Working at Jagex

So how did I end up at my favourite games studio?

Well, after taking my third year out to make a video game with some friends, we came across a slight problem where one of our programmers had left and we couldn't carry on with the game.

At the time I was playing a game called Old School Runescape, (I have been playing Runescape since 2001) and they had a job going for a 3d Artist, so it was litterally fate and I applied for it there and then.

Unfortunately I couldn't do part time and finish off my degree whilst working at Jagex, so I decided to come back finish my degree and hopefully return then after graduation.

Whilst working there I had a great experience and learned alot from the artists and employees there, I was working within a small team so that had its beneficial side to it.

Working within a small team was great as ideas and development floated around endlessly, and not needing to go and talk to any of the senior or art directors was great as we could make art how ever we pleased as long as the player base was happy, this was a great time saver and we could do alot more work this way. Almost as if it was a little indie team.

I learned how ideas turn into concept, then development then finally ingame.

Old School Runescape is a community driven game, so asking what the players wanted was an essential piece of the development cycle, using twitter and social media kept the players interested in what the developers where actually doing, kind of like an update page.

We also had Twitch streams every Thursday at 5pm for an hour this was a Q&A session with the developers so the players could ask them anything they wanted.
http://en-gb.twitch.tv/runescape/profile

I also started using Max which I had to learn in under month luckily it was alot like Maya, so I got to grips with it pretty fast, Max has alot of cool functions Maya doesnt have.

We also used perforce to keep all the work we did in organised folders, it also meant that we could update revisions or roll back to old revisions if we had a bug in a current update.

I had worked on alot of updates, from 3d models to animations to graphics to concepts, it was an all round generalist job. Here is some of my work, approved by the community and put into game, the most fun I had was bringing back the Corporeal Beast boss into the game, alot of the players loved this update.

Here is my Twitter that I used to communicate to all the players of OldScape, good social media to know what the players wanted along with Reddit.

https://twitter.com/JagexAlfred
http://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/