybe they can come for placements here as they may have some knowledge that’s just embryonic here and we can build on that and build a relationship with the University.

Do you recruit many Newcastle graduates?

We have – well, when I say many, we’re not a huge employer, but we do regularly, yes, [and] physics as well – it’s quite important to us. Obviously car handling, vehicle dynamics physics, and so one of our most senior engineers was a Newcastle graduate – Dr Chris Jenna. There’s also a guy who’s at Newcastle Uni now who did work here – Dr Gary Ushaw. So they’re all Newcastle graduates. We love home-grown talent – first of all, it means they’re not just coming for two years and disappearing again, they have huge loyalty to the region, and I would say 40% of staff are from the north east – but when I say the north east, that’s because they come to university here and then stayed. You know what the student retention up here is like.

How does the hiring process work?

The hiring process itself takes the form of obviously screening by CV and work submitted, which a lot of graduates forget – they think a CV will do it, [but] obviously we need a link to their work and see what they’ve done. If they’ve done any relevant work experience, tell us about it.

We do a technical assessment, which is quite lengthy and quite thorough. We don’t expect everyone to get everything right. Obviously it’s the thought process about what they do and how they can discuss that.

Is that a written test?

Yes, it’s a technical test – a written test. And then we will discuss their answers with them – so it doesn’t really matter if they didn’t get it right. Where did they come from is key.

And then finally, if they make it through the technical discussion part, I tend to generally interview everybody and talk to them about why they want the job, what they think they can bring to it, what they’re looking to get from it.

What do you look for in the interview?

A lot of people have been involved in organisations while at university, in societies – I want to know what they have achieved, what they have enjoyed. And usually there’s something within people that inspires me, you’ve got something – I can see you’re a bit of a shining star.

Or sometimes it goes the other way and there’s someone with extreme arrogance and I think, “oh god, they’d destroy a team”. Lovely person, even though he is, and very very bright, sometimes there are some traits that just don’t work here. Not saying they’re not going to work anywhere else – but just doesn’t always work for our culture.

So I don’t know if people would call the interview gruelling. It’s certainly testing. And then you go into your job, and you have a six-month probationary period, and we have very few failures from that period – people who don’t make a mark. I think because it’s quite an exciting atmosphere to work in, there’s this whole idea that I’m coming in and I’m learning so much, there are challenges here.

The veteran

Mark Sample has worked in the games industry for over 20 years, and was involved in the original Driver game on PlayStation. He is now a senior designer for Ubisoft Reflections.

What did you work on in Driver: San Francisco?

I worked on the missions -  “do a handbrake turn”, and “get to a place”, things like that. The gameplay section worked with the team to implement all the missions to make sure they had as much fun and gameplay and variety, because a good game should have variety. Just like a movie where you pick up the pace, and then slow it down, and have frightening things here, and you’re always playing with the tension and the emotions – that’s what a good mission should have as well.

How long have you been working for Reflections?

For Reflections? I’m up to four years now. I left school when I was seventeen and got a job ith computer games, and I’ve been making computer games ever since. It’s twenty-one years now, and I was lucky enough to be part of Reflections on the first Driver game as well. But I went away, worked with other companies, after the first Driver, and then I came back for Driver: San Francisco, which is a privilege as well.

Where did you work between then?

I worked for 2K games, Infogrames, Rage Software – a variety of software. I worked on controls for Bioshock and The Darkness… a boxing game called Rocky.

Is it difficult to produce a game set in America, when you’re based in the North East? Or do you think it adds a certain Newcastle flavour to it?

Well, I think it recreates San Francisco really well – with the tone and feel of the streets, the angle of the streets and the levels you can jump between. But I;’m sure there’s little twinges of Newcastle in there as well.

You’ve never been tempted to have Tanner [Driver’s main character] driving through Grainger Street and down Bigg Market?

Well, it’s funny you say that. In the first Driver game, there’s actually a secret level which is a small section of Newcastle modelled, and you can actually drive around the Quayside.

And you’ve still got the pedestrians who jump out of the way?

[Laughs] Oh yes, that’s typical of the Driver franchise. You can drive to your heart’s content trying to hit people, but it’s always fairly safe.

Rockstar North [based in Edinburgh] make another open-world game – the Grand Theft Auto series. Do you think there’s something about the north of the UK that brings about this kind of game?

Yeah, well, you’ll find that in a lot of the North East and in Scotland there’s a lot of driving specialists, and I’ve found in games development that the colder the weather gets, the better the game developers. Because if you go to southern Spain or southern Italy, there’s much better things to do than make computer games. Seriously! But think about Scotland, the North East, Scandinavia, northern Germany, where it’s pretty grim, you’ll get great games.

And Newcastle’s always been highly creative, for the past thirty years there’s always been a good talent base. Maybe there’s something in the water – I don’t know. It’s good that we continue to make great games.

Is there growth in the technology sector in the North East right now?

Yeah I think there’s growth in the North East. I think things are changing, that’s all. Obviously the larger, AAA games are becoming more and more difficult to make. It’s like making a Hollywood summer blockbuster – there can only be two or three per year. But there’s certainly room for indie developers, iPhone developers.

Is there a large indie game scene in Newcastle that you’re aware of?

There’s a few around Newcastle – obviously they don’t spend as much money as, say, Ubisoft, hawking themselves, but they’re there. In fact there was one making a zombie game – which had the kit stolen unfortunately – but they made Kotaku and the big gaming sites. So there is scope, obviously you have to hunt them out but there’s little teams between Newcastle and Middlesborough mainly.

What you’ll find as well in the way things are changing is that a lot of people who graduate and are wanting to make teams will have two or three guys who are close by, but they’ll have an artist in another part of the country, or another country altogether. And they just check in using Hotmail and other services. So teams are starting to recognise that they don’t have to be in the same places to make a game anymore.

So you entered the industry at seventeen – I assume you didn’t go to university, then.

No, no. Back when I started, there weren’t any university courses [regarding game development] anyway. In fact, if you do some researching you’ll find that a lot of people who got into game development in the 80s or early 90s, most of their skills were learnt by being hobbyists and becoming speciailists at home, and then taking those skills off to companies.

I would strongly recommend that everyone does get a good education in whatever field they want to go into, whether it’s programming, design or art – trying to get the best course they can to suit them.

Do you know what courses are looked for?

Well, a degree in maths or physics is always good, because if you’re spending all day playing with numbers you want to be good at it. But good design courses – my speciality is design production – what I’m looking for is someone who has possibly made something with an editor, something like Unreal or Unity, or anything where they can show off what they made, and the thought process of why they did that. Because a good game designer or producer has a good logic thought process and creativity – combining them both together to make something, that’s a great experience.

Whereas you could turn up with a lot of documents and a lot of theory, which is fine and that’s also good, but there’s something really valuable and practical about being able to say, “I’ve made this,” and someone can pick it up and play it and say, “yeah, this guy’s got the touch, he’s got the feel, he knows exactly what will make a game tick or feel special”.

So a good portfolio is the most important thing?

I’d say so – it shows what they can do. One of the best bits of advice that I got was, “don’t show everything you’ve got – show your best”. Sometimes it doesn’t have to be pages and pages – it could be a smaller amount, but when you see it it’s just really strong stuff. So people will say, “we need this guy – he’s got some really great potential there, she’s got something great to bring to the team”.

I think one of the key things is having a certain amount of perseverance and persistence, if that’s something you want to do. Just apply to as many companies as possible, find out if there’s any networking events in your local region. Offer your services to do a little playtesting to show your skills, and when you do the playtesing make sure to fill in the feedback in a very thorough, well-though-out way.

Don’t just say, “yeah, I like that level” – you could say “in that level I had trouble on that corner”, and just help the team and hopefully they’ll say “oh yeah, this guy – he really knew what he was talking about”. You’re just trying to make a mental imprint of your personality on members of your team. So the next time when you’re free, when you’ve finished your course, you say, “yeah I did some playtesting”, and they go “oh yeah!”. You build a bit of rapport to help you get in there.

So the next phase would be trying to get any kind of position that gets you a foot in the door, and holding onto it. QA is a good entry point, junior programmer, junior artist if you’re an artist. Design’s a bit of a different one. Most of the time you come to design via another skill – but you can get straight in from university. There are a lot of guys who come from Teeside [University] and started as a junior designer.

So, good portfolio, work on your interview skills, know a little about the company, and be very persistent on getting there. I’ve worked with a lot of students and the ones that have been persistent have actually got jobs.