Splash Damage

PlayStation 3 Programmer

Joining us from the attic of athletic mantis antics comes Ronald.

Ronald's contributions to the wider society outside game-craftment have been neither sufficiently recognised nor celebrated. He was instrumental in creating the Highbrow/Lowbrow divide, smiling or frowning as the various cultural artifacts were placed on a salver before him. Incapable of making our own decisions, increasingly we turn to him for all manner of Judgments: when to bevel and when to chamfer; what is a detent and what is a ratchet, what is a dowel and what is a tenon. He kerns, and scandalizes gaff rigged sails (which isn't anywhere near as rude as it sounds).

He is remarkably patient with English, a language that makes no distinction between interior corners (the corner of a room, say) and exterior corners (the corner of a street, for example), and is rhyme-poor. He's nine foot twelve inches tall, but it depends on the humidity, and gravity, and which feet and inches you're using. Your mileage may vary.

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

What do you do at Splash Damage?

My task is to wield the dark forces of black magic and use the powers that are unlocked by voodoo rituals to have electricity and light bend to my will. I stand between two towering giants and use powerful and ancient words to make them do my bidding. I stir in the primordial pool of which all power is built. I am the gatekeeper of logic and control all that wish entry to knowledge. I am the channel through which communication is made possible to that what sees all, controls all, creates and destroys all, of that which communicates to other plains of existence. I am both its master and its servant. What am I you dare ask?! I am a programmer in the service and control of the core tech.

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

When growing up I started programming on an MSX mostly because there were never enough games, so I thought, why not make my own? Later it was flashy visuals in 64k PC demos that caught my attention, which I had to try for myself. It was like trying to find out how a magic trick works.

During the last few years at University I noticed that a lot of my interests in programming were all present in games development and especially in engine programming. After leaving University I did try to pursue a job in the games industry, knocking at the doors of every Dutch game developer, but never seriously considered that I'd ever land a job in this industry especially because I figured engine programmers weren't hired like that. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t work out, but I got the chance to work for quite a few non-games companies afterwards, and learned a lot in the process.

My first break into the games industry happened when my girlfriend found out by chance that Streamline Studios were looking for people. I sent in my resume, got the interview and was hired.

Do you have any tips for people wanting to break in?

1) Be honest to yourself. There's no denying that the games industry is a wonderful place to work in, but that doesn't mean that it's for everyone. If the only reason you want to be a game developer is because you think games are cool, there's a good chance that you will not last very long in this industry. To put it differently, the games industry isn't looking for people that are only enthusiastic about games. It certainly helps, but other skills in programming, artistic, design or management are far more important as that's needed to actually create games. Ask yourself if you really have a skill that the games industry needs and be honest to yourself about your motivation to get into this industry.

2) Get a programming degree if you plan to start as a code monkey. Though these won't teach you how to make actual games, they will point you in the right direction. The lack of game development experience can be partly compensated for by doing projects in your own time, which also underlines your enthusiasm for game development. For example, if a games company needs an A.I. programmer, somebody that studied programming with a specialization in A.I. and who also happens to create bots in his free time will have their attention.

If worse comes to worst and you can't seem to get hold of that hard-to-find opening in the games industry, you'll at least be able to get another job until you do.

What games have you worked on? Which one did you enjoy the most?

So far I've worked on Hoopworld by Streamline Studios, followed by Haze and few unannounced projects by Free Radical Design. All my programming for the games industry has been for engine/core tech, which has the benefit of automatically getting credited for multiple projects.

Hoopworld was pretty exciting because none of the team members had a lot of game development experience, so we were learning as we went along. Haze however was the one I truly enjoyed the most up until now. Though it wasn't the first product I had worked on, it certainly was the biggest, with the most publicity around it. That extra pressure combined with having to stretch and test my technical knowledge and having to cope with a whole new console I had never worked on before made it such a challenge that it was hard not to get caught up in it.

How did you end up at Splash Damage?

A recruitment agent contacted me out of the blue about a programming position at Splash. The day of the interview I was pretty sick, with a headache so bad you wouldn't even get after the best binge-drinking night. I was pretty impressed with Dean's and Arnout's technical knowledge, Splash’s plans for Brink and the company as a whole. On the train ride home I actually regretted not moving the interview to a day where I would have felt better and able to answer the questions with coherent and full sentences. Turns out though the guys managed to understand me despite my sickness and shortly thereafter Splash Damage was a programmer stronger.

What is it like to work at Splash Damage?

Most of the time it's just hard work (though honestly, if it was a party every day we wouldn't get our games to be as great as they are), but it's nice to do it in an environment that has so many passionate people working in it. Splash Damage has managed to group together an amazing pool of very talented people and working with them means there are a lot of highlights that frequently make the days just that bit more special.

What are the best and worst parts of your job?

Best: Programming is, to an extent, about fitting smaller pieces together that turn into new pieces to fit together until finally there's a product resulting from it. Even after so many years of programming, I still get excited when a particular bit of code has reached that point where it slots into a larger system or that other programmers start using it. Breathing life into your creation, so to speak. It’s a feeling that's similar to testing your first model rocket or finishing a model car and giving the remote control the first push forward.

Worst: Bug fixing without a doubt. It's a mandatory part of the job and something that every programmer just has to live with. It's a tedious job, especially towards the end of a project when time’s running out and you begin to doubt the debugger, the compiler, other programmers or even your own sanity (mostly in that order). It's in those moments that I regret not becoming an international superhero.

What was your first gaming experience?

Back in the good old days, my dad traded his racing bike for an MSX home computer. It came with stack of cassette tapes which had a bunch of copied games of which only half or so worked. Since it took me a while to discover how it was possible to find out at what point a new game started, I only ever played the first games on them. Most weren't even worth remembering, except River Raid. It may technically not be the first game I ever played, it was the first that I enjoyed enough to remember.

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

I usually buy my games regardless of a particular genre. More often than not, there has to be something special about it that appeals to me which makes me buy it, although with my weird taste, “special” is often surprising to me too. If I had to pick my favourite genres, I’d go with platformers, western RPGs and point-and-click puzzlers.

So far my all-time favourite game is still the original Diablo. Blizzard struck gold with the re-playability. Every dead monster holds the potential for an upgrade so you keep coming back or playing a bit more just in case that tiny upgrade drops. The difficulty was balanced so subtly that you felt stronger with every run-through, but never invincible. This was helped by the random levels that meant the layout was unpredictable and there was always the chance that around the next corner or through the next door that the random combination of tiles was so unfortunately ordered that you had to deal with a few too many monsters. Diablo was the first game I truly got excited about to play. I wasn't rushing home from school to play with the computer, but I was rushing home to play Diablo. Not very many games have gotten me that excited since.

What's the meaning behind your nickname?

When saying my nickname "Conine" or "Co9" in English it sounds the same as "konijn", the Dutch word for rabbit. The name is actually stolen from a hardcore/metalcore band I used to play in. At the time the bass player had two guinea pigs he kept referring to as his rabbits. It became a running gag to correct him on this and so when it was time to get a proper name for ourselves, "konijn" was one of the first names to come up. Ambitious as we were at the time, it was dismissed due to the lack of potential international appeal, but picked up again after "americanising" the name. Though the band died a quiet, anonymous death, I'm now using the nick to keep a little of my childhood ambition alive.

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

Nothing spectacular I’m afraid. Watch a movie, read a book, play a game, listen to some music, play a bit of guitar, do some programming, ponder the meaning of life. That sort of stuff. I play a lot of World of WarCraft (Infrael@Burning Steppes-EU if you want to say “hi”) with my girlfriend, but with more people playing WoW now than the population of a small country, that’s not that special anymore, either.