Max Boughen, 23, environment artist at Electronic Arts

“I can’t talk about the game that I am working on at the moment because it’s commercially confidential. It’s so secret that I can’t even tell my friends about it unless I really really trust them. But before that, the most recent thing that I worked on was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which was released in the summer.

“It’s strange working on a game like that right at the beginning because at that stage no one quite knows what’s going to happen. There’s a lot of brainstorming, lots of talking about ideas to get a feel for what we want to achieve. It’s a great feeling to come up with a suggestion and then to have people say that it’s a fantastic idea and ultimately to see it in the game itself.

“As an environment artist it was my job to make to make the world of the game look and feel as much like the movie as possible, so I got to go out and visit the set. I also worked from blueprints of Hogwarts because fans want absolutely accurate detail, with every nook and cranny exactly right. The first step was creating a 3D line drawing that we could walk around in to get the scaling right. It let us check things, for example, that it doesn’t take two hours to get from one room into the next. Once we have the structure we build up colour and texture to make the game really rich. Overall it generally takes us four or five weeks to make a location.

“The whole way through the process we reviewed each others’ work to make sure that it was consistent and we kept playing the game to make sure that there wasn’t anything wrong. The more we checked the more we were amazed at how many things weren’t right all the way up to the end – anything from a hole in Hogwarts’ wall to a texture that was upside down.

“We put in some personal touches too. If you look in the charms class you’ll see the names of everyone in my team on the wall. No one in PR noticed that we’d done it so we got away with that one.

“The environment here is really fun. I work in a studio, which I suppose looks a lot like any other office, but the hours are quite relaxed – officially I work 9.30am to 6pm but it can be less or a lot more depending on what stage we’ re at with our projects – and we can spend time doing things such as playing other computer games. We have to do that because we want to keep up with what other people are doing. It’s pretty competitive.”

www.electronicarts.co.uk

A second opinion

Chris Child, 35, director, Childish Things; lecturer, City University

“I’m a huge cricket fan. I had been working on cricket games for about ten years. The first game that I did when I started my own company (basically just me) was International Cricket Captain III.

“The first thing I had to do was create a demo, which is a very basic version of the game. In my case it was stick men moving around a field. It’s just something to show potential publishers so that they can see what the game is and decide whether to commission you to do it. I suppose you could use bits of paper and a description, but the best way is to show them a bit of working code. I took the demo to 15 publishers and was rejected by all of them. Then a producer at one company moved to another employer, remembered the game and gave me a ring. That’s how Empire Interactive came to employ me to make the game.

“Once I had the deal I had to create all the action that would go into a cricket game, from the bowlers bowling to the batsmen playing shots and the fielders returning the ball. Once that part’s done the publisher gets more confident that you are making a commercially viable product so that’s when you bring in 3D graphics and get the team up to full strength. In this case it meant three programmers and two artists.

“Once the bones of the game were in place we used motion capture to get the movements. You could get artists to do it but we used real human beings to get it exactly right. We spent three days in a studio with professional cricketers wearing black lycra suits covered in white ping-pong balls and doing all the actions used in cricket so that we could put them into our game. Later, when we were testing, we realised that we’d forgotten to get the motion for the umpire signalling a six, so we had to animate that by hand.

“Because my company is just me, my job doesn’t end when the game is finished. I will have worked seven-day weeks with 12-hour days just getting it done but when it’s published I have to do things such as making sure that it has shelf space and promoting it in the media. Plus I teach at City University as well.”

www.childishthings.co.uk

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