Current Employment - Monumental Games Ltd. Since [2006-08-24]
Currently Happy and Currently Employed at :: Monumental Games Ltd.
Writing Mini-Games which involve: well stuff n' things. Sorry can't say yet :( I know, I know, no secrets amongst friends and all that.
Monumental Games Ltd was started by Rocco Loscalzo, who had been Technical Director on Warhammer Online; Rik Alexander, game director on MotoGP3 and Warhammer Online towards the end; and Gylan... who's last name i've just forgotten. Doh! However I'd only met him once on MotoGP3 as he was a freelance artist so didn't come into the office. There's several other ex-Climax employees here, many of whom worked on Warhammer Online so it feels kinda like coming home. Very odd.
Previously employed - Sumo Digital Ltd. Until [2006-08-18]
Previously Employed, but unhappy with commuting from Nottingham, at :: Sumo Digital Ltd.
Sumo was a fantastic place to work with a lot of very very talented people. I landed the job there
shortly after the Climax Nottingham studio went bust and everyone was laid off. To be precise I got
the job within 3 days of being laid off!
The place has a very relaxed and friendly atmosphere with teams often sharing artists and games designers
which leads to plenty of talk amongst groups with none of that inter-team rivalry you can get at places.
The only downside for me and the reason I finally broke down (figuratively although nearly literally) and wanted to leave was that my commute from Nottingham had reached an epic 2 hours in each direction. That was something that I coped with for a while during the crunch period on Outrun2006 but eventually it was too much.
I still have many friends including a former housemate and about half of Climax Nottingham who work at Sumo and so am still in fairly regular communication with them all. Hopefully I'll get to see the new offices they've just moved into when I go to visit them all for a beer this month (as of 2006-10-03).
Previously employed - Climax Nottingham. Until [2005-02-??]
Previously Employed, but laid off when studio went bust, at :: Climax Nottingham
Climax Nottingham (Aka: Climax Online) was my first industry job since graduating from University. Until this point i'd only been a games tester at a couple of places (Ask if you're interested) and the work was a real eye opener. The title i was initially working with was Warhammer Online, which is now being remade from scratch by Mythic Entertainment. Their game will share no code or art assets as far as I'm aware from Climax's version.
I began as a Technical QA (Quality Assurance) tasked with finding bugs, investigating them a little and then passing them onto the relevent programmer. However a couple of the programmers soon realised that I could code too and started just bouncing the simpler bugs right back at me (I'm looking at you Ed). This suited me fine as I've always wanted to be a programmer but lacked the experience or demo's.
After Warhammer was cancelled the team went through a bit of a shake-up and I spent some time doing game scripting before moving onto the MotoGP3 project. Several other team members had been transferred as well in an attempt to both meet deadlines and to keep everyone employed. It was on MotoGP3 that I was actually promoted to Junior Programmer.
Without going into detail: We finished MotoGP3, and the axe fell on the studio as a whole. Without a project there was no money coming in and a lot going out in wages/bills/etc. A small (7 or 8?) man team was kept to try and find funding for the Leviathan Engine tech which Warhammer was built on but that was small consolation for the 20+ of use who needed to find jobs.