Jake Ganey

Similar to Nate in some respects, in that I was a mature student coming into university. I'd spent years floating between different jobs. I've always wanted to make video games, be involved in video games. I did it in my own time when I was supposed to be doing my schoolwork. I was making mods for Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, that kind of stuff. But I kind of drifted into a job. I was doing junior project management actually. It was okay, I had good prospects and I was earning okay money. But I remember driving home daydreaming about seeing a game I'd made being presented at E3 or something like that. And I just thought, what am I doing? I need to do something about this. So, like Nate was saying, I've had a creative background as well and my family are creative. So it made sense for me to go down an artistic path. So that's what I did, I went back to university and studied. I was lucky enough in university that my tutor at the time, or one of my tutors, Dean, managed to get me a placement at TT. As you know, a lot of guys from TT eventually came over to work at Foundry 42, CIG. And yeah, that was my path through there as well. And it was good working with Dean as well, because there's a Battlefront connection in a similar respect, as he worked on the Battlefront games, one and two. So it's a funny connection between us there as well. So yeah, when I came over to TT, I think I was there for three years working as both a VFX artist and an environment artist. And then I had the chance to come over to CIG and took it with both hands.

I think for me it's the combination of so many different elements and fields coming together into a single product, so to speak. If you were to work on a film or on a book or a piece of art, it's very singular. Whereas a video game combines so many of these different disciplines together. And I think video games are the only real thing that you can immerse yourself into that world. Equally, with other media, it's not quite the same feeling that you get to capture somebody with the world that you create. So that, for me anyway, was always the appeal of video games: making that cohesive unit of different disciplines.

For me, I just love video games. I've played video games since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I'd rush home from school, play video games. This is way back. Do you remember the Vectrex? I actually brought it up in studio the other day and everyone looked at me like I was from outer space. I was like, okay, I'm getting old. Nobody knows what this is. So there is that connection. But of course, you fantasize about going to work on a film every now and again or doing different things, which I've had the opportunity to do. I've been very lucky. I've managed to work in architectural previs. I've done some film work. I've worked for Apple. I've worked for the McLaren F1 team. I've gone through a lot of industries to get where I am. You just find your path, if that makes sense. But the key thing for me about working on video games is the culture and the people. You don't really get that anywhere else. Especially with CIG, it's a very organic process, putting the game together. And I love that. And bizarrely, the years that I had in catering, not that the catering thing was that bad, taught me to appreciate people more than anything. Because in catering, you're dealing with 70 staff at any one time. That's what I used to have to do. And then you would be dealing with two, three hundred customers at the same time. So you've got to develop your human social skills and be able to communicate clearly and know when you're winning, know when you're losing. So I'm always quite thankful for that experience. It's taught me an awful lot about just working with people and I think it serves me quite well with the team that I'm with now.

With great difficulty. When you're comparing it to looking at something in what I would term 2D, which is film, as in a linear point of view, it's completely different. Everything needs to hold up, for a start. But a lot of principles do trickle through. The eye should never stare, it should always wander. There are certain things that you can do to feed into that. The laws of the golden ratio and lighting, the principles are still the same, it just takes a lot longer. You can do a beautiful corridor in a matter of a day, maybe two, but what's around the corner? It's very tricky. I can't really put into words the challenge, at least on, I know you get it in the PU, but on Squadron, that we have, especially with a game that deals with vast scale. I think Jake will attest to this. The biggest challenge that you have with our game is trying to portray scale in space. Because in everyone's head, when you're going across the surface of a space station, they're instantly going to go to the Death Star. And they're going to fly past all this greeble sort of stuff. In reality, the Death Star would be gone in a couple of seconds. That's the flight model that you're dealing with. So trying to balance those expectations is tough.

When new people come to join the team, that's always one of the biggest challenges: getting people to understand that scale, work at that scale, and understand where to keep the detail. You get someone who's used to making FPS environments and making the corridors and things, and then you go, okay, now we've got to make a solar system effectively. And they're trying to break it down in the same way that you would do a corridor. And it's about focusing the art in the right places. And then it becomes more about how do you craft the experience. And again, you're asking about why video games? And it's because of the experience. Sometimes you're not just directing or creating artwork, you're directing and creating an experience for the player, right?