Games Careers Week: Meet Dom Harris
It’s Games Careers Week, so to mark the occasion we chatted with Dom, one of our developers, who also runs an indie games studio.
Dom joined Appt as an app developer at the very beginning and in addition to keeping our #office-improvements Slack channel updated with requests for the latest monitors and nap pods (which we still don’t have, after years of campaigning), he often asks the team to test his latest game.
Read on to hear what Dom says about game development and his advice to anyone wanting to make their own games.
How and why did you get into game development?
I originally started hacking Pokémon games! I found some tools that let you change basically everything about the games; my first attempts just added little areas that let you catch everything.
I started making games from scratch with Macromedia Flash 8 – Adobe bought it and is now Adobe Animate 😂 we used it at school, and I found this “actions” box at the bottom that let me input text. I asked the teachers what it was for, but they just said “programming” and didn’t know any more, so I went away and did my own research. In that class, we were just tasked with making a little animation, but I added explosions when you moved the cursor and a button that replayed the animation when it was finished, so it didn’t loop automatically. I got told off and marked down, but that didn’t really stop me 😉 I found Unity a few years later and have stuck with it ever since!
What do you enjoy about it?
I like games, but most games these days are longer experiences – I love short arcade-type things with a nice scoring system, and everything I play that isn’t that gets put down very quickly. I love that I can open Unity and have something I can play around with in a few hours.
The game Dom is working on right now is called Polyfury, and you can follow his #RoadToRelease on the Wayfarer Games website.
Why did you decide to start your own indie game studio?
I like having control over what I do. I can make the games that I want to make without having to compromise. It’s unlikely ever to be a money-making venture, but if I can put a few games out there and break even, I’m quite happy. It means I don’t have to do things like excessive ads, gambling mechanics/loot boxes, etc.
What do you enjoy about development in general?
The logic and problem-solving. It’s one big puzzle which keeps my brain working. I’ve always loved maths for the same reason, and programming is really just an extension of that.
What are your top three pieces of advice for anyone interested in game development?
Fail fast! Make lots of games, do it quickly, and make plenty of mistakes. That’s the fastest way you’re going to get better. Game jams really help with this; you can see what jams are happening at the minute at https://itch.io/jams. The GMTK Jam in July is always excellent, it’s one of the biggest jams and the community is great. This leads me to my second tip:
Join communities – there are a bunch I help moderate, but any will do. The big YouTuber communities can be a great place to start, or if you’re using a game engine, there’s probably one for that engine. It’s a great place to get help, but also having people around who are doing the same thing as you is great for your mental health. Programming and game development can be quite isolating; you want to avoid that wherever possible.
And finally: don’t worry about tools. Unity is what I use, but Godot is also great. Unreal is better for larger AAA games. Celeste was made with XNA. It really doesn’t matter, any of them are going to be able to get you started, and the skills you’ll be learning when you’re getting started are broadly transferrable between engines. In my opinion, Godot is a great place to start – it’s an incredibly small download and will run on more or less any hardware. Unity has a really big community, which is useful for getting help. Unreal is powerful and has many excellent tools, but it is huge, complicated, and doesn’t run well on older hardware. Your aim when starting should be to get making as soon as you can!
Which resources would you recommend to someone just starting out?
If you’re using Unity, there’s https://learn.unity.com. YouTube has many great resources for all the other engines. The itch.io jams page (linked above) is probably the best place to start; jump in at the deep end and start making things. Game jams usually have communities attached, where there will be a bunch of people to help you out.
Are there any surprising skills people need to succeed in game development, and if so, what are they?
I don’t know about “surprising”, but knowing vector maths will be a huge help! Maths skills in general are useful for game development. You don’t have to be able to do the calculations yourself, but knowing what tools you have available is vital. For example, to get a direction from one object to another, you can do (objectB.position – objectA.position).normalised – which you might use for turrets that shoot at the player, making the player face the mouse direction (in games like Enter the Gungeon), to move an enemy towards or away from a point, or even to connect wires in a puzzle game.
