Before entering game development, John Dennis was “an art teacher who really didn’t enjoy teaching!” as he puts it. A friend who was working at Team 17 encouraged him to apply for a game designer job there, which, after some hesitation, he did. “I was the first game designer they’d had.”
Though at the beginning he wasn’t sure precisely what a game designer did, he was clearly a quick learner. He stayed at Team 17 for 15 years, and had advanced to the level of head of design, leading a team of 14, by the time he left. After a few years at Activision, he moved on to working with New Star Games and Five Aces, where he’s been for the past ten years.
The game he worked on for Activision was the mobile CoD game Call of Duty: Strike Team. Balancing difficulty for that involved a combination of things that may seem obvious, such as enemy health and accuracy, enemy effectiveness at taking cover and so on. As a racing game, New Star GP involves different variables, but the principle is the same. “We knew we wanted different tyre types,” says Dennis. “We knew we wanted fuel load, and for the fuel to affect the handling of the car. We knew we wanted dynamic weather in races. We knew we wanted component damage. The original concept for the career was that you’ll start racing in the 1980s and race all the way up to the 2020s. Each decade of racing will be more difficult than the last one. The tracks will get longer and more technical, the opponents will get harder. And also we’ll make the economy slightly tighter as well. The first decade will be very generous with the money, and it gets slightly tighter as we go.”