Roll Call Interview Series - Samuel Brayley (Systems Designer)

STATS

Name: Sam

Role: Systems Designer

Years at Roll7: 6.5

Favourite classic game: Streets of Rage II

Pets: None, but he likes dogs.

Hi Sam!

Hello!

We’re running a new interview series for the Roll7 blog, so that people

can learn more about all the awesome people on our team. Could you

tell us a bit about what you do as a Systems Designer?

Well, as the name suggests, I design various systems within our games.

That checks out. And what does designing systems involve?

It’s everything from working out what abilities a player may possess in order

pass a level, deciding what types of loot people will get for completing it,

planning what features and game modes may exist for the user, to working out

the logistics of how players will know progress through the game. Essentially, it’s

a lot of the metagame rather than designing the actual gameplay - although

since we’re still a pretty small team I do often end up involved with that too.

When you started at Roll7, you were a QA intern – how did you end up

in design?

I actually got the initial internship because I turned up to a short playtest session

and ended up turning in a bunch of super detailed QA notes at the end. Tom,

John, and Simon took a look at the bugs I’d found and decided that they needed

someone doing this a bit more often! They booked me in for an interview and I

came on shortly after. From then until now I came on in a fulltime QA position,

got involved with production while making ports with external studios, designing

platform feature content, and by the time we were making Laser League I was

QA Lead. During my time doing QA, I found myself contributing a lot to design

discussions, and over time I ended up getting more and more involved in our

games' feature and level design and now... here we are.

I guess that’s one of the benefits of a small creative team, right? You

get to be involved in the discussions that interest you, even if they’re

not strictly related to your current role.

For sure.

So, what was it that made you decide to get into a career in games in

the first place?

As a kid I was really into playing games – pretty typical for a lot of folks in the

industry I guess – but one thing I was super drawn to was glitches and bugs that

did cool things. I distinctly remember accidentally coming across ‘MISSINGNO.’

when I was about 8 and it blowing my tiny mind a bit – do you know about

MISSINGNO.?

I don’t!

Off the top of my head, it’s basically a Pokémon that doesn’t really exist, but

which could appear in-game because of an oversight the developers made. You

can encounter it in some of the early games, and people figured out that this

oversight could be used to do things like duplicating items and finding any

Pokémon you wanted in that exact area if used correctly. It’s- you should look it

up, it’s really interesting to see all the things that have come out of one tiny

mistake in the creation of the game. But yeah, as a kid I remember seeing that

and having this realisation that games aren’t just made by these faceless distant

figures who can do no wrong – they’re made by people, they have flaws and

quirks which can result in all these interesting unintended things that you can

find as a player. And that sort of made me realise that if regular people were

actually out there making games, I could be one of those people someday.

So that’s what kind of drew you to QA as a career path initially?

Definitely. I guess also, you know, QA is often an entry level sort of position, so

that was part of the appeal too. I haven’t always been super confident in my

abilities, so starting from the bottom and working my way up seemed like the

best way to do it. Over time through my career in QA, I’ve also found out what

I'm good at in terms of design work.

So what would you say is your proudest achievement to date at Roll7?

Probably working on OlliOlli2 – Everyone on the team was super talented and I

made a lot of friends working on that game who I still speak to today. In terms of

achievement. It was amazing to be part of making something that got so much

exposure, as well as it being our most critically acclaimed title to date.

What was your role on OlliOlli2?

QA mostly, but I ended up getting involved in a bit of design work on that one

too – I think one of my personal favourite parts was stepping up my design

involvement and working on the ‘FreeSkate’ mode for the Xbox One version. I

really got to stretch my legs and design something that was a bit more chill, a bit

more accessible, and a bit more open to new players or casual gamers. I’m

pretty proud of what we managed to do with that. I really like the idea of making

a game more accessible, while still having that really high skill ceiling.