Smart People Work Here

Zoe — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 19:57:16 +0000

So we have a lot of smart people who work here. It’s sort of a prerequisite on top of being superbly witty and incredibly funny, combined with really really good looking and, of course, humble. All jokes aside, our hard working engineers have been kind enough to offer access to some of their recent technical exploits. If you’re a fellow smart cookie (or, like me, just find yourself enamored with sequences of foreign looking mathematical functions that you can show to your friends and pretend you are smarter than they are) you’ll enjoy checking out our new Tech Papers section on the Dev Notes page. Guaranteed to make you 10% smarter, or atleast feel that way!

Spotlight: Game Designer, Tyler McCulloch

Zoe — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:14:20 +0000

This week we’ve cornered Tyler McCulloch, and forced him to give up his dark secrets of game design. I don’t think we succeeded but you can atleast find out why he’s here and what he pretends does.

Quote:
“motion blur is the new lens flare.”

Years in Industry:
Just over 5 years

What do you consider prerequisites for your job?:
Being able to build ideas like lego, but allowing them to be molded like clay.

How long you’ve been at Slant Six Games?
2.5 years

Best part of the job:
Waking up each morning and knowing I get to hang out with a bunch of awesome people all day.

Morning web surf:
Shacknews and Kotaku usually for game stuff, Gamasutra and various game dev blogs for development stuff, and finally the ‘oddly enough’ section of Reuters for my news updates.

Favorite Work Perks:
Slant Six is a great company to work for, and they’ll go out of their way to try and make you happy. They are constantly try to improve the quality of life here by listening to their employees, encouraging company backed outings, to having a BBQ just because!

What do you like about Vancouver?
You couldn’t ask for a better location, than where Slant is located. Beautiful views of downtown from across the water, Granville Island a couple steps away. Umm, plus the Emily Carr University of Art + Design is really close by. And umm, those Arty girls are pretty. Yeah.

What kind of person do you need to be to work here?
The great thing about Slant is that everyone gets along so well, regardless of the type of person they are. There are no egos here, just a bunch of people sharing ideas while trying to improve themselves and the game they are working on.

What do you do for fun outside the company?
I once met a guy who thought it was really fun to run full speed into a wall with enough force to knock him out… Well, actually it was me. Um, well, actually it wasn’t fun either, I just didn’t see the wall.

What games do you play?
I love playing all sorts of games. One of my greatest pleasures though is playing a game that may be considered a ‘flop’. I love trying to figure out what went wrong and coming up with solutions that I think may have helped if they had the time to implement it.

If I weren’t working at Slant Six games I’d be:
On my own private tropical island pretending I was a survivor of Oceanic flight 815… until I got hungry and heading back to my resort when my chef would have made me a deliciously ginormous meal which I would eat with one hand on a controller.

Slant Six Games » Game Design

Smart People Work Here

Spotlight: Game Designer, Tyler McCulloch