Developer Spotlight: Lee Russell, Blind Sky Studios
Somewhere - here in the UK - there is a small development studio fuelled entirely on coffee where three chaps are currently working on a melancholy and beautiful game called { adam }.
Blind Sky Studios are fairly fresh on the scene but a full version of their debut title - Biolith - is on the way to iOS and Android devices, while development for { adam } is currently underway. Today, we’re chatting to Lee Russell, programmer at Blind Sky Studios to learn a little more about his work.
Lee himself ‘earned his stripes during university’ where he studied computer science, surviving by exchanging repairs for vodka with five live-in art students.
What does your work with Blind Sky Studios entail?
As a developer I would say my job falls into 3 parts.
The first part is ideas: Most of the work here is distilling ideas into mechanics; you have to make sure you know every detail of an idea before you can fully design it. For example; say you want text boxes, I will ask when you want them, for how long you want them, how do you want to interact with them and so on.
The second part is design: With all the ideas changed to a full set of criteria now comes the part where I sit down with a pen and paper designing classes and methods. I may still have a few questions at this point, and find criteria I had not thought to ask about - practice makes perfect!
Lastly coding, writing it testing it and debugging it.
What was it that drove you to game development?
I always liked programming and I always liked games. At a young age I used to use things like RPG Maker 2000 and the Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos level editor.
In 2003 or so the idea that I could make and sell games seemed crazy. How would I get the money to pay for the CDs boxes distribution? It wasn’t until half way through 2014, over 3 years into a database maintenance job, I thought “I don’t want to do this”. I was told about Unity and just started playing around at first, I then started to work 3 hours every night and weekends (around my regular 40 hour per week job).
With services like Steam Greenlight and Apple and Android stores making indie development more accessible, I decided to quit my job in December last year so I have been full time indie developer since.
What has been your favourite project to work on; personal or professional?
[This question was answered by both Lee and Blind Sky Studio’s artist, Tom Kitchen, whom we spoke to last week.]
We’re pretty new to this as a team, so we’ve not worked on many projects yet but so far it’s all been a blast! Biolith was our debut project, so that was great to really learn the trade, every day was something new, you know? Poking our heads into our local game dev community and finding such a wealth of creative and inspiring people has been incredible!
But with the full version of Biolith on the cusp of being released we’ve begun work on our next project, { adam }. This is a very exciting project for us, we’ve created an art style I’m very happy with and I’ve just begun to work our story into the game world. Writing on this scale and for a video game is brand new to me and I’m really enjoying being out of my depth. I can’t wait to show people what we’ve been working on!
What hardware/software do you usually use?
Blender, Unity and Visual Studio (I prefer it to Monodevelop). Hardware is less important, except that you need to make frequent backups!
What misconceptions do people have about your job?
“Game development? Wish I could sit around playing games all day” would be one of the examples I have heard!
What do you love most about your work?
Seeing strangers play your game for the first time and seeing get genuine enjoyment from playing it. More specifically, I enjoy making abstract ideas become fully working mechanics in game.
Do you have any advice for budding game developers?
Make sure you finish your games. Don’t start a game do some fun things then get tired and make a new game. It also takes a lot of time to make finished games, if you are going to do it whilst you have a full time job you will have to be super passionate not to give up.
If you could’ve worked on any game in the past, what feature would you have added?
It would have to be The Secret of Monkey Island. As a child I loved playing the games with my dad. We would often get stuck and take weeks to figure out what to do (it was 1991-ish we had no Internet!).
Given the technical constraints at the time they did an excellent job, they have even updated Monkey Island (2009's Tales of Monkey Island) with new art and voice acting.
New feature? I would say the voodoo lady could be a bit more magic, perhaps a puzzle where you turn into a rat and have to sneak somewhere?
If you enjoyed this interview, why not check out the previous entires in our Developer Spotlight series?