Producer (Computer Games)
Realtime Worlds

Carol C

00:00:03 My name is Carol C I work here at Realtime Worlds in Dundee I’m a producer for the studio.

00:00:11 A producer in a game sense help bring everything together, help people communicate between each other, set processes and practices up to help the teams do their jobs and make sure that the right things are happening at the right time.

00:00:26 It’s a big team that we have here, so, there’s a lot of potential for miscommunication, so sometimes conflict arises from that. Productions roll off then as they come in and just try and help people come to the right decisions.

00:00:40 I started off working in IT and was moved into project management so went off and worked for an internet service provider doing IT project management. Subsequently while I was working for the ISP I saw a job advertised at a games studio here in Dundee for a project manager. And games have been a lifelong passion for me, so, you know it’s kind of exciting seeing a job that was being advertised that I could actually do in the games industry.

00:01:11 As much as there’s a lot of similarities between the two things because making games is a very, very technical thing, it’s also very different because you have the creative involvement, so as much as you’ve got the technology platform everything runs on, that you know especially these days is very, very complex and very expensive there’s you know the kind of creative layer on top making the technology actually fun to use.

00:01:35 My childhood was spent in Highland Perthshire, so I grew up there, I grew up very much in the countryside, so, very outdoors sort of life.

00:01:46 I guess my biggest hobby as a child was probably playing games.

00:01:51 It started with dad buying my brother and I Gameboys for Christmas the year they came out. So it was Super Mario and Tetris.

00:02:01 At school I picked the subjects that I was good at or I enjoyed, you know I didn’t, as I say because I didn’t have a clear idea what job I wanted to do it didn’t really, that wasn’t what was guiding my subject choice it was more about what I enjoyed and what I was good at.

00:02:17 Even when I was finishing school at seventeen, I went and did a computing degree because I was good at computing and I loved technology. I had no concept even while, when I was entering university what job I might actually like to do.

00:02:35 My sister is seventeen so she’s just going into her last year of highers at the school that I went to. She felt this pressure to choose her subjects really carefully because if she makes the wrong decisions now she’s not gonna have any career choices later in life.

00:02:47 When I look back what I did was completely accidental it troubles me to think that kids at school get really worked up at the age of seventeen that they’re gonna mess up their whole lives just by picking the wrong highers or whatever. I think that most people will find their way if you know the kind of passion for it, and the want for it is strong enough. Which isn’t to say you should slack off at school, d’you know what I mean, I’m not advocating that and I wasn’t the best student I’ll be perfectly honest. But, you know you’ll get where you want to go if you kind of pay enough attention and work hard enough and maybe start at the bottom somewhere, you know and kind of work your way up.

00:03:26 I do have ambition and I think, it’s difficult kind of thinking about what I might do next after this, because the game we’re working on here is huge, it’s an amazing game it has the potential to be unbelievably successful. So, for the near future I see myself staying here and being very happy here, and you know loving the thing I’m working on. How do you top that, I, I don’t really know yet.

00:04:03 END