Meet the Team: Steve

Hello.

I am Steve, and I am zee game designer. At least, that’s what it says on my business card. As does everyone at Flashbang, I tend to wear multiple hats. On Splume I wore the Level Design hat. On Raptor Safari, I wore the sound design hat. On Mysterious Upcoming Projects I’ll be wearing more of a game design and music hat. I wish I had a stronger neck. Hats start to add up, and I’ve begun to cultivate a hunch. All I need now is a goiter and I can be a true freak mutant.

*gobbles table salt*

Oh! I see you’re still reading. Unlucky day! Um, well, lessee…I just finished writing a book. That’s pretty cool, amirite? It’s about game feel. You can find more information about it here. Actually, scratch that. Just make an impulse purchase on Amazon. Boom! Zap! Buy! Sales rank #1,135,144, here I come!

I came to Flashbang as so many others did, a refugee from the perils of the retail game industry. I worked at a place called Tremor, on an Xbox exclusive action RPG thing with the title “The Unseen.” In retrospect, this was a poor choice of name.

After Tremor fell to pieces, I worked as a designer at Neversoft on a game called Tony Hawk Underground. THUG for short. It was only begrudgingly called that, though. If I ever have children and for some reason let them name themselves and they choose something like “Doomcock the Despoiler…” Well, I’m prepared for how embarrassing that feels. Heh.

Working at Neversoft really crushed my soul. I wanted to work on stuff that interested me, stuff that I cared about. If you’re going to crush your soul to a fine powder through overwork – and make no mistake, game development is unadulterated masochism – it’s better to work towards your own dream than to let the dreams of others be built on a foundation of your sweat and tears. So I jumped ship to Flashbang, where sweaty tears salt the sweet pretzels of victory.

Another thing I do is teach; I teach the game and level design classes at the Art Institute of Phoenix. If you have something interesting to teach, I highly recommend it. In fact, I wrote an article about why you should teach. Teaching is one of the most rewarding, fulfilling things you can do with your time. Now that I think about it, the whole reason I wrote the book was to try to extend the sense of joy and pleasure I get from helping someone make the game or level they want. There’s just nothing like it.

In the future, I’ll be posting here various design-related rantings. People think that designing video games is a bit of a lark and that it’s as easy as tying your shoelaces or eating. I hope that exposing a bit more of the process of design will help those of you who’ve never made a game understand better what goes into it, why it’s exceedingly difficult and humbling, and, on the up side, why it’s worth doing. In fact, making games might be the most rewarding thing ever. It is for me, at least. As my friend Kyle once said “Games are the new medium of choice for the motivated misfit.”

And that’s it from me for now. I’ll leave you with a challenge. A hobby of mine is collecting Swink pseudonyms. For example: A Swinkle in Time. Swinkletoes. Swunken Treasure. Can you come up with one I haven’t heard yet?

Two in the Swink, over and out.