In the most recent Academia Devlog, you guys got a chance to meet our awesome game designer, Tristan Angeles (Pssst...if you wanna know what he looks like, watch the first 30 seconds of the video). In this blog post we asked him a few questions so we can all get to know him better and learn how he became a game designer.
What was the first video game you remember playing?
I think we're a computer game playing family. My aunt on my dad's side played Mario 1 and 3. My uncle introduced us to Warcraft, Doom, and Heretic. My dad and I played through a lot of the levels of Battle City, and we devised tactics for each level.
I faintly remember my dad bringing home the Casio MSX one night when I was 4 or 5 years old I. The first video game I remember playing was called Monkey Academy. In the game, the player played a monkey and had to solve math problems by getting the missing part of the equation on top of the screen while avoiding enemies. We had another game for the MSX, but I forgot the title(Car Fighter?). In the game you played a car, and you needed to avoid other cars chasing you, and you could blow smoke on them to stun them for a while.
I played with bootleg copies of games as a kid, we had no idea that it was illegal. Me and my brother would go to a computer shop that had copies of games put into diskettes, and we'd play it in my dad's office during weekends. Some of the games I'd play were: Commander Keen (Carmack,Romero) , Prince of Persia (Jordan Mechner), I didn't know the guys who made these games were well known game developers, I just really enjoyed the games.-
What was the first board game you ever played?
The first boardgame I played was probably Snake and Ladders or Chess. I think these two games are one of the first games introduced to children. Excluding those two games, the first game I played would be the Mad Magazine boardgame. It was like Monopoly, except the players needed to do funny things based on the cards drawn in the game.
We were interested in Warhammer, but since we didn't have money to buy models, we wrote to Games Workshop in the U.K. and they sent us their catalog along with the basic rules of Warhammer Fantasy. We cut out the pictures of the miniatures and pasted them on cardboard to play with them.
One day a friend of my dad brought a board game he designed to playtest it with us. The game was called 'Success', and I remember that it was a business themed game. The goal of the game was to become the richest player in the game. I can't remember the mechanics anymore.
This isn’t exactly about board games, but my favorite movies as a kid were Candy Man and Congo. I made up a variation of the game tag based on those movies and played it with my friends in our backyard. Weeks later we find out that other kids in the neighborhood were playing tag with our rules.
Candy Man Rules:
In the movie, the protagonists had to destroy Candy Man's mirror to destroy him, so in our game "The Candy Man" hides a piece of stone or broken glass in the play area before the game starts. After the glass is hidden, the other players shout 'candy man' three times to start the game. Once the game starts, the Candy Man player chases the other players around the area trying to 'kill' them(tag them) before they find the hidden piece of glass.
Congo Rules:
Congo plays like Candy Man except the players are divided into two groups, the explorers and the guardians (ape men) of Zinj. The guardians would hide diamonds in the play area for the explorers to find. The guardians win if they tag all of the explorers before the explorers find all the hidden diamonds. A special rule of the game is that the explorers had a 'camp'(guarded by perimeter guns in our heads) in which they could be safe.
Did you always want to be a game designer? If not, what did you want to be?
No but I remember I always made up games growing up. I say made up rather than design, because some of the rules of the games I made were not really thought out, just what I thought would be fun. Anyways, I made games but I didn't really think that game design was an actual job. I mentioned earlier that a friend of my dad’s had made a board game, and that was the first time that I thought making a game was possible for 'normal' people. After that me and my brother started making our own boardgames.
I think a lot of my friends back then would know boardgames but were only exposed to the common ones like Monopoly, Snake and Ladders, Checkers, etc. We had an old copy of this magazine at home called Games Magazine, and there were reviews of boardgames inside. So I guess I was exposed early on to the wider world of board games.
I was in grade 6 when I got acquainted with Dungeons and Dragons through a photocopy of the 2nd Edition Dungeon Masters Guide hidden in our classroom. At first I had no idea how to play D&D since we only had the DMs guide, but luckily I learned that a kid from the lower grade levels had the the D&D Basic Set Players Handbook. I bought it from him for 50 pesos. My love affair with D&D had begun. I actually loved D&D so much that instead of grounding me my dad would hide my D&D rulebooks.
Still, it’s not as if game design or development was a well known career path at the time. My dad was a lawyer, so it kind of made sense to take up law. . I took a course called Development Communication as a pre-law course. I spent less time playing pen and paper roleplaying games as I began focusing more on Taekwondo and earning my black belt.
So how did you end up in game design?
In my last year of college I decided to do my thesis on using Pen and Paper Roleplaying for Teaching History. I was partly inspired by my professor’s research on using Democracy 2 and partly lazy because it was so natural to me already.
One day after I’d graduated I saw a game design contest in GameCareerGuide challenging people to think of a game idea based on a theme. I entered it and then weeks later I found my idea in website as one of the top picks. I joined again a few weeks later and once again my idea was featured. I then joined a contest on Gameful (a website started by Jane Mcgonigal) and won 500$. I joined another contest which had prize money and a chance to talk with Asi Burak, Co Founder of Games For Change. I entered the contest with the game "In The Court of the Spider King" and won another 500$. I bought my very first laptop using the combined prize money and felt like maybe there was something to this whole game design thing.
Me and a few of my college friends joked about it and talked about starting a game company together. Problem was nobody knew how to make games. I think I took that joke too seriously. When I entered my first job at a call center company as an agent, the trainer asked us to stand in front of the room and tell the class where we saw ourselves in 5 years. I remember saying "I see myself as a game designer travelling the world showing my games to conventions." Around this time I was learning how to program in Python, asking people in the IGDA(including my now team mate Marnielle) how to do stuff.
I eventually left the call center company and applied as a game designer for two local game companies. I got rejected by both and realized that this was because I had nothing to show them in terms of game design work. So instead I applied as a Quality Assurance Tester. While doing QA, I learned Actionscript and started making games with my brother. I also joined game jams like Ludum Dare and the Global Game Jam. I got an award in Manila Global Game Jam, and a month later I receive an email from Casual Connect that they wanted to feature one of our game jam games at Indie Prize.
Being pressured by time( I gave myself one year to become a game designer or else I'd take law), and thinking I now have some credentials to design game I left the company I was working for as QA and got a game design position at Gameloft.
Who is your favorite game designer? What is your favorite game in terms of game design?
Hard question. I don't really have a favorite game designer I think, because when I say that I like a game designer I'm probably talking about the games they designed. If that's the case my favorited designer would be Gary Gygax(for creating D&D). AD&D(2nd ed) is probably my most favorite game of all time. When I first learned about AD&D my first reaction was like "really? a game that you can play only with your imagination." There are other better designed games than AD&D out there but AD&D is the only game(in my experience) that makes your friends talk about "killing that dragon" years later after playing and make strangers look at them as if they were crazy.
In terms of game design philosophy I'm trying to integrate some of Sid Meier's thinking into my own. I've listened to all of the Sid Meier interviews on Designer Notes, and the ones on youtube. What I've taken from these interviews is something like, to give the most
importance to the player's fantasy i.e. being pirate, building a civilization, and do whatever it takes to let the player play out
that fantasy in the game. I took this to mean that how a game is designed is less important than the output(meeting the player fantasy).
An example of this is when I'm designing a mechanic of the game, and I design this complicated system trying to make it look 'intelligent'. So as a designer I think we feel the pressure to make 'intelligent' designs, or look for answers in obscure places when the simple solutions may be enough to create that player fantasy. It's easy enough to say this of course, but really hard to actually pull off. I'm still trying to make sense of all of those interviews.
Offhand, my favorite boardgame is Pillars of the Earth because is one of the prettiest boardgames I've ever seen, one of the reasons that kept me from selling the game when I've started selling my boardgames(I had 20+ boardgames once) when I moved to Makati. I like the game because the theme works well with the mechanics. It's a very easy game to play and easy to teach because the steps of the game is already laid out on the board.
My favorite Video/PC game is The Last Express. I really like how they executed this game. Storytelling with time moving forward. The setting was great( One of my dreams is seeing or even getting a chance to ride the Orient Express after I read the Agatha Christie novel).
What do you in your spare time aside from playing video games?
Actually, I'd like to spend a lot more time 'seriously' playing games. I can count with my fingers the games that really made me sit down in the years since I started designing games professionally. My spare time is split between reading books, learning Japanese, going to the gym,practicing Taekwondo, and learning programming . Recently I think I've started to have an itch for travel, and I've been wanting to travel more. The team recently talked about taking up new hobbies to get our minds off the project once in a while and I've been considering taking up either MMA or Kendo. I also attend meetings of the Philippine Historical Boardgames once in a while, and recently got started playing Advanced Squad Leader.
What are you most proud of in your work as a game designer?
Political Animals. Seriously and not just because it's a Squeaky Wheel game. The game might not have been financially successful but:
- It was my first PC game on Steam where it has "mostly positive" reviews.
- It's my first game to get into EGX,PAX, and Tokyo Game Show.
- It's been introduced by a former teacher of mine to students and teachers as a tool for learning about Philippine politics.
Aside from what I've stated above, another reason it means a lot to me is that it's a full blown game and a project I was involved in from the very beginning. This game will be like a battle scar I'd be telling younger game designers in the years to come (assuming I stay in the industry that long).
Thanks for reading! You can read more of Tristan's thoughts on his old game design blog (which he unfortunately no longer updates) If you're interested in learning about our latest game, Academia : School Simulator, please sign up for our mailing list, join the Facebook group, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our Youtube channel! !