Hear the lion Roar!

[andrewducker]

Mike got his news this morning, he's being hired by Lionhead. He's going to be the AI guy, initially working on pathfinding and suchlike, presumably branching out from there to whole-brain simulation and a whole host of bad guys, each capable of passing the turing test. At least you'd hope so.

He was ecstatically happy when I chatted to him, and when I asked him if there were any other games companies he could see outranking them in his 'must work for list', replied that if he had a million pounds in his pocket and could do anything he wanted, what he wanted to do would be to write AI for Lionhead.

So that's ok then :->

Comments

Indeedy-doodley-dandly

[(Anonymous)]

It's hard to express what getting this job really means to me unless you know a reasonable amount about AI, the history of the games industry and Lionhead's position in it. I can think of no-one, literally _no-one_ that has written more games that I've played than Peter Molyneux (http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId=1274) and in doing so created so many classics that have kept me awake late through the night and turned my weekends into single, solid barrages of pixelated wonder. I hear (as I haven't properly met the guy yet) that he treat _everything_ in life as a game, which is obviously a pre-requisite to being an unfeasibly good game designer. I'll be interested to see the design style in practice as it seems their development process is pretty liberal and open-minded with regards to developer input. A welcome change from my last job.
As to AI, not only did Richard Evans (head of AI at Lionhead and my direct boss) recently win an award for innovation in programming for the AI for Black and White at the recent Game Developers Conference (one of the many awards he and Lionhead have one for B&W), but Lionhead are going for a Guiness book of records for most intelligent AI (probably in a computer game, I'm not sure of the details).

And this guy made me tea ane gave me some of his Smarties.

I feel I'm in the realm of the Gods here people.

So not only will I be working with one of the best game designers on the planet, but also with one of the most innovative AI programmers anywhere, let alone the games industry. This shoe-horned into a company with more talented, intelligent geeks than normally allowed by law means that not yet having a start date really bugs the Hell out of me, but in a good way :-).

Anyway, once I've started I'll let you know how it really is, because it can't possibly live up to expectation now I've said all this.

Can it?

Mike