I am a 23 year old student, currently in my final semester of studying towards a BSc Computer Games Design degree at Bolton University. I have already gained a HND in Computer Games Design and am excited about getting into the computer games industry.
I have always been interested in computers and gaming. Gaming started at a very early age for me, with Spectrum’s ZX81. Waiting half an hour for a game to load then coming back to it and seeing “R Tape Loading Error” did tend to get a little tiresome though. My family then decided to buy an Amiga 500+, which then created probably the most exciting Christmas of my life. Playing a wide range of newer games with rich graphics and fantastic sound really kick started my gaming passion. In particular, one game that has stayed with me to this day and will never age in my eyes is Rainbow Arts and Factor 5’s Turrican 2. Gameplay is simple but challenging, visually it was stunning at the time and the soundtrack is still something I listen to today and is in fact playing as I type this!
After a while I added Sega’s Mega Drive to my collection, only playing a handful of games, but playing them all to death. Sega’s bright graphics and simple control scheme was great as I could play with my family and friends who weren’t too handy with a keyboard! A new love for consoles was born, this developed into a Playstation and a Playstation 2 later on in my gaming career. My console tastes were fairly limited during this time, spending most of my pocket money and hours playing the Tony Hawk skateboarding series. I was skateboarding in my spare time as well as playing it on my Playstation so this was a strong interest of mine. Thrasher: Skate and destroy gets an honourable mention here as being one of the best skateboarding simulations I’ve played to date, sticking with higher realism rather than ridiculously long linked combo’s appealed to me at the time and is still very playable.
The most important family purchase however, was our first PC in 1997. I had a massive range of games available to me, played an incredible amount in my spare time and started to get more interested in how games worked. Playing around with config files and settings doesn’t really count as game development, but it was the start of a long relationship between me and my computer, ending up with various toolsets for different games. I started creating levels for Counterstrike, in Valve’s Worldcraft (now Hammer) editor. I was part of a clan and larger community of CS players, way before the Steam environment allowed this to be an easy process. I have then continued to follow Valve’s releases to this day, creating maps and a small mod for Half Life 2 in the process. In my spare time I am beginning to create Left4Dead 2 maps as Steam has made sharing these a great deal easier in recent months.
I now play a variety of games spanning most genres. I have dabbled in MMO’s such as Activision Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and Funcom’s Age of Conan release as well as beta testing several other smaller MMO’s such as Grand Fantasia and Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine Online. I am still very interested in First Person Shooters, in particular Left4Dead 2, Counterstrike and like everyone else; I am still waiting with bated breath for Half Life 2: Episode 3. I play a lot of extreme sports games, in particular skateboarding games, having grown up playing the Tony Hawk series and then moving onto Skate and Skate 2 on the Xbox360, it’s an area of development I would love to look into, and am starting to create concept content for in 3D Studio Max. I still have a soft spot for Blizzard’s old RTS games, Starcraft and Warcraft 3, Starcraft being the first time I’d ever picked up an RTS and really enjoyed it right from the start.
I’m looking forward to finishing my degree this year and getting a chance to work in the industry that I have wanted to be a part of for most of my life. I would ideally like to go in to level design for either first person shooter games or extreme sports games. Both of these interest me greatly and I have some experience, both educational and personal in these areas. I am working on several projects in my spare time when not concentrating on university work. These projects include some basic Left4Dead2 mapping, both scavenge and campaign maps, and some basic untextured level design in 3D Studio Max relating to extreme sports games, specifically of the skateboarding genre.