I thought I’d post here to introduce myself. My name is Ollie and I’m the new Lead Designer on Oort. So I’ll be working really hard with Ben, James and the rest of the team to make the game as good as it can be.
A bit of history: I started working in games at Lionhead Studios on a game called Black and White, and went on to work on various titles there including Fable 1, Fable 2, and The Movies. I then spent time at a place called Kuju, and most recently worked at another Guildford studio called Supermassive Games on a few things, most notably a PS4 title called Until Dawn. That’s just been released and I’m now really excited to have moved to Wonderstruck to work on Oort.
I look forward to hearing your ideas, and helping to deliver all the features you’re waiting for.
For the members here who are not familiar with what role a lead designer performs on a game development team, can you elaborate about what your role entails? What part of development do you most heavily influence?
My second question is what about Oort brought you to this project? Thanks in advance.
A Lead Designer is responsible for the delivery of the overall design of the game. In a large team this might be quite a prescriptive role, but in a slightly smaller team like Oort’s this becomes much more collaborative. So I’ll be working with all the great people here, and getting their design input, and collating that into a cohesive plan.
What attracted me to Oort was the people, the work they’d produced, and the sandbox open-ended nature of the concept, which is the type of game I enjoy, and also fits with my skills and experience.
In my experience this is the same as with any other position. If you possess the required skills and have notable experience in a leading role in a company (preferably in gamedev), then you apply and get reviewed by your future superiors. Not much difference from any other job, really.
I was on Until Dawn for four and a bit years, so I did lots of different things. Initially I worked on the story. I then worked on the design pipeline and the AI, and for the last stretch I led a team responsible for around a third of the levels.
