Games Industry

I have been in the computer games industry as a core technology and rendering programmer for quite a while now, I find the job really challenging and really rewarding, when things are going to plan! I currently work at Juice Games which is a subsidiary of THQ, and have been an employee since I joined the industry about 4 years ago.  I was previously employed in the UK defence industry developing systems for aircraft and other defence applications, I found this very frustrating as there was no creativeness involved in my work and red tape to cross everywhere!

The time scale of games development is pretty long and it is great to finally see the title that you have been putting your soul into for the past few years making it onto the shelves of games stores.  Currently I have 1 title to my name Juiced2:Hot Import Nights of which I was initially recuited to build and maintain the PS3 version, porting across systems from the XBOX360 core engine.  I found this a big challenge but all went well and I learnt a hell of a lot along the way, I optimised a lot of the engine to fit the PS3 architecture and use as much distributed processing as possible.  It was great to finally use a lot of the technical expertise I gained in my degree education for the one thing that I love, computer graphics.

I think the figures for Juiced2 were 2million units + worldwide on 6 different SKUs (gaming platforms) which is not bad considering it is not a AAA class title, as I understand a AAA title means on a very big budget, big workforce and to a high production level (I could however be a little wrong here).  On Juiced2 we had up to 60 people working on it which crossed all 6 SKUs.

here are a few youtube videos of Juiced2:

TV Advert

Trailer

Drifting Gameplay

I recieved a gold disc from Juice Games to commemorate the Juiced franchise which I am very proud to recieve:

The Juiced franchise has since been canned and I am now working on an unannounced original IP for Juice Games / THQ, the job is still really interesting and every day brings new challenges.  It is great to work on my second title in the current generation of hardware and to see us pushing the hardware even more!  It is exciting times!