This is a piece written by Ryan Astley, a friend of the show recently recruited by Ruffian games and working on Crackdown 2. -Alex

Today marks the end of a large task I’ve been set by the lead artist to undertake. I’ve been working on this set piece for several weeks and the last few days have been the about cleaning up all the nooks and crannies, adding that extra bit of polish ™

Working for a games company does feel really different to many other jobs I’ve had. You sort of don’t see it as a 9-5 thing. It’s more of “let’s see how much work I can do today before my brain wants to explode”. Of course you have to be driven and committed to want to put this amount of effort into a project, and Crackdown 2 is definitely worth it.

Working with people at Ruffian games is inspiring enough. Chuckles and belly laughs are heard all day from play tests and new integrated features as the project develops. Its all smiles, a very positive atmosphere and I feel very lucky to be a part of it. It all comes from good planning, passion, experience and some fantastic talent.

When you think about working in games, think about what skills you need, might it be C++ programming skills, knowledge of 3DS Max to craft something awesome? That’s probably about half of it as its as much about needing good time management and organisational skills. Tasks can be amazingly complicated and will last several weeks, meanwhile everyone’s watching your stuff progress, and so it’s good to not prat around and start wavering for too long.

Games today have multi-million pound budgets, and that is well planned out and spent appropriately, so you don’t want to waste time and money.

In any creative industry you have to be ready to take a lot of constructive criticism. To be honest I find it very useful. There’s little point in having a huge ego in this game, you have to work closely with many others in your team and taking on board ideas from others is key. So it’s important that everyone gets along and communicates well with one another, less ego and more “lets get along and share ideas to make something great”

As projects eventually draw to their final stages of bug fixes and tweaks I could imagine I’ll be doing 12 hour days + to get my parts of the game up to scratch. In a year’s time it’ll all be worth it, seeing our game on the shelves hopefully scoring high in latest EDGE magazine. I’ll have my fist pumping in the air screaming “I FUCKING DID IT!”

So this weekend we’re all going on a Ruffian BBQ party

Ryan Astley – Ruffian Games