It’s been a while since we did our last batch, but with the games business having blossomed into a hotbed of ongoing recruitment, it seems like a peachy time to bring back Rare’s in-house staff profiles. Hopefully these will prove informative for those hoping to get into a particular line of work, but also entertaining enough to be worth a read for anyone interested in Rare or a general industry career.
In this edition: James Thomas, Gameplay Engineer. Let’s have it, Trophy Thomas!
Rare: What’s your background and how did you arrive at Rare?
James Thomas: Despite loving videogames from an early age, I got into programming relatively late compared to a lot of others here. I wrote my first “if” during Computing at college and then followed that up with Computer Science at University. Between them they managed to get me up to a decent level, so I was able to put together a ropey FPS demo and send that in to Rare. Although it only ran at four frames per second and featured enemies no more threatening than a series of white triangles, it managed to get me past security and I’ve been here for just over ten years.
Have you found yourself doing the job you always thought you’d do?
Yes. And no. Being completely honest, I wasn’t 100% sure what games programmers did when I first set my heart on cracking the industry. So whilst I have achieved my dream job, it’s been so varied during my time here that I don’t think I could have predicted that.
What are your main responsibilities on the average game?
On my last couple of projects I’ve been involved at a lot of the early planning. This is an honour and a privilege but what it boils down to is a lot of architectural design, pouring thought into large UML diagrams and flow charts that describe just how we will build the game and how all its constituent parts work together. Whilst this may not sound very attractive, it’s extremely beneficial and gives a great insight into what the next few months will contain.
After that initial phase, it’s time to get my hands dirty. My duties lie mainly on the gameplay side of things – sitting above all the system level code and actually coding up the fun bits. For Kinect Sports: Season Two‘s Tennis this involved getting things like the AI and the ball up and running, but also getting a whole mini-game to myself, all of it spent working closely with a Designer to ensure that everything was what had been expected.
Finally, and this goes for everyone: bugs. No matter how well you think you’ve programmed, there will be errors and the last stage of any project is squashing them good and hard so they don’t come back.
Which Rare games have you worked on, and what’s been your biggest achievement?
So far my CV reads: Grabbed by the Ghoulies, Viva Piñata, Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise and Kinect Sports: Season Two.
As for my biggest achievement within them I’d have to say that it was (together with colleague Eike) building up the Xbox LIVE portion of the game from scratch. When we first started on Pocket (very early Viva Piñata) there was next to no common network code in the studio, and so as a learning experience I thought I’d dabble. After a few false starts and flooding the company’s network on a few occasions, we slowly got something up and running, culminating in a full online co-op experience.
From the outside it might appear as if those features just come about, but that was an absolute labour of love from me. The post-midnight shifts, the scream-inducing bugs, they were all worth it when just after launch I sat down with my wife, my brother and our good friend to nurture our ever-expanding colony of Swananas.
What do you see as the top perk of working for Rare?
I think the biggest one for me is where we’re situated. My first application went to a company that had an address of “Above Blockbuster” in a shopping precinct. Compare that to the sweeping countryside that I look out onto every day and I think we’re very lucky. It’s a peaceful environment that lends itself well to walks at lunchtime when you want to get away from the glare of the monitor, having five-a-side tournaments on-site in the summer, and being within a five-minute drive of some of the best pubs in the county. Pub Lunch Friday is a tradition that should be encouraged wherever you work.
What do you find most exciting about your job?
The variety. Over my years here I’ve implemented characters for Ghoulies, worked on save game systems, built whole networking solutions from scratch, prototyped insane little projects, created gestures for Kinect, architected foundations for Kinect Sports: Season Two, and worked on many secret gubbins that have yet to see the light of day. And it’s not just me; I’ve found Rare brilliant at allowing individuals to grow and expand their talents, allowing them to stretch out into all manner of different areas of games. Variety is the spice of life, and all that.
How would you describe your fellow workers in five words?
Always. Forgetting. Birthday. Cake. Swines.
As a Gameplay Engineer, how do you like to work with people whose ideas you’re implementing?
I like a good close working relationship with our Designers. Ideally, especially during prototyping where it’s all about the feel of things, you should be sitting as close as possible to them so that you can grab their ear, mull over design choices and figure out how best you can represent want they want in code.
It’s a very iterative process too, so every time you try something you need to get them playing it to give you instant feedback. During those stages you build in a lot of tweakable numbers so they can alter basic things like speed and weight without having to recompile everything. There are times when you come away from a session with Design to find that half your code is made up of conditionals and magic numbers as you try to track down the perfect balance. When you find it though – and that can take anything from a few mins to a few days of constant trying – it brings a great sense of satisfaction.
Favourite Rare game, favourite Xbox 360 game and favourite game of all time?
Let’s rattle through these:
• Favourite old Rare game: Solar Jetman. Honest to goodness, it was my favourite NES title and I think it still holds up today. I have a Man Room at home and I’m currently working my way back through it for the first time since childhood.
• Favourite new Rare game: Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. As a big Lego fan, it gave me everything I needed to just sit in front of a telly and let the hours tick by. Ended up making a working Thunderbird 2, including a detachable middle section that then released a tiny scooter for Banjo to ride out on.
• Favourite Xbox 360 game: Halo. All of them. I absolutely love the AI and the variety it brings to the sandbox combat, but the multiplayer Halopalooza gatherings are just brilliant fun. I’ll have to tell you about our Mike Myers game type one day.
• Favourite game of all time: can only do you a Top Three, sorry. World of Warcraft, Halo: Combat Evolved, Tetris. And Animal Crossing. And Journey. NEXT QUESTION!
Any good (printable) anecdotes or memories from within the walls of Rare?
I have very fond memories of my time on Ghoulies and the love shown to other members of the team when they went away on holiday. On one occasion, we wrapped someone’s entire office up in newspaper. This wasn’t the office as a whole, but every individual item. It may sound very childish (and it was) but it was the level of detail we went to that got me. If it crossed the office boundary, we only wrapped it up until that point; and nothing was ignored, so even the dead fly we found when wrapping his lamp was cocooned in tabloid headlines. When he came back it was just like Christmas.
Then there was the time where I and a couple of now ex-Rarites decided to do our own little promo for Trouble in Paradise. As mentioned above, I’m a big fan of Halo, and so taking that as inspiration we hijacked a large portion of the maintenance shed and acquired a great quantity of the VP Burger King toys that had been released. To get from concept to the final video took about two months of hard lunchtimes and some of our own self-induced crunch, but it was worth it.
What’s been your personal proudest moment in programming?
The two that stick out in my mind are both firsts. Back when I first started and was still very unaware of how everything worked I was tasked with putting The Grim Reaper – or Junior, as I call him – into Ghoulies. That day when I showed him to the rest of the team, walking, talking and stalking Cooper through the level, I thought I’d burst with pride. That was my first big contribution to Rare.
The other was on Piñata when, after countless false starts and late nights, Eike and I had taken devkits for a home test of the early LIVE code. It didn’t start well, we had connection issues and after a while I left my box on and went to sort some food. By the time I returned my Austrian chum had rectified his iffy internet and I returned to find him planting pumpkin after pumpkin around our online garden. It was our first big success and I’d never been so happy to see a vegetable in my life.
What advice would you give to anyone thinking of applying for a role similar to yours?
Do so. If you’re after a varied and exciting career in the sphere of programming I can think of nothing better than becoming a Gameplay Engineer.
Beyond the requisite ability to code and understand the latest technology, passion and enthusiasm for what you do is always a great asset. As we work on the rock face to determine what’s fun and what is not, that little difference to make what you’re doing the best it can be really shows. But more than that, there’s a dark art, something that can’t quite be bottled, that you see in the best Gameplay Engineers. A lot of them have a touch of Designer in them, the knack of identifying where some games lack that spark and just how it can be turned around.
So next time you’re playing a game, don’t just disregard it for being “bad”, take a step back. Consider how they may have put together what you’re looking at. What building blocks went together to form it and how they might be tweaked to be improved…
Previously in Rare Life:
Gavin Price, Designer
Steve Mayles, Character Artist
Rich Nguyen, Tools Engineer
Weighing up a career in the games biz? What roles would you like to see covered in future Rare Life columns? Drop us a line and let us know.