Peter Akril – A.I Programmer at Supermassive games

Peter Akril – A.I Programmer at Supermassive games He has 6 years worth of games industry experience and also another graduate from Bolton University and isn’t afraid to speak his mind. His prior experience has been working at Travellers Tales and Codemasters (Guildford) before it was shut down after the release of Bodycount. He is now working at Supermassive games. At first glance it would appear that he had learnt most of his programming while at Travellers tales since he apparently learnt about debugging C(Programming language) He did express his opinion about Travellers Tales but were surprisingly negative since most of the work he did there was mostly under pressure due to a constant flow of work that had to be done in a short deadline time. After working at Travellers Tales he had very positive opinions about Codemasters exclaiming that it was an amazing place to work at. This makes me think that different studios will unintentionally neglect some of their employees when it boils down to deadlines coming up, making employees stay to work overtime until late night may be the only option for a games company due to the resources that they can afford. Other than expressing his opinions on what companies that he has worked at he also talked about his role as an A.I programmer and how it fits together with an animator’s role. An animator will make an animation and its Peter’s job to implement some A.I in order to make the character move to the actions of the animation to give the illusion of intelligence. Other than the animator and A.I role he also talked about the roles of all the other jobs within the game development team. Game designers have the idea and vision for the project and is the person who will be consulted for various game features to be put into the project. (They apparently cause a lot of confusion since they apparently don’t know what they want at times) Development managers make sure that the game eventually gets sold. If the game doesn’t get should then no money will be going into the company and if the company has no money then unfortunately No-one gets paid and the company won’t be able to make games anymore. Audio within games is neglected and is usually the last thing that is implemented within the game followed by music. Other roles in the game development team are as follows: Quality Assurance, Office managers and finally Marketing. He then gave us some ideas as to what to expect when working within the games industry. Making games is NOT easy. The Combination of a large amount of working hours ,mismanagement as well as the frustration of the work that you are doing is a harsh combination and can cause health issues. Since pete had to work long hours he spent a lot of time only eating Take-aways and sitting down and working he gained a lot of weight in a short period of time leading him to give the advice of staying healthy and working out before going to work since doing exercise after work is not a good feeling. Learning what I’m capable of is the main body of his presentation. Not everyone can work 15 hours every day and finding out what I can cope with is essential to make sure that i can maintain a high morale when working on a game. If i am not fit enough to work on a game then the company will be losing out so having such high hours is not recommended but standing my ground is a good thing if it means that I am not overworked and eventually becoming sick due to the amount of time spent working rather than staying healthy and having a social life to maintain a good morale and motivation to work to the best I can. Overall Peter gave my an insight to working under crunch time and how it can affect my health in a negative way. But the main issue being that to expect a lot of stress and pressure when working on a game since a whole team is relying on each other to ensure that the game that is put together at the end of the day is the best quality possible. A fairly large warning from Pete and thanks. I’m a little more prepared to watch out for the pressures of working in the games industry.