Nickname: Ant

Irrational Title: Junior Level Designer

Qualifications: My brother is actually the lead designer on the project Ed [Orman], and he's been working in the industry for a while and I thought it would be terrific to get involved in. I finished a degree in Media Production year before last and I thought this would be a great place to put these skills to use.

Previous Games Worked on: None

Meet the heavy armour

Most Challenging Moment in Development: Learning the Unreal engine, as powerful as it is, it's got some quite difficult concepts to get your head around at first, once you do though it can do some really amazing stuff. I think it's very clever in the things that it does but there is a hump in the beginning, which is hard to get over. The learning curve is quiet steep.

First Gaming System: Going back we had a pong plug into the TV version, well it wasn't just pong, it had a light gun on it and we were very proud of that, because I think we were one of the only people to have one.

Earliest Gaming Memories: I still remember the day that our dad bought the Atari2600 for us and it was supposed to be a surprise but we peeked.

Favourite Game of All time and why: Half-life, without a doubt. Well I could go back through the entire history of games, I've always been a first person shooter player. I started with Wolfenstein, moved onto Doom then to Quake but then when I hit Half-life I was just blown away, I thought it was fantastic. I really enjoyed single player that was what really grabbed me with Half-life in the first place. It took me quite a while to actually get onto the multiplayer stuff. I play a bit of counterstrike, a fair bit of DOD [Day of Defeat]. I enjoy DOD a lot gameplay wise, graphically it's very dated but gameplay wise it's excellent.

Games Currently Playing: Currently would you believe, i'm still playing Vice City on the PC and i'm like 92% on the damn thing but I just can't do the damn paramedic mission. But i'm enjoying that, it's a good game to just fire up and just muck around even if you aren't going for any particular goals.

Home PC rig: At the moment i'm still labouring along on an 866 PentiumIII. Well in fact, just today I was looking at prices on a new motherboard and processor for it. I've just installed a radeon 9200, which I picked up cheap and now that i'm working here at least I'll actually have some money which I can put away to get a decent machine. When I bought it, it was top of the line, you know all my mates were jealous as and it's served me pretty well actually, it's handled the games slowly but surely. But there are two things coming out which I would not be able to play on it, Doom3 and Halflife2 so it has to be upgraded.

Do you prefer PC to console: Yes definitely.

Singleplayer or multiplayer: Um, I really enjoy singleplayer mostly. Multiplayer is good fun. Coop I think is a lot of fun and I think there aren't enough games which actually support it. Playing DOD with your mates on one side is one of the best gaming experiences I've had.

Is there one map in any game that stands out above the rest for you, design or playability in any game. Is there anything that stands out as being the best?
Now that's hard, I'm trying to remember the last map I really enjoyed playing. Well I know i've played some excellent DOD maps and i've also played some shockers. Ummmm……. No I can't think of one.

Freedom of movement in tribes, how do you find it with mapping with the movement you can get?
It took me a long time to cotton onto that, to really get over the idea that you have to start thinking about not only building things in three dimensions so you can have the vertical movement but building appropriately in three dimensions so you can allow for lots of movement, not just bump from wall to wall but you have to put a ledge there for people to land on. It's just something that once I started making maps I sort of realised as I've gone on and I've had to abandon a couple of things because I've realised I'm still thinking fairly flat. You know building a level where you've got an up and down, that's easy. But thinking, ok you can travel between those two points without having to go down any intervening stairs or ramps, that's the hard bit.

I guess then that you would really have to sit down and do a test to see how far people can actually jet vertically from a standing start so you have a height that they can reach.
That's right. I mean they are still tweaking the physics so it changes all the time. But I mean that isn't a big problem you can always go back in and put in another ledge or shorten things. Of course I'd never played any Tribes before until I came here and i'm all over the place. You know just trying to get up on the thing at the damn top. I thought, ah yeah I've played plenty of first person shooters this should be a piece of cake, nup, I felt like a moth just battering itself up against the window, it's appalling.

Does KP(KineticPoet aka Mike Johnston) constantly own you when you test multiplayer?
Oh god yes. *laughs* I just avoid him. I'd like to think i'm a reasonable player and I can hold my own but he's still so many levels above me in terms of prediction, movement and energy management. I don't know how he does it. Like my movement is that close to being random.

What are you working on at the moment? Single or multiplayer?
I've been working on a spaceship which is the first singleplayer level doing the second art pass, which a lot of work needed to be done. The whole thing needed to be made two times as large otherwise it was going to be terrible like that. I just finished that up last week and at the moment I'm just working on multiplayer maps.

Thanks for your time Andrew.