Senior Level Designer

Joining us from the Mystical IntarNetular Chests O'Stuff comes Dave 'Captain ducks' Johnston. Previously 'Duke of Cat Pain', Dave has been persuaded out of some of his grislier former habits, and is now all sweetness and light apart from, you know, the knives. And what appears to be a human leg, temporarily pressed into service as a tire iron/letter opener/paperweight. We don't want to ask, you don't want to know, everyone's happy. Unless it's their leg.

Formed by the gradual erosion of an atypical igneous laccolith, Dave is only four fathoms deep, but extends on for three to five miles depending on time and tide. Strewn with wreaths of gorse and tipsy on thimbles of Falernum, Dave is currently drenched with glory as the victorious captain of the glorious SD Shackbattle team. We expect many more such triumphs, or we'll tie him to wombats. Many, many thereof. In fact his name among our tribe shall henceforth be "Victorious-But-Tied-To-Wombats" which in your common speech is pronounced...um..."Dave".

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 Dave does, how he ended up at Splash Damage, and more.

What do you do at Splash Damage?

My job description says 'Level Designer', which is fortunate news as I'm a horrid artist.

This means that instead of painting characters and beautiful environments, I get to draw badly-proportioned stick figures and map topologies, and collaborate with the real artists, the real coders, and fellow surreal designers to plot and plan maps for our next top-secret game... and then make them.

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

I should have been a software developer or researcher! I'd been mapping for games since Wolfenstein 3D, but when Quake 2 came out that actually put me off level design... I really couldn't contemplate how the level designers at id had produced such breath-taking maps. I definitely couldn't imagine myself ever making anything that would come close to one of my all-time favourite maps, Q2DM1, so I gave up and started concentrating on other things, like web design, programming and that school thing.

Then Half-Life came out and sucked me right back in to making maps again, purely for fun. I wanted to make maps that I would enjoy playing, so I made a Half-Life single-player mission and - realising it wasn't too awful - uploaded it onto the web for other people to try out. I was amazed when got me e-mails from a handful of developers offering me interviews! That was the first indication that maybe I could do this for a living.

The best advice I can offer to wannabe level designers is to just get stuck in. No amount of reading or playing games can beat the value of just making maps. Bad maps especially... lots of bad maps. Doing as much as possible, including making textures and sounds where necessary is really valuable experience. Do everything and anything.

What other games have you worked on?

Apart from Counter-Strike and Condition Zero, I made a few multiplayer maps for James Bond 007: Nightfire, and have been involved in bits and bobs of level design for a few other games in between, most still unreleased.

Most people probably know you as the creator of the popular Counter-Strike map de_dust. How did that map come about?

The idea from Dust came from early Team Fortress 2 screenshots of a small middle-eastern town. It was the total departure from the style of Half-Life and Team Fortress which really caught my interest, and so I couldn't wait to start making maps for it.

Unfortunately as TF2 got delayed and I grew weary.

Then I had a cunning plan, realising it would be quicker and easier to just make it myself. Fellow CS person Chris Ashton (aka MacMan) agreed to make some similar textures for me, and set about recreating the TF2 screenshots so I could pass it off as my very own original CS map.

At that time, CS maps were mostly dim, dark, creepy, grey, warehouse-style affairs - including the previous CS map I had made. In contrast, Dust was bright, warm, airy and had a dead simple layout which seemed to strike a chord with new players, which turned out be exactly what the mod needed at that time.

In your opinion, how has level design changed since the days of de_dust?

Well, maps have got bigger, and louder, and prettier, and they take more time to make, and require a wider range of skills. The original Dust was the product of just me and MacMan, but when Valve updated it for the Source engine, it required a variety of artists, designers and tons of reference material to bring it up to par, and that was 5 years ago! Designing a map is still roughly the same process, but now they need more layers of detail, interactivity and polish, and that's where the time tends to go.

But at the same time, we've now got more freedom than ever before, letting us do bigger, bolder and crazier things with our maps and try to give players more fun and more engaging experiences.

It's both a blessing and a curse... Some days I wish I could go back to the purity and relative simplicity of Doom 2 mapping, and other days I can't wait for the next generation of next-generation engines. It's quite an exciting time.

Why did you join Splash Damage?

Much of it was wanting to work on a Quake-based engine again, and as soon as I discovered Splash Damage were looking for a tall, handsome, talented level designer, I went to find them.

After 15 hours of banging on the entrance door and bouncing pebbles off the Splash Damage office windows, I managed to wear them down to a point of exhaustion that would let me convince them to give me the job.

I've been here ever since.

What are the best and worst parts of your job?

The best part is that I get to work with the type of game I enjoy and an engine I love making maps for.

The worst bit is that everyone here seems to suffer from selective name amnesia. They keep calling me 'Dusty', or 'Dust', or occasionally 'Dave Dust'.

I think they need treatment.

What was your first gaming experience?

The first real game I remember playing and enjoying is Buggy Boy. It came with the original Atari 520ST. Along with it came gems such as Ikari Warriors and Black Lamp, Summer Olympiad... then later Turrican, 9 Lives, James Pond, H.E.R.O...

However, it all changed the first time I connected to a Quake deathmatch server on the internet. Playing on a LAN was nothing new - I had mastered multiplayer Doom and Wacky Wheels - but playing with other people, on this 'internet' thing - that was magical and was like opening up a whole new world of gaming.

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

I'm split between shooters, platformers and driving games. Tactical and strategy games were never my thing, nor RPGs and adventure games. However, get something flashing around the screen at high speed and I'm there! I'm particularly fond of GripShift, as it combines those three things I love into one addicting little game.

Predictably though, my favourite game of all time is Half-Life, and probably always will be. It was such a revolution! It pressed all the right buttons at just the right time, and sent me flying off into a career I thought I had given up on.

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

My spare time is sloppily divided up into programming, designing, waiting for the next series of Spooks, attempting to cook, and wondering what to do with my spare time.