Interviews// Splash Damage Founder, Paul Wedgwood

SPOnG: Out of the platforms you've worked on, is there one that's coming out as your favourite?

Paul Wedgwood: Well, we decided at the beginning that we'd work with the PS3 because that's the most alien to us as a PC game developer. The Xbox 360 is closer to a PC in type, but that's not to say that we've chosen one platform for the game or another platform for the game, that's something that we'll work (on) with Bethesda over the course of the game's development.

But for us, certainly, we just wanted to be able to experiment with things and not stress about what platforms the game's going to be released on and things like that.


SPOnG: It must be interesting times for you guys, with your backgrounds being in the mod scene. You're obviously pretty hardcore PC guys...

Paul Wedgwood: Yeah, but it's good fun and I think because of the way that we work we do have the luxury of an extended research and development phase that a lot of companies don't get. I think being financially stable as a company helps with that sort of thing as well.

So, it means that we get this opportunity to think about what we're making and make sure that the scope of the game is right, and that it has a really high quality.

We've never gone straight to production. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars took... (looks sheepish) a few years. I would hope that we never do that again, because it just kills people spending that long on a game. But it is good to take your time, and do things properly, and make sure that the quality bar is set properly.


SPOnG: So, what stage are you at with this one?

Paul Wedgwood: Completely just experimenting and stuff. There aren't really any announcements for that are really worth mentioning.

But, as a company it's been really good. As a company being able to get in loads of talented people that have come from different backgrounds, that have come from different genres, that have worked on different platforms is really interesting. We've done really well with recruitment in the first three to six months – I think we only put the press release out about two weeks ago and we're almost ready to do another one because we're finding it so successful. I'm really surprised, because I don't know what this skills shortage in the UK is that everybody else is talking about.

But that's gone really well for us. We'll probably expand to about 60. We finished Quake Wars with about 24 staff. We work really well with other developers anyway. We tend to just go after really talented people, because we find that if you have two really talented artists they do the job of five or six artists anyway. We may grow to 50 or 60 staff over the course, but at the moment we're just focusing on key positions that we think are crucial to the game being at the right stage of development.

So, we've got a number of jobs up at the moment that we're trying to recruit for. Then I think the next thing for us is, hopefully in the next two to three months, we'll move offices. We've found new facilities and we're putting in an offer. Whatever we do, we'll be moving to 15/20,000 square feet of new premises and we'll finally get to build the kind of facilities that we always wanted, like putting in a big cinema and a huge bowling alley and stuff.