This week one of our veteran programmers steps up to the plate and tells us a bit about his experiences in the industry and how it all began for him. Self named "the daddy" of the team, David is our resident Scotsman hailing from Edinburgh, he's been in the industry for over 17 years, it could be counted as 27 with his first bedroom coded game being published 10 years before he stepped in to the industry proper. Here he is to share some of his experiences with us.

Tell us a bit about your background and how you got in to the games industry?

I wrote my first commercial game in 1984 for the Commodore C16. My favourite game at the time was Boulderdash on the C64, but I couldn't afford a C64, I was still at school, so I got a C16 and wrote a Boulderdash clone. I never wrote it with the thought of publication, but a mate sent it off and Mastertronic published it as 'Return of Rockman', I had called it Pebbles. It reached number 3 in the C16 charts in 1986. I didn't start working full time in the games industry until 1994, although I was still programming at home. I got the chance to go to DMA Design in Dundee, where I was put on the programming team for what was to become 'Grand Theft Auto'. Since then I have been at EA Sports, Sony and a few smaller independent teams, and I have been fortunate enough to have worked on some very big titles. While working at Sony I was invited to become lead programmer at Geniaware and that is why I find myself here, in sunny Savona, Italia, working on 'Lords of Football'.

Describe what happens in a typical day for you?

My day starts with a 2.6 Km walk to the office, which I quite enjoy, it gives me time to think and as a games programmer 90% of my job is thinking. The weather here on the Italian riviera means that I am hardly ever tempted to drive in. It's quite different at the beginning of a project, but at the stage we are at now with LOF my days are actually pretty straight forward and very similar. Almost everything has been written for the match, and now it's just a matter of watching it and tuning the individual player functions so that they interact well together in all circumstances. My goal is to create the most realistic match simulation I can, so there's a lot of tuning required. Then there's lunch and gelato and some more tuning in the afternoon, and then it's home to the wife, and the futility of trying to understand the Italian football commentators on TV.

Any advice for programmers wanting to break in to the industry?

You will need a good maths based degree, and something to demonstrate your skills as a programmer. There are no jobs in the games industry where you learn on the job. So you need to have  learnt everything by yourself before you get there. Read lots of books and do lots of programming. Write yourself a demo. Try to clone a published game that you really like, and really know well. Microsoft have some very good free development tools on their developers site. I would go straight to C++ rather than C# or Java.

For you what is the best thing about working in the games industry?

Most companies I have worked for regularly supply free tshirts and free games which is good, but there is nothing quite like reading a good review of a game that you have worked really hard on, or seeing your game high up in the charts. Positive reactions to your work are great. I remember getting on a bus in Edinburgh just after GTA was published and hearing two teenage lads, sitting a few seats behind me, talking about how fantastic GTA was, and I thought 'I did that, that was me!'. What a fantastic feeling.

Describe the biggest  change you've witnessed in the games industry?

The biggest changes are in scale! My first commercial game was 12.5K. All the graphics, all the sound, all the level data and all the code in just 12800 bytes of memory. In LOF, I doubt that we have a single graphical element that is so small. A bluray disc based game could use up to 23.31GB on a single layer disc (thats over 25 billion bytes, and there are dual and quad layer discs out there) I created my first game in 2 weeks in my bedroom, and had to create the graphics and music and levels, whilst studying for my A Level equivalents (in Scotland, they  were called highers and CSYS's) now we have large teams of highly trained, highly qualified professionals working for 2 to 5 (or more) years on a project that will cost millions to develop.

What is it that keeps you motivated within the industry?

I know what it's like when you finish a game, and you see the boxes on the shelves in stores and you see people picking your game up and buying it. I know what to expect when the game is reviewed in magazines and you read something really positive about something that you spent months coding, and I know what its like when you look at the charts, and you see your game at number 1. So motivation for me is not a problem. There are times when nothing you do seems to work, and I have worked on games that I did't believe were going to be good enough, and that can make the long hours very difficult, but at the moment the motivation comes easy. Lords of Football is a step forward in the sports simulation genre, it is something that has never been done before, and the knowledge that I am an integral part of that advance in computer games technology is a real motivation.

What's your all time favourite game and why?

I don't think I have one. Or maybe it just changed too often. I like the Resistance series, I am playing 3 right now. I was hooked on Warhawk for a while, and would like to see a new version of that released soon. (it was planned when I was at Sony, but it seems to have disappeared in the last 3 years) The Doom series and Quake were great, I have fond memories of Team17's Worms, and of course Boulderdash, and Lemmings, I liked to play the Infocom text adventures in the day, but the original Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple II, which I was playing before some of the guys at Geniaware were even born, is probably my all time number 1. There were so many controls that only a few of us played tried it alone; it needed about 4 hands. It was probably the first cooperative computer game ever developed, and they never even realised it.

Apart from gaming you have a passion for music ,tell us a bit more about that?

I have always done creative things, I started doing drama when I was 5, musicals and pantomimes for a local community group that my mother was involved in, and, as a search for my name on Google will demonstrate, it went as far as me getting a part in the Oscar winning movie 'Chariots of Fire' (I didn't get the Oscar). At around 18 I started a band with a couple of friends. The plan was  to become rich and famous, but before we got fame and fortune, we got jobs. I actually prefered it as a hobby anyway. I don't think I had the right attitude, or enough talent to succeed in the music industry. I still write and sing as a hobby. I have even tried to sing some Italian songs since I moved to Italy, to help me learn  the language. My wife thinks I should try for X factor, but luckily I'm far too busy with Lords of Football.

 Big thanks to David for taking time out to share his experiences with us.