The penultimate episode of Season 1 of Enduring Play: A Game Development Podcast is available worldwide featuring the versatile veteran video game artist and interface designer Tamara Knoss. Currently a Senior Technical UI Designer at Wizards of the Coast, Tamara’s experience spans animation, lead artist, UI artist, and technical artist roles. Her expansive experience is a perfect example of the pragmatic cross-disciplinary problem solving required to create thriving games whether you’re shipping on modern PCs or classic handheld consoles. This episode is a fun look at a developer/publisher relationship since Tamara and Cheryl first worked together as developer and publisher on The Sims Bustin’ Out and The Urbz before becoming coworkers at Griptonite Games. This episode also includes insights from time developing for the extreme constraint of classic handheld systems including their shared time working on one of the seven launch titles for the Nintendo DS, and reflections on how those constraints might help modern developers. Whether you’re a classic gaming fan or a modern game developer looking for inspiration to make your ideas more convincing and your file sizes smaller, there’s something here for you. As with all episodes of Enduring Play, definitions and context are provided to make sure as many listeners as possible can enjoy the journey.
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Key Quotes
“There was just this unending debate of do we want to be portrait or landscape? I ended up just taking the entire game and okay, here’s the worst case boss fight in this game on landscape. Here it is in portrait. I went through this whole exhaustive list of measuring out everything and showing them because nobody would just believe me that portrait’s best. So I had to prove it out with hardcore documentation… And then they were like, “Oh yeah, that’s simple. We Should go portrait.” And that solved that problem. But it was really exhausting because I knew the answer was portrait, but I had to go through all the busy work to prove it.”
”Persuading people, getting buy off. Like that whole thing of you know the answer but you’ve got to prove it. That’s where it gets to be really good to be on a team where you’ve got established rapport, where there’s trust, because then sometimes you can bypass a lot of that. Because if you have that trust, people will just know that you know what you’re talking about. But if you don’t have that, then that becomes an even harder problem. Having trust with your coworkers is paramount to getting things done.”
“When I’m trying to problem solve, giving me prescriptive answers doesn’t help me problem solve. I want as much data as you can give me. I want all the problems that you can give me. Give me solutions? Yes, please. But don’t give me prescriptive answers and don’t keep me out of the conversation.”
“Because I grew up in the industry in that very “keeping things small and tight and limited” era and then moving to AAA… and it’s just, “look at all this waste.” Artists making art that is 10 times the size it needs to be and like that’s taking up space on the person’s device. It’s okay for when they’re working on console or desktop, like when it’s a PC, but we’re talking about somebody’s phone. The amount of inefficiency in desktop games and then porting them to mobile is mind boggling and painful.”
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