Hey Everyone,
We wanted our fans to have a chance to get to know the team at Blue Isle Studios a little better so we’ve done a series of interviews with the developers to talk about their roles at our studio.
Our first interview is with Brenden Frank who is the Technical Director at Blue Isle Studios.
What do you do at Blue Isle Studios? A bit of this, a bit of that. Recently with the console launches, I’ve mostly done programming but I’m responsible for the sound design of our games as well as helping out with environment/character 3D art. Since the game passes through me before finally going live, I often work on finalizing level design.
What is the best part about working for Blue Isle Studios? I enjoy the ability to develop and make use of a wide variety of skillsets. I really enjoyed my time working at BioWare, however I was limited to making use of a specific skillset based on the department I worked in. With Blue Isle, I get a chance to feel more ownership over the title and become more passionate about my work.
How did you break into the video game industry? Do you have any advice for people looking for a career in the video game industry? I started modding games at a very early age. One of my most notable projects was http://www.moddb.com/mods/project-revolution where we essentially tried to remake Starcraft in the Warcraft3 engine. I went to a game development school and found that it didn’t really further my skillsets much. When I graduated, I had job offers, but it wasn’t until 2 years later that I got a job where I really wanted to be: BioWare. The funny thing about my start at BioWare is that they didn’t hire me because I graduated from school, instead they hired me because of an internal recommendation. In fact, the majority of hires I knew about were due to internal recommendation.
My advice if you’re trying to break into the industry: network. Gain experience, build your own projects with Unity or some other game engine and make friends on the inside. If you’re contemplating school, ask yourself if you want to get into this industry because you like playing games, or because you like making them. I do not recommend getting into this industry if you haven’t at least tried making a small game on the side, yourself. Chances are you won’t know what you’re getting yourself into. Just to share a statistic with you, at my school there was 150 students in my program and only 5 graduated on time.
If you don’t know where to start, check out some tutorials on YouTube.
What video game are you currently playing? Hearthstone! That game has so much depth and is incredibly easy to pick up and play. It feels like chess on steroids.
What horror movie has kept you up at night? I’m embarrassed to admit this, but when I was younger, “The Grudge” really disturbed me. That clicking throat noise just brought shivers down my spine.
What is your favorite dinosaur? I’d say it’s a tough coin flip between the Kronosaurus and the Mauisaurus.
Massive terrifying sea creatures have always intrigued me. The Kronosaurus mostly because of the size of its teeth and cool factor. The Mauisaurus because of its place in folk tales around my area. My family owns a cabin in Shuswap Lake, BC and we’d often go out to Kelowna (Okanagan Lake). People believe that there is a giant creature called the “Ogopogo” there and many people stand by their sightings of it. There’s talk of underwater caves in these lakes that reach out into the ocean so it’s always a possibility!
Here’s the Kelowna welcome sign.
You can see it looks like a snake, but I’ve always believed as a kid that it was a version of the Plesiosaur because of its long neck.
The Mauisaurus is just the biggest genus we know of.
To learn more about Brenden Frank, and the other members of our team, check out the Team Bios section on our website. You can also follow him on Twitter.
Stay tuned for more interviews with the rest of the team!
Thanks,
Blue Isle Studios
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