KS2 / KS3 PSHE: A career as a games artist

I usually cycle into work, and when I'm getting nearer to the office, I'm kind of, in my mind, imagining what I have to do today and how I'm going to manage the time that I need to do it in. This is the office where we make games. We make football management games, which are games where, rather than controlling the action on the pitch, you're controlling everything off the pitch and the tactics and the transfers. It's effectively a role-playing game that allows you to be a football manager.

I first started drawing when I was around five, and the only reason I started drawing was because my brother was really good at it, and he got loads of attention from it, and I wanted to be better than him because he was my brother. In school, I was… I was fairly quiet, and I was always daydreaming and had my head in the clouds. I spent a lot of time as a child playing computer games. Way too much time. The only other times I didn't spend on it, I was playing football.

It feels good now working in the video games industry because it was something that used to get me in trouble quite a lot. It's really easy to end up the person that's playing the games rather than making the games because you're going to come across a lot of obstacles, and it's really easy to get discouraged by those obstacles, but you have to just keep trying and keep thinking that the next time around, you'll get it.

So I'm actually now just taking pictures of players in their kits. I'm just going to use it as reference for basically the creases on their shirts and making textures. And then later on, we'll take the pictures back to the office and create the player models. The strangest part of my job is that I go around taking pictures of random things, and no one other than me knows why. So I could look like I'm taking a picture of a brick wall or a piece of dirt, and it just looks strange to other people, but to me, it's really useful.

The games look real because of observation. Things like light and shade and contrast are really important because they give you an idea of the time of day, and they also make the characters stick out or fade into the background if they need to be. If you're going to be an artist, you really need the natural flair of being able to look at things in the real world and work out how you can then computerise those so that it either looks realistic if you're making a photo-realistic game, or it just fits in with the character inside the game and the characters of the world.

Ronnie is incredibly laidback, which is an important thing because you need to be incredibly patient because you need every single pixel to be perfect. I never expected to have the job I've got—like, never. I didn't think it was possible for, like, a young black kid to be able to make it into the games industry. Just because I always thought that the games industry was for, kind of, like, geeky white nerds, basically. It's only just a perception, and you just basically have to work for it, and you'll get there if you keep putting the work in.