In the second in a series of Q&As with The Creative Assembly team, we talk with Mike Brunton, Senior Designer and Head Writer on the Total War series.

Can you please tell us a bit about yourself and your role at The Creative Assembly?

My name is Mike Brunton. I’m the head writer and a senior designer at Creative Assembly. That means I have the power of life and death over the nations of the earth, or something. On balance, I think it’s most likely the “something” bit. I seem to remember reading that I’m on the TW “command team”. One day I really must ask what that means.

For now, I seem to spend a lot of my time organising and writing all the words that appear in TW titles. That’s not a trivial task, given that most of the games have at least 300,000 words in them. That’s about two chunky novels. Or about 1200 chapters using the Dan Brown method of book production. Oh, did I say that out loud? Who am I to argue with success, even if I do agree with Stephen Fry’s analysis of Mr Brown’s opuses? Exactly.

However, what we don’t do is write novels for a TW title. In fact, all thought of narrative structure is consigned to the bin because the people reading any text can wander about as they feel fit, and all the words have to be as self-contained and concise as possible. So, for example, everything you need to know about a Strumpet ancillary can be inferred from her description – “Oooh, sir, are you going to take your boots off this time?” – even before you know her game effects. There’s a good deal of not-so-innocent fun to be had in squeezing in cultural references and in-jokes. Most Brits spotted Frankie Howerd in RTW, but how many people are going to spot the ABBA and Stingray references in ETW? We’ll have to see.

The rest of what I do involves sticking my conceptual oar in where required to make sure the games are flavoursome and tasty and do at least nod in the general direction of history, even if they don’t dance to history’s fateful tune. It’s a bit of a dark art, really, taking historical fact, working out what is worth including because it is interesting and repeatable, and then getting it to fit into systems that can be coded or included within a given timescale and resources. So yes, I know that there are huge liberties taken with history, uniforms are “wrong” (well, they have to be instantly recognisable on the battlefield, and we can’t include a few thousant different textures for every uniform detail ever, not unless you want your graphics card to melt) and the games don’t always stick with what “really happened”. If they did it would be boring and you really wouldn’t want to play them. That has probably annoyed a small shedload of historical purists, but what we’re not doing is a rehashing of old history lessons in a new shiny format.

Oh, and I put the jokes in. And the bad taste bits. And tech trees. If you thought the general’s speeches were OK, then that was me. If you didn’t, then it was someone else who doesn’t work here anymore.

Strengths: the ability to churn out readable text at a rate that makes lesser men weep; history hyperlinks and trivia dribbling out of my ears; knowing too much about TW games and why they are the way they are; I make great coffee.

Failings: many and manifest, but an overfondness for sarcasm (but then that’s almost a British national art form) and the smartarsed putdown is my greatest weakness. And over the years, I’ve developed the annoying habit of being right more often than I’m wrong and have perfected the art of saying “I told you so” to the point where my pronouncement comes with a little dance and a musical backing track. The “I-Told-You-So” boogie could be staged as an opera as long as the Ring cycle, but with greater loss of life among the audience due to extreme despair.

What is your background and how did you first get into the industry?

I almost (but not quite) predate the industry, being the equivalent of a boardgames celeocanth swimming in the modern fisheries of computer games. Actually, I started out to be a very boring systems analyst and business programmer, but got PTSD instead.

I got into the games business almost by accident. I knew someone at TSR UK (the British end of the people who originally made Dungeons & Dragons) and they needed a dogsbody who happened to know a shedload about games of all kinds and who could: be sent to the warehouse to pack orders; run a computerised order processing system (in the days when computers were mysterious and scary beasts); answer D&D rules queries; write games stuff as required; make coffee; use his weekends to do unpaid overtime at games conventions; do paste-up in the days before DTP; paint model soldiers to competition standard; write advertising copy; and… and… blah-de-blah-blah-blah. In other words, what used to be called an “indentured servitude” in the 18th Century. Still, it was a good grounding in the games business, because it taught me that the hours are long and the pay is “carp” (the fish references will continue).

My time at Games Workshop included general editorial and designy things, and a stint editing “White Dwarf” magazine just before it became a monthly hymn of praise to plastic space marines, and then moving on to run the roleplaying subsidiary before that was franchised out of house. I also wrote Realm of Chaos for them, which has to be a book filled with more boils, tentacles and maggot-ridden pus than is strictly necessary. But is there a necessary quantity of pus? I think not. Cool bits about working for GW: as many model soldiers as you could eat. Not cool bits: facing down a hall of 500 White Dwarf readers who all thought – no, knew in their hearts – that you were spoiling their hobby by daring to think up new stuff. I learned early on that some games players are a passionate bunch, if you define “passionate bunch” as the kind of people who would have stabbed Frank Hornby in the face for making model railways fun.

In 1990 I made the leap away from paper games and into the shiny, sparkly world of computer games. I went to work for MicroProse – hey! I was the first designer they hired in this country! – and naturally ended up doing the staple of the time, flight simulators. This makes me “old skool” really. “B-17 Flying Fortress” was quite well received, won awards, sold impressively for its time, and was different in that you could play it without ever flying the aeroplane. I think this may have been a first for any flight sim. You did, however, get to run the crew’s lives. These days it’s out there on abandonware sites and if you can find it and get it to run, think kindly of the MPS/Vektor Graphics team that put the thing together.

When MicroProse ran out of money and made everyone they could redundant, I went freelance (yeah, like there was a choice) and stuck at it for nearly a decade doing all kinds of design work on all kinds of products, both good and bad. You learn a lot from bad products, by the way, far more than from good ones. This is because, if you have even an ounce of sense, you try to work out what went wrong. When things go right everyone is too busy dishing out the cuddles and high-fives to analyze the experience. Back to another point: one of the problems of freelance design is that you’re often called in too late to save the game. Starting a game and then worrying about the design was and is a cardinal sin in the business, but it’s still surprising how many people get this wrong. I’m rather proud of the fact that when it was too late to do anything about a flawed design I did try to tell people not to spend their money on my services. Anyway, CA wanted someone who could do history and bash out some words really, really quickly on stuff, and hired me on a short term deal to work on Shogun back when the entire company would fit upstairs on a double decker bus. Oddly, they did offer me full time job and I said no. We parted on good terms, exchanged Christmas cards and that kind of thing…

How long have you been at The Creative Assembly and what is it like to work there?

…and then later on they offered me a job again. Since then I’ve been here nine years “…behind the bell and proud of it.” Oh. Nine years. Nine. Years. Deep. Breaths. Paper bag! Paper! Bag!

Working here is - interesting, both ironically and not.

To judge from some of the comments that get made (and those I read on the forums) people have very strange ideas about what it is like to work in the games industry. So, just to be clear: I threw the Porsche away because it stopped working when the petrol tank “ran dry” (well, really!) and then scrapped the Maserati (a Ferrari is so last year, my dear!) because the ashtrays were full. The Hummer was sprayed the wrong shade of Pirate Midnight Black (you just can’t get the staff these days!) and had to be crushed in a fit of creative pique. And do you know what’s the best bit? We laugh as we vomit yet another creme de menthe and absinthe cocktail topped off with a dolphin burger into a gold-plated mahogany Victorian commode and wipe the drool away with panda wool towels. But these days even excess can be a problem: I am sick of suckling pig for breakfast, cannot faced another glass of champagne, and gag at the thought of another Belgian chocolate being shoved into my overpaid gob by the company’s roller-skating (and morally slack) wait-persons. And I’m not the only one, let me tell you. Even with all this luxury, it’s a wonder we ever touch a keyboard, given that the office is a sink of slovenly vice, degrading perversity, sheer incompetence and naked greed. And that, despite what some would have you believe, is what is technically termed “utter pollocks”.

So back in the real world, working in the games industry is a lot like working anywhere else. You have a job to do and, unless you have no sense of personal honour, you try to do it to the best of your ability. By and large, the people at CA are on the clever side of the whole intelligence bell curve thing, which means that there’s a lot of ability in the building. It’s quite a challenge to keep up much of the time. Work days are rarely boring: they may be infuriating, as frustrating as duck (look, it’s not a fish, but it lives in water), and as full of flying fur, bared teeth and claws as trying to stuff a labrador into a mincer, but not boring. The downside to working with clever people is the fact that everyone is ALWAYS right, ALL the time, and no one has the ability to back down and admit otherwise. I sometimes think we should make big decisions by playing conkers in the carpark. It would be less painful, even taking into account broken knuckles.

A normal working day here consists of emails, spreadsheets and databases, meetings, arguing the toss about everything, informal chats, dark muttering, drinking coffee, poncing free cake and biscuits, making mock of the unfortunate and talking about plastic tank kits. Just to dispel one myth: sometimes we do actually play the game we’re working on, but only when the management isn’t looking. And sometimes when the management is looking too. One other myth to dispel: SDKs for games often consist of no more than MS Office and a copy of Notepad, at least where design is concerned.

One last point: the CA offices are quite warm. The company has a long tradition of broiling the staff with defective and badly adjusted airconditioning, and the move to a new building with a new aircon plant has, thankfully, not seen the old ways of doing things being entirely abandoned. Other traditions such as having a filthy kitchen, providing horrible instant coffee and an overpriced, usually-empty drinks machine (nope, we don’t even get free soft drinks!) have also been retained. These are traditions that are strangely comforting in an unappetising way.

Which games have you worked on to date?

We’ll limit the list to “games at CA” I think, otherwise everyone gets bored. I’ve worked on all the Total War titles except Kingdoms. A short answer, that one, because the cafetiere is empty.

Back in a minute.

Would you recommend any specialist training, courses or books to people interesting in becoming a designer or writer?

Don’t get me started. Just. Don’t.

One of the many tasks I’ve been involved in has been recruiting. It can be soul destroying to have to turn people down, and not because they are bad people. Over the years we’ve seen some good people who have, quite frankly, been rendered almost useless by the education that they have received. Worse still, many of them are saddled with debts for the rubbishy courses that they’ve been on.

We do have a couple of people with games-design-type degrees working on TW games, but they are relatively junior because they only started here recently. I’ve known designers have degrees as varied as archaelogy, psychology, civil engineering (very useful, being able to make good concrete), business and journalism. For my own part I gained an Open University BSc degree at the same time as writing all the text for RTW but then I was mad, looking back. A wide range of skills, interests and experiences among the design staff has actually been quite useful to us at CA. The same has been true elsewhere in my experience, so I’d have to say that doing a degree that fully engages your attention and getting a damn good result is far more use to you than a mediocre achievement in a games industry-related subject. University might be your last chance to do what you want to do to the exclusion of all else before the wonderful world of work, so why not do something that you think is insanely great and interesting?

So, I’m not sure that specialist training pays off in the long run. That’s not gospel, just a feeling. There are now many courses that aim to offer a grounding for the games industry and some are worth the money. You just have to be very careful where you go. I’m not going to name and shame any particular courses, because by the time you’re reading these words things may have changed. As a very rough rule of thumb, however, try this: if a games design course is part of a university or college’s graphics department, give it a wide berth. There is, in our opinion, a good deal more to games design and creation than just being able to do really neat concept sketches of characters and the platforms they jump about on. There are other places that offer extremely good training but these can be spotted because the games courses are firmly embedded in the IT faculty. Good courses and departments will offer the chance of internships at development houses, and a course that offers such a feature is likely to be better than the normal run because a development company cannot afford to mess about offering placements to people who aren’t getting good training.

If you want to be a writer in the games industry, being able to write is an advantage, and not just with crayons. I’ve also noticed that quite a lot of games journalists use their journalism as a springboard into a development job. Stringing words together in a way that interests, entertains, informs, moves and engages a reader is a worthy craft but not one that everyone can do. That said, there are some writers out there who make a tidy living by relying on editors to clean up their maunderings. A formal English (or other language) qualification or training in “creative writing” will help with certain kinds of projects. Creative writing is little help with TW games, for example, because there’s no real narrative, as previously mentioned. Being able to write cleanly and quickly will stand anyone in good stead in getting – and keeping – a job as a games writer. And being able to change all your words as soon as they’re finished because everyone else has changed the design, put a skateboarding duck in it, or simply couldn’t read the longer words that you used.

Finally, have you got any other advice or messages for those wanting to break into the industry?

Do something more socially useful! Heal the sick! Grow food! Care for the halt and lame! Save fallen women! Dig ditches! Make bread! Fix airconditioning!

Oh, if you must have an answer.

Play games, but not to the exclusion of everything else. If you’re going to be involved in design, you have no way of knowing what obscure piece of knowledge or strange skill will prove useful in what you are doing. And don’t necessarily limit your game playing to console or PC titles. There’s nothing wrong with paper and board games either – the mechanics of those have to be open to the player and should be elegant (code for “individually simple, but appropriately so, building into something bigger than the sum of the parts”) in a good game. Pulling a boardgame to pieces to work out how it hangs together is a good design exercise. Nearly all the other TW designers at CA have a background that included playing boardgames, paper RPGs and miniature wargames, although that could be a function of age rather than anything else.

The other thing that can stand you in good stead is modding. Reverse engineering games’ data is clever, and can show you how things hang together under the hood to a limited extend, but there’s a world of difference between modding and starting with a blank sheet of paper. One of the big shocks for modders when they start working on games instead of modding them is that they are expected to keep quiet about what they are doing, other than with colleagues. Non-disclosure and commercial confidentiality are serious things.

Keep applying for jobs, but be realistic about your chances. The games industry is seen as an exciting thing, and it’s definitely better than the usual run of office jobs. That means that many, many, many people are applying for each job and you’ll need something out of the ordinary in your CV/resume to get you noticed: a “unique selling point”, as it were. And if you’re applying for a job outside your native country, make sure that you read up the immigration and work permit rules for your proposed destination. Companies have to jump through administrative hoops to get some workers in, so make sure that (a) they can actually do it for you and (b) you’re really worth the effort. Otherwise, it won’t matter how lovely you are because your chosen employer simply won’t be able to get you a permit to do the job. We’ll have to wait and see how the recession affects international mobility of labour, but there’s a good chance that governments will become more protectionist towards their local workers in all kinds of sneaky ways.

You’ll see a lot of job adverts talking about “a passion for games”, and that’s all very well but you can’t rely on passion in the long run. And the reason why you don’t want to run on passion alone is: will it sustain you for years? You might be working on the same game for years. Passion will get you started, but you need a less emotional motivation for the long haul, and making good games takes years. It’s not a brief fling. Passion – for anything or anybody – is very high maintenance and ultimately draining. If you think that passion alone is going to carry you through your working life, then you’re likely to be disappointed and have your passion crushed by the inevitable setbacks that will come. And passionate love thwarted is likely to become its opposite very quickly, which is something you don’t want. And it’s a sad fact that there are exploitative companies out there that will use the game-loving passions of their staff to fuel development through unpaid overtime, crunch working and eventually burnout. It’s not a great way to develop good games, but it goes on a lot. Far too much, to be honest, and this is why games sometimes repeat mistakes, because a whole bunch of new people are being used to make a game, and they’ve lost the experience of the old people who have moved on.

From a personal perspective, you’ll needed to learn and to wait before your dream job appears. There’s a simple reason for this: a lot of money is spent during a game’s development cycle and no one, except a love-lorn mooncalf, is going to trust their investment to someone who has a limited, or worse still, no track record. That said, this does happen, and the results can be (to use that word again) “interesting”. In an ideal world, you’ll want to serve an “apprenticeship” that will involve a lot of work on other people’s ideas. You’ll want to work adding data and tweaking values, as well as creating lists of artwork, sound effects, game features, lists of lists, more data, bugs, features, text, more text, and artwork that got forgotten the first time round. That way, you have a good grounding in the practical skills you’ll need and understand what’s going on in the design process. A blank piece of paper won’t scare you any more. In other words, you shouldn’t get admitted to the mafia until you’ve made your bones.

Gosh, that sounded depressing, didn’t it. Sorry. Let’s not call it depressing, just a smidgen of reality. After all the other guff I’ve spouted over the last few thousand words, a bit of reality is a welcome thing.