Lecture 7, Codemasters/Traveller’s Tales

6/12/10

This lecture was given by Peter Akrill, another ex student of Bolton Uni now working in industry. He specifically works with game programming, so a lot of what he had to say is not applicable to myself as I have very little ability with coding for anything other than simple scripting, though I do plan to rectify this. Initially Peter worked for Traveller’s Tales, he paints a very different picture of the company to Arthur from the first lecture. Peter strongly disliked the working environment at TT and as such was not happy there, however the environment at codemasters is apparently much better structured, and he is much happier there, and as such he gave it a shining review as it were.

Mostly this particular lecture was about 2 things, the roles of members of any one given development team, those being split into;

• Programmers
• Artists
• Animators
• Designers

And additionally, how to survive the tough hours when working in the industry, and what kind of workloads to expect. The impression I got was that the workloads would be huge, pressure would be constant during development time, and that I will be working an awful lot of overtime. While this is a little discouraging, I feel confident I can put in as much time as whatever project I’m working on needs.

Overall in this lecture, while I was entertained, I felt it was somewhat lacking in fresh information, but the suggestions on how to survive the pressures of working in the industry was good, but sadly the whole lecture seemed slightly off topic.