Steven Huckle

From Runescape to Shark Infested Custard

Tuesday was an eventful day for gaming students, mainly because one of the designers of one of the most influential games of all of our childhoods, that influence came from a phenomenon known as the mythical land of Runescape, and Steven Huckle was an interesting guest to say the least.

Why so interesting you may ask?

The reason behind my wording is because of the vast amount of knowledge brought towards the table by Mr. Huckle , from working on the original Tomb Raider to working on Runescape, this man has seemed to do it all, and he has, he offered information for several audiences, this information was stated towards many different people, from designers to programmers, from artists to producers, and most importantly from consumer to developer. through out his talk, Mr. Huckle gave clear explanations on how the game industry works and how every cog in the big machine that is a development studio worked and how important it was to the final product, the main subject that was spoken about was all the ways one could get into the gaming industry, we learned of helpful programs such as JavaScript and C++ that allow us to make our own games, and than was the talk about his new company, Shark Infested Custard, which helps out aspiring developers start out.

These are some of the many reasons why this event left me feeling more inspired to make games and also left with ideas on how to achieve that, so all in all not a bad way to spend a Tuesday morning.

Legendary Games

A Legendary experience

On Monday we were treated to a visit from a developer from Legendary Games Studios and an original developer of the first two Tomb Raider games, his name was Gavin Rummery , and this event gave everyone a better idea of what this glorious industry of our is all about.

At the beginning

At the beginning of the event we find out some personal details about Gavin and about how the environment he grew up in changed his life and how it inspired, Gavin told us about all manner of things such as his first computer and his trip to see the first Star Wars movie when it was fresh off the press. these experienced help create the amazing result which was the first Tomb Raider, but first we should probably talk about how he started in this amazing industry of gaming, Gavin started off as a student in university but didn't initially start with programming video games, but studied Engineering, although later he found that his course was boring and difficult, so instead decided to start programming and coding.

This is where it starts to get interesting

Later on we moved towards Gavin's days as a developer, and found out he started with a small company called Core Studios, this was the company working on the original Tomb Raider, we learnt that the original team was made of six people and the initial idea behind this masterpiece was to make a female Indiana Jones with Lara Croft, and as this talk went along we found more and more interesting things about the production of the first game in a long series, such interesting facts such as the creation of a dinosaur in the first game and the amount of units the game sold, many more were told throughout the hour and three quarters the event went on for but if i said them all this blog would go on for ages so to save you the trouble of my random rambling and get to the very important stuff, later on in the event we than heard from the production of the second Tomb Raider game and all the complications that went with it, such as team changes and release deadlines, we find that all of these affected the end result of the game and created chances for more sequels.

In Conclusion

In the end we find out about more of the recent projects from Legendary games such as Year 0, and we get a few questions answered that allowed a large number of students to gain better insight into this industry we call home, and all in all we thank Gavin for his time and his wisdom, because after his talk i felt inspired to begin designing and producing to a better standard, and this most of us took away from this experince