Life as a developer

FiringSquad: So what is life like there now - what does your job entail?

Rory McGuire: I’m having a blast here, Sammy Studios has treated me extremely well. Things were pretty laid back through the holidays, but it's getting busy with the recent announcement and E3 looming in the distance. My job duties are pretty broad, I’ve designed single and multiplayer levels, mechanics, weapons, enemies, interfaces and more. Currently I’m juggling a few levels and the enemies those levels will contain.

Glowing death

In your eye

FiringSquad: Has working at a development house changed your perspective on games?

Rory McGuire: Absolutely. Being outside the industry and looking in is entirely different from being there. At the risk of being cliché, one of the most important elements is the aspect of the team. This is something that is mentioned all the time and applied very little. A game which has isolated art, programming and design departments shows it. When a designer has an intimate relationship with an artist working on a level, the two of them can take the map to higher levels than either one of them could individually. Both, however, must make concessions and requests along the way to get it to where the visuals match the gameplay and vice versa.

To some degree there's a myth perpetuated by game journalism that it's aloof, legendary auteurs crafting video games. This is and isn’t the case. The Sims wouldn't have been one of the best selling games of all time without Will Wright, but without the team that Will Wright was leading the game wouldn't have been a tenth as polished as it is. In this day and age there are no auteurs in the video game industry, projects are too large and too long for one man armies. In the game industry today there is very much so a case of the weakest link holding everyone back. One bug, one little annoying nuance is all it takes for a player to say "To hell with this game!" I've known players who have stopped playing games because they couldn't stand to look at the way the hero ran. Every discipline and every department has to be on point and working together to pull off a grand game.

Indianval

Jericho

FiringSquad: Who are some industry veterans and leaders on Sammy's Darkwatch development team?

Rory McGuire: Sammy Studios has been very deliberate and precise in our acquisition of talent and it really shows in the caliber of our team members. We have a number of Oddworld alumni in the development of Darkwatch: Paul O’Connor, Chris Ulm, Eric Yiskis, Sean Miller, Mauricio Hoffman, Ivan Power and Farzad Varahramyan. Between the Oddworld bunch alone they’ve got a few walls worth of awards for gameplay, programming and visual design. The proof is in the pudding, as well, the wisdom, insight and skill I have seen those guys display is nothing short of extraordinary. We also have team members from EA, Rockstar, Stormfront, Origin and more.

Sammy Studios itself is led by a number of industry veterans including Emmanuel Valdez, Brian Johnson and Dave Wagner, all of whom held various leadership positions at Midway in its heyday. The company president, John Rowe, was a co-founder of Tradewest, which gamers from the old school will remember publishing Double Dragon, Ikari Warriors and Iron Man Stewart’s Super Off-Road.

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