My first role in the industry was at Dlala Studios. The interview was a month before graduation, 2 months later the offer came in, and one month after that was my first day.

Even from the start of my career it was hard to classify me, so I got the title of Technical Designer and was assigned two line-managers, the lead designer and the lead programmer.

Turns out this was exactly where I most thrived: in the liminal spaces between creativity and brass tacks development.

Of course, I am a “scumbag traitor”, as they always lovingly remind me, but I visit Dlala as often as I can and have very close friends there. I’m lucky to have found them when I did (and I hope they feel vice versa!).

Battletoads

With the team being so small, I got to work on a huge variety of different aspects of development, collaborating with every discipline:

  • behaviour design

  • gameplay programming

  • puzzle design

  • cine & animation implementation

  • QTE

Disney’s Illusion Island

This represented my last 6 months at Dlala and the first 6 months of the project. I was predominantly working on programming for gameplay experiments, as well as design for enemy behaviour trees and their implementation pipelines.