Ian Livingstone

Ian Livingstone 

40 Years in the game industry

We had a visiting speaker at uni who was none other than the Fantasy Adventure books such as Warlock of Firetop mountain. these books were a big part of my child hood so I had to go and see his talk, here is what he had to say:

He was selling Dungeons and Dragons out of his flat after talking to Gary Gigax, who was the the inventor, Gary was just starting off so needed help as well as Ian, but he had the fire in his belly

"when youre following your heart its not hardship"

he went onto say that if you want to create value in your company you need to invest your own IP

He said to not sell your ip's to anyone, keep them yourself because you don't know how big they could get!

As the success of their interactive books was so great, they loved the interactivity, so they decided to explore the video game industry. and thus Lara Croft was born.

A huge success! and is still going strong to this date!

Ian started to describe his understanding of how to create a successful video game:

the three most important things in a game are:

game play

 game play 

and

game play

There is a graph he presented showing how a game should play out in terms of difficulty, to really make a successful game it has to be hard but not too hard, and easy, but not too easy. there is a sweet spot in the middle that makes a game successful

and one thing that he left us with was a very good quote, one that is relevant to my modules

"collaboration is not cheating"

because that was a similar mindset as to what I had, but after this talk, it really did change my outlook, that collaborating is more beneficial than detrimental to the success of your animations.