Frontier Email

Here is an email In reply to one that I sent to my brothers friend who works for Frontier ( http://www.frontier.co.uk/ ).

Hi Seb,

 My role at Frontier is that of a Programmer, some studios like to subdivide Programmers into a bunch of different titles (Tools, Runtime/Engine, Gameplay ), Frontier doesn’t generally do that though and the work we take on tends to be more fluid. I would say if I had to pick one though, I’m pretty clearly on the gameplay side of things. What this means is that part of my job is iterating with designers to make game-specific features.

 An Engine coder (not me, hopefully) might work on a say a system to load and unload gameassets efficiently, code to model Physical objects or a system to load animations and play them on artist authored assets. These systems tend to be not specific to a particular game but shared amongst all games (and therefore put in our game-engine ).

My job is then to take the design of the game as described by designers and make it out of the systems available in the engine. One of the things I do quite a lot is player controls, which involves using the input system to gather player input and then accordingly move a player object, choose animations etc. This tends to involve a lot of back and forth with designers playing the game and giving feedback on how responsive the player is or whether whatever abilities he has are easy or satisfying to control, which I then try and improve upon. I also tend to coordinate these designer issues to the engine team, if something in the engine needs changing to make a gameplay feature possible and also to animators, artists, audio people etc.

 Happy to help with any questions you might have.

-Oli