It’s been about a year since the seventh class of Game Design students at VFS graduated, so there’s no better time to catch up with some of them.

During their time in the program, one of those teams – with the tongue-in-cheek name Boring Games – created a third-person action-strategy game called Bloom, which went on to win an Elan for Best Student Game and get jobs for the five Boring Games members: Mike Wilson, Guilherme Ramos, Brennan Massicotte, Adrian Audet, and Brian Vidovic.

“This is the group that proved to everyone that people are capable of incredible accomplishments with the right attitude and skillset,” says Senior Instructor Andrew Laing, who mentored them throughout Bloom’s development.

So we got the band back together, to reflect on their experiences at VFS and to find out more about their growing careers: 5 grads in 5 different roles at 5 different game companies.

This is the first part of five in a series of interviews we’ll be running all week.

Mike Wilson
Then: Bloom’s Creative Director
Now: Narrative Designer at Relic Entertainment

“Game Designer” is a pretty broad term. What does your role as a Narrative Designer actually encompass?

At Relic, I’m responsible for writing character dialogue and coming up with the ideas for campaign storylines. This involves a lot of brainstorming and iterating based on feedback from everyone else on the Company of Heroes team. I am very lucky to be able to work with super talented people, and their feedback makes my job much easier and makes the end product that much better. Most of the time, I feel like I am a scribe, writing down words from a holy influence, and I feel lucky to be able to bring those ideas together.

Part and parcel with writing about a subject is actually knowing your subject. So before any writing can happen, I need to investigate the subject of the story as much as possible. As I am working on a World War II franchise, this involves a lot of research on the war itself: books, movies, web articles, any little bit of realism I can find to try to use to sell the story.

To be a Narrative Designer, you have to love feedback and be able to incorporate other team members’ ideas into your work. I don’t get to lock myself in a room and emerge with a narrative; it’s an organic thing that lives amongst the various members of my team, and together we make it work.

Reaching back to your time at VFS: what did you, personally, get out of being part of the Boring Games team?

I think I learned a lot about team dynamics during my half-year making Bloom. Understanding that each individual reacts to stress, frustration, happiness, and excitement different is an important realization, I think, and learning how to co-exist with four other people with different personalities in such a close environment is an important lesson.

Realizing what expectations my team members had of me, and living up to or failing to live up to those expectations prepared me for the professional industry. Scrum, deadlines, “crunch”, and “estimates” can be a scary thing for someone just starting out in the video games industry, but because of Bloom, I felt like I had tested the waters before.

Luckily our project turned out to have a modicum of success and everyone on the Bloom team got a good amount of exposure from our game. This exposure provided us with a good reputation and opportunity as we entered into the job market.

Lastly, because of my time with Bloom, I also made four amazing friends. As corny as it sounds, you don’t spend six months with people and walk away strangers. Although sometimes I wish I had. Yes, I’m looking at you, Brian.

Oh, c’mon, Brian, this is how we joke!

You were Bloom’s Creative Director – how has that role informed your current job at Relic, if at all?

Working on Bloom was a lot like working with my current team.

What a “Creative Director” role usually includes is having a very powerful hold on all creative aspects of the game. The problem of defining a “Creative Director” role for Boring Games was that we are all intensely creative people, so in the end, I became the scribe for our idea collective, not the sole proprietor of it. I knew what questions needed to be answered, and I made sure we had those answers. No one person on the Bloom team had a grapple hold on original ideas, and we were smart enough to trust each other to add our little bit of creativity where applicable.

My “little bit” was the narrative and dialogue of Bloom, and even with those assets, we ensured that they met the expectations of everyone in the group. I was also the creepy document guy for our group, and performed other various fringe duties.

Bloom was a good exercise in sharing creative ownership. It is not a big secret that a large part of being a successful designer is learning not only how to sell your design, but provide others with ownership of it. The trick is to take your little idea baby and make everyone the parent of it, make everyone want to nurture and love it, lest it be left by the side of the road to die like all of the others. With Bloom, I had the privilege of championing the narrative and world of our game, but of course, with anything as anomalous as story, everyone has an opinion. I had to be respectful of everyone’s stance on certain story issues but in the end, come up with the strongest concept.

Has your perspective on games or the game design process changed in the last year?

I am amazed every day by the power of marketing. It, the globulous mass of marketers and business men and women, seem to be able to polish pieces of filth and sell them to the general public by the millions. On the flip side, terrible marketing can make a perfectly aged piece of brie look like a disgusting pile of mold. It makes me sad that so much of a game’s success is tied up in the business end of the product, and not in its creation.

Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give somebody just now entering the Game Design program at VFS? What about someone just graduating?

The first and by far, the most important advice I can give a Game Design student is a very simple yet incredible important lesson:

Do not be an ass.

Yes, it is a crass statement, but it is the most important lesson you will learn at VFS. If you are a nice person to work with, and get along with your team mates, you will find that you will become a more valued teammate. Doors will open for you, opportunities will arise, and you will have an amazing year as a Game Design student at VFS.

If you are a complete ass to your fellow classmates, you will find yourself alone by the end of the year, shuddering in a corner, wondering where it all went wrong. Where it all went wrong was that you had the personality of a naked mole rat and you have no one to blame but yourself.

The second important lesson, one that I wish someone had imparted on me, is to make your VFS education your own. Come in to VFS knowing what you would like to do in the industry and use the course to get yourself there. Put your time and effort into the courses that you want to stand out in, and simply do well in the others. Your most valuable resource during your year at VFS is time, so allocate it properly in the talent tree of your choice.

To someone just graduating VFS, I would say never give up on trying to find a job. Hit the streets every day looking for an opportunity to break in. If you constantly get doors slammed in your face, then start building your portfolio up even more. Start a mod with some friends, design something awesome, get active within the game design community. Do anything but stagnate, because the longer you wait to find a job, the less relevant your skillset becomes.

Great advice. Thanks, Mike! Last words?

If we are allowed to make shoutouts… I’d like to say hello to my COH team – they’re the cool kids who for some reason allow me to hang out with them – to my parents who didn’t laugh at me when I told them I wanted to write for video games, and to my Bloom team, who made my first working experience a spectacular one. Group hug!

VFS Game Design Senior Instructor Andrew Laing on Mike:
“Mike’s enthusiasm is impossible to suppress, so it came as no surprise that he was snapped up fairly quickly by Relic… No doubt related to the fact that he impressed one of the instructors who happened to be a Design Director there!”

Next: BioWare Cinematic Designer Guilherme Ramos