BIO
Name:Trevor Williams Title: Chief Operating Officer Developer: Playground Games
www.playground-games.com
lead. It’s worth stating on the covering email which post you are applying for.
We do not have a traditional
recruitment or HR team. Our recruitment is led out by our
discipline leads. Trevor Williams,
Playground Games
Who is the best interviewee you have ever had and what was it they did that impressed you? I’m not sure I recall any particular interviewee who stands out, but I have interviewed some great people over the years. I try to filter out how well they interview and focus on how well they will be able to do the job. For instance, do they casually demonstrate deep knowledge and experience in the discipline you are hiring for?
And who was the worst? An interview is a very artificial scenario – particularly for development staff. It can make people very nervous and cause them to do and say some quite strange things. I’ve had people fall asleep, faint and one guy was actually physically sick. He blew chunks in the lobby. But I think the worst crime is when candidates decide not to turn up because they have taken another job. That’s happened a couple of times. All it takes is a phone call.
What advice would you give jobseekers for a successful interview at Playground? Be calm, be respectful and demonstrate you can do the job. The interviewers at Playground are
never trying to trip you up. They just want to know that if you do join our team, you will be able to make the game better.
NEW STUDIO ALERT!
FORMER ROCK BAND designer Dan Teasdale and his mystery draped partner in crime named Panzer co-founded No Goblin in July 2013, in Seattle, Washington. “As a company, we exist to make fun original titles with unique gameplay,” Teasdale tells Develop. “Personally, starting a studio has been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I’m secretly one of those weird people who looks forward to min-maxing their taxes, so combining my game development experience with the logistics of starting a new company has been crazy fun.” CEO and creative director
Teasdale worked with Panzer on a number of games projects in the past, and says it has been
DEVELOP-ONLINE.NET
great joining forces again to work on new ideas. For the short term, No Goblin
is focused on announcing and releasing its first game – “something that’s mechanically fun to play”. Long term, it’s looking to stay
relatively small. Teasdale says: “I think being
totally invested in a creative endeavour like games development and having a life and a family shouldn’t be mutually exclusive concepts. So, sure, we have all of the usual goals like ‘being dedicated to making rad games’ and ‘being part of a fun work family’, but we want to make sure that we still have a real family to go home to at the end of the day.”
www.nogoblin.com
OCTOBER 2013 | 57
If your studio has recruited talent internationally, what was the process like for your studio and for the applicant? We have hired about a dozen people from Europe and North America, but we have never hired anyone who needed us to sponsor their visa – although that’s purely coincidence rather than avoidance. They either had EU citizenship or ancestry visas. We try to gauge how committed
they are to living in another country and how long they may stick around. From experience, international hires are much more likely to leave and go home. Two years seems to be the sweet spot. So they join us for a project and then move on, which is fine.
Why should developers join a large studio when indie and self-publishing have become so much more accessible? I think it’s really a matter of security. Indie development and self-publishing is absolutely accessible, but just because it’s easy to set up on your own doesn’t mean you should. It’s a tough life being an indie dev. Not everyone is suited to running their own company. I’d say that on average, an experienced developer is going to earn more working at Playground than working on their own indie project. There are obviously exceptions to that, but I think for many people, a well paid, stable job works for them. And I think Xbox One is a big pull for a lot of people. Working on cutting-edge technology is challenging, but rewarding.
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