meet the team: jon creighton (part 1)

For the second of our meet the team features, this time we caught up with Lead Programmer Jon Creighton and asked him a few questions about himself along with his work on the game. Make sure you check back here on Thursday for part two of the Q&A.

 

Who are you?

I’m Jon Creighton.  I’ve been working for Codemasters for around two and a half years.

What do you do on the Bodycount team?

I’m the Lead Programmer on the project, so I’m directly responsible for the delivery of the technology that is necessary to make the game happen.

We developed a completely custom engine for Bodycount from the ground up.  At the start of the project, which is only a year and a half ago, we had nothing on the screen and no tools for the artists and designers to use.  A lot of my work has been to prioritise and organise what needed to be done to develop a solid game engine and tools system while we were maintaining visible progress in the software.

In addition I designed and wrote quite a lot of the rendering engine, did the initial work on the destruction technology and have had a hand in writing most of the shaders for the game.

In two words, how would you summarise your job?

Mental gymnastics.

What’s the coolest thing you’ve seen in-game so far?

In our game?  Well the most visible thing that impresses me at the moment is the way the Psycho hunts you down throughout the level, bashing through walls and doggedly finding you even if you’ve run all the way over to the other side of the map.

However if I look under the hood, which is what I deal with every day, I’d say the coolest thing in the game are the systems we have put together to make the best use out of the Playstation 3 and Xbox.  The two consoles have very different architectures and it takes some careful planning to use them effectively.  Because of the fresh start we made with Bodycount we had to put together a whole range of systems to let us exploit them both.  It might sound like a trivial thing, but I’ve worked on projects where the game engine just got in the way of everything you were trying to do and made your day-to-day work a chore but ours is efficient and a real pleasure to work with, which I think is pretty cool.

How long have you been in gaming, and what did you do before working on Bodycount?

I’ve been working professionally in games for the past ten years, starting out back in Australia for Atari Melbourne House.  However my first published game, if you could call it that, was made all the way back in 1992.  I was at University at the time and submitted a little 3D game to Amiga Format for their cover disk.  They used it but I never did receive the cheque they promised as payment.

What is a typical workday like for you?

I try to start early, around 8am, so that I get an hour or two to write code before the majority of the team turn up.  Around 10am we have our scrum meetings, and then there are usually a few more meetings to cover whatever issues are currently the most pressing.

I’ve got the good fortune to have an excellent team, with five sub-leads who look after the various discipline areas, so that makes managing them far easier than it might otherwise have been.

I don’t schedule myself up with tasks that are on the critical-path because I need to be able to keep a good overview of the project and shift my attention when there is an issue which needs to be sorted out.  However I do get a little time every day to work on smaller tasks or develop features that will be needed later in the project.

What do you like to do in your free time?

I live in central London, which is an amazingly exciting city, so there’s never a shortage of interesting things to do in the evening; plenty of small gigs for bands to go to see, theatre and that sort of thing.  I used to do some acting but I haven’t had time for that for a while.  I cycle quite a lot in order to stay fit, which I hope makes up for the beer and junk food that I consume regularly.

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