Meet Mark Simmons
September 21, 2009

For those of you who’ve been worried – I survived the ESRB submission process, thanks to help from the intrepid Ray Hiyoshi, our Marketing Product Manager on Shattered Memories. However, my doctor has prescribed bed rest as part of my recovery process, and he said specifically NO BLOGGING. So taking over for today is Mark Simmons, from Climax.

(now Mark is talking)
Hi, I’m Mark Simmons, I’m the Game Director on Shattered Memories and I work for Climax Studios Ltd. I was also the GD on Origins which is a game I’m proud of. I’m ultimately responsible for ensuring the game is really good, it’s out on time and stays within budget (which is damn hard sometimes). The game production spans almost two years with multi-millions of dollars and a team of well over 100 people.

I have a core team of leads who have worked together for a good number of years now on several games (including Origins). As the project gets going in the early stages that core team expands with new team members and combines with external people from 3rd party companies in Europe, Asia, and USA to build the game. Climax directs all aspects of the production of the game (working closely with Tomm) and it’s a key part of my job to make sure all these different facets of the production run smoothly and come together to make the final game cohesive.

In terms of the creative direction of the game that comes from four key people. Tomm handles that from the Konami side of things. Myself and Sam (the lead designer) work closely together. Sam created the original vision for the game and together we ensure that the game gets created following that vision. Neale (the lead artist) shares the vision also and drives it with his art team. If there is a dispute or disagreement, myself and Tomm get final say on which way we go, but we rarely disagree on the direction once we all get ‘in the zone’ on the project.

At the moment we’re in a transition period on the project. A large portion of the team are still polishing the game – trying to squeeze in every last bit of polish that will make the game really shine when it hits the shelves – and the rest of the team are fixing bugs like crazy. I’d expect us to have fixed around 10,000 bugs by the time we ship. It doesn’t mean that this is a buggy game, its common for games to hit these numbers and this game has so much content in it and is so complex it will have more than most, especially since so much of it changes depending on your personality. With this game we end up getting some bugs that only appear if certain people with certain personalities play the game in a certain way. In these cases you have to pretend to be that kind of person, try to simulate their personality, so you can recreate the problem in order to fix it.

source: SHSM Blog – Meet Mark Simmons | 09/21/2009