Technical Game Designer

Joining us from betwixt and between the mortice joints of the galley wainscoting of our clinker-built yawl comes Aubrey 'Bezzy' Hesselgren. Originally of impermeable felt yurt-ish construction, he has since been re-cast in bronze and babaganoush.

Responsible for the in-no-way offensive Leper Quake 2 and in-no-way official Matrix Quake 2 mods, Aubrey studied software engineering at Manchester University. It studied him back. Eventually they called it quits. He also trained at Parkour for a while, but only before it was cool. When freerunning showed any signs of being cool, he'd stopped, although he did appear briefly in the "Jump Britain" documentary, in a textbook example of skillful AV editing being employed to make subjects appear prancing buffoons.

Aubrey worked at Streamline Studios in Holland before joining forces with Tommy Refenes to work on the Indie Games Awards nominated Goo! before being snatched by the snatching snatchers of the SD snatch squad. He's about yay wide, can be found over yonder, and goes a bit like the theme tune from The Rockford Files. No, Quincy. Shh now, he's mantling.

Things You Were Too Afraid To Ask...

Every once in a while, we interrogate one of our own and put their answers up for all the world to see. Read on to find out more about what Aubrey does, how he ended up at Splash Damage, and more.

What do you do at Splash Damage?

I'm a Technical Game Designer. It's somewhere between a coder and game designer. I focus on core game play and usability within the core controls. I partly program things myself, and partly work with other (better) coders like Arne and Gordon. I'll also discuss designs, and write up design documents with the other designers.

Why did you want to work in the games industry and how did you get started?

It probably sounds a bit pompous, but I feel that games are this generation's emerging art form. I'm obviously not alone in this sentiment, and many people are starting to feeling the same way nowadays, but I've felt this way since before it was cool to feel this way. Still, there aren't a huge amount of games you can point to as harbingers of the age of games-as-art... I feel like we're at the tip of the iceburg, and that there's a lot more that can be done with the medium, which isn't (or is only attempted by a few standout developers with a lot of freedom. Lucky sods.).

I got started about 10 years ago, making mods like Matrix Quake 2 and Leper Quake 2, and being an obnoxious whelp within the modding scene. It took a while to get into the industry (messing up my A-Levels and university because of side-projects [games and lengthy ludology articles] which seemed more interesting than the syllabus) but once I got in, it was a trial by fire. A few years of industry experience have humbled me a lot.

Why did you join Splash Damage?

After working at Streamline Studios, I decided to go indie with a programmer friend, Tommy Refenes. We created Goo! - an abstract real time strategy game idea I had been sitting on for a long while. It was nominated at the IGF this year, thanks mainly to Tommy's tireless coding skills. Unfortunately, after about a year of excessively hard work and no real down-time, I found the lifestyle kind of unsustainable, and had to stop (though Tommy, bless his socks, is carrying on strong). After taking some time off to recover, I needed to get back on the horse, closer to home.

When I heard Splash Damage were hiring, I remembered how much fun I had making mods for Quake 2 and 3, and how much I enjoyed Wolf:ET around that time. It's a bit like going back to your roots, but armed with a lot of hard-earned experience.

What are the best and worst parts of your job?

Well, I've only been here a little while now, so right now the worst thing is probably familiarization with the code base. You want to be able to get your prototype ideas into the game as quickly as possible, but that kind of rapid deployment doesn't happen until you know the code base like the back of your hand, so it's a bit frustrating at first.
It's easing out now, thankfully.

The best part of technical game design is having a game mechanic idea run through the gauntlet of design, implementation and iteration, and finally hearing someone, while playing, say "That feels right."

Kinaesthetics (feel) is one of my big my passions in games, so it really makes a difference when someone notices that an implementation of a design is markedly better than what they're used to. I also get a perverse sense of satisfaction when one of the testers finds a cool exploit - often it's something worth fixing, but you never know when a mis-slip of the pen creates some cool feature to riff off (like, how could anyone at id possibly nerf rocket jumping after it proved to be so fun?).

What was your first gaming experience?

Probably being allowed to press the space-bar to fire in Elite - at the time, I was too young to understand the trading aspects, so my older brother would do that, and I would be allowed to do the dog fighting.

What types of games do you like, and what's your favorite game of all time?

I like good games! I don't have any real preference for one genre over another (there's wheat and chaff in them all). That said, I'm fairly allergic to the typical Japanese RPG combat model. It just leaves me cold.

Innovation, they say, is overrated, but at the same time, because of the amount of games I try out (for research *cough*), I'm always looking for interesting new ideas to learn from - or even just old ideas done really well or differently.

What do you enjoy doing when you're not at work?

The typical stuff: TV, movies, books, internet. I also like working on my own home brew stuff try out small ideas for interfaces, game mechanics or control systems. I recently entered the TIGSource Procedural Generation competition - took up a lot of my spare time, but the camaraderie in the indie scene, and the creativity it throws up is well worth the time sink. Oh, and some occasional parkour...

Can you explain what parkour is all about, how you first got into it, and how many bones you’ve broken because of it?

I actually came to parkour because I was annoyed at stodgy animation systems. Remember flashback? Remember how cool the animation looked? And how irritating and unresponsive the controls were? I was researching ways to help mitigate the problems of response times in realistically animated games, and happened across a few videos from some of the original French traceurs (Sebastien Foucan, David Belle, Les Yamakazi
etc.) moving in ways I had never seen before - not even in video games. At the time, I was in Southampton, sharing a flat with a couple of school mates. I showed them it, and one of them decided it would be cool to try it for ourselves.

So we spent a lot of time busting shins and twisting ankles on the streets of Southampton (a surprisingly fruitful obstacle course, as it turns out). We'd set up meets with other enthusiasts through the urban free flow forums, and despite being the least athletic person at school (I took up range shooting as my "sport", because it was the only one you could do lying down), I really enjoyed it. It completely re-maps how you look at the terrain, in the same way that every edge looks like something to grind on when you've been playing Tony Hawks for too long. Plus, when you put a run together, you start to feel like a ninja... even though I probably looked ridiculous doing it.

Eventually, I got to practice with the Urban Free Flow crew, participated on the forums, and me and my friend were invited to the Jump Britain filming, where I TOUCHED SEBASTIEN FOUCAN'S HAND!!!

It's sort of embarrassing to be asked this, now, because I am completely unfit. I took Flavius out for a free running session recently, and though he had never done it before, he was able to do 90% of the things on his first attempt, whereas I had taken months to build up the courage to do them.