Produced in association with our mates at SAE Creative Media Institute.
Brisbane game designer Adam Single grew up playing table-top RPGs like Warhammer, but says he felt sorry for the kids whose parents went to the shop and just bought them the whole set, because they didn’t get to feel the joy of creating and improvising something of their very own from scratch.
This passion grew into a love of video games, but it wasn’t until years later, after dropping out of uni and working in hospitality, that he realised he could turn his love of gaming and turn it into sweet, sweet $$$ and career satisfaction. After going back to uni in his 20s, he now gets to do what he loves all day.
What was it that inspired you to change careers and study game design in your 20s, and was that a scary decision to make as an adult with responsibilities?
It was a little bit scary. I started a degree in engineering when I left school, which was the thing that my grades and interests implied that I should do, even though gaming was what I really wanted to do. At the time, though, there wasn’t a clear path in to studying it. For various reasons, I didn’t finish my degree. I worked in hospitality management, but started to get the feeling that I wanted a career instead of a job. My brother sent me a link to Qantm College, which became part of the SAE Creative Media Institute in 2004. I hadn’t heard of them, but it was an opportunity to study what I wanted, and the two-year degree they offer was very attractive in terms of getting out there quicker.
So now you’ve actually been able to get that dream career in game design, what does your average work day actually look like?
I’m a full-time dad, a full-time worker, and I’m working part-time on three different indie projects, so time-management can be tricky. At the moment, I work full-time for a company called Real Serious Games, where we use gaming technology to create simulations for all kinds of industries. The people who work here all have experience in the gaming industry, some for many years, and we’re taking our knowledge and love of video games and applying it to sectors that don’t usually use that kind of technology. We make interactive visualisations that you can get into and play around with.
What kind of industries does that cover?
If a company is putting in a tender to do a new highway or something like that, we can create a visualisation of the construction process over time, in an accurately-modelled rendering of the area. We have engineers on our team who work with the engineers from the various companies, we have artists who work on the design of specific buildings or vehicles or whatever’s required, and we have programmers who put it all in the engine and make it interactive. We can show what a project will look like over a series of months or years.
And companies can then get in there and muck around in a simulation of their own construction project?
Yeah, they can run traffic simulations, they can go backwards and forwards on the time line, see the construction at any point, work out when and where equipment will be needed and what delays, if any, that will create before they occur. It’s like being in god mode in a video game, where you can see anything you want, go anywhere you want, walk through walls …
What about in your spare time?
I spend a lot of my spare time working on an application I’m developing with my own company, a little four-man indie team, a mobile fitness application. I’m also the programmer for an indie bitpop band up here in Brisbane called 7bit Hero – I program the games that come up on the screen at the shows. I have another collaboration going with a friend, we’re working on another game again. On any given night, I’ll be working on one of those three indies.
A lot of game designers tend to have that one dream project they’d like to work on, given the time and the freedom. Do you have one of those?
Absolutely, yeah. I’ve had that passion for a very long time, and I’m quite confident that we’ll be able to start working on it in the next few years. My group all work remotely – none of us live in the same city, and we all have families and jobs and contract work and bills, so at the moment, we’re trying to keep things to a minimum, simplify them. It can be hard to manage a team this way. We can’t just have one of us working on something alone for 24 or 72 hours with no input, because inevitably, there will be feedback and changes, and we want that loop to be a lot tighter than it is now. We’re working our way towards something much bigger, what I like to call my magnificent octopus, which is a line stolen from Blackadder.
Can you tell me a bit about the game itself?
I’m a huge fan of artificial intelligence, and a lot of my ideas for games grow out of that. The game is about sending a squad into battle, but the battle part is automated, and the player’s job comes before that – it’s about selecting the right people and personalities and attributes and training them and encouraging them to work as a team and make certain choices. At some point, you’ll have to send them out on a mission and trust that you’ve done enough to prepare them, because once they’re there, they’re out of your control and you’re essentially a spectator, watching their personalities emerge and watching them interact based on how you’ve trained them up.
I want to ask a bit about study now – what were the most important lessons that you learned in your game design course?
The content was excellent, the people who teach you have worked professionally in the industry, and do their best to make sure that the people coming through the course come out aware of the realities of the industry. There are plenty of misconceptions, and there are plenty of romantic ideals about what the games industry’s like to work in. Designers go in with a passion, and a really strong desire to make the type of games they want to play, and they don’t understand why games like that don’t get made. I can tell you that the problem is not a lack of ideas, ever – the problem is that game design also has to be a business, and if you want to be able to do it long-term and make a living, you have to factor that in.
So basically, that you need to keep the realities of the industry in mind?
Exactly. There are plenty of passionate gamers who make games on the side, and there are some great platforms for little indie games that aren’t monetised in any way. The developers might make money, but not enough to live off. Still, they have the freedom to make those kinds of games. There’s almost always a compromise, and the instructors made sure we came out aware of the realities of the industry – the fact that you’ll be working in a large team, the fact that you won’t be the sole voice in direction or design or even how the controls work. You learn that if you want to have an influence on that side of things, you have to be able to defend your ideas, show prototypes to prove your point.
Did studying help ground you?
Yes, it wasn’t lofty theory, it always came back to the practicalities of the industry. That was an excellent part of the degree, and access to those people was almost as valuable as the content, being able to talk to those people, discuss your ideas with them, find out what they’ve been through with companies they’ve worked with, and how to best get your own ideas heard.
Between working and being a dad, you probably don’t have much time to play games, but are there any recent ones that have taken over your life?
It’s not a great idea for me to invest in a game that’s just come out when I’ll end up paying $80 and only being able to give it an hour, if that. I loved Journey and was able to spend a whole day playing that – I’m really glad I was able to make time for it. The most recent game I’ve loved is Invisible Inc, which is a really beautiful, interesting strategy game whose focus is on non-combat, which is something that, as a father, I’m starting to look at more in games. I’m trying to find games that are interesting and challenging and thought-provoking and aren’t based in violence. I’ve heard the designers speak about how they went through a lot of prototypes and before they got to something they liked, because they were determined to stay true to the core pillars of the game that they’d imagined at the very beginning, which is impressive, and not a skill that a lot of teams have.
Image via 7Bit Hero
