”
Like many people in the video gaming industry, I’m not an early riser. The hours after nightfall are typically extra productive for me.
About 10 in the morning is when I wake up. I grab a quick cup of coffee from our kitchen and ease my way into the work day. I ride the bicycle to work. It is a little bit of exercise and relaxation in the morning.
The first thing I do is check e-mail. If someone is sick or late, it affects the composition and working of the team. I then send three or four e-mails to ensure all parts of the project from the previous evening are moving along smoothly. I deal with animators, artists, programmers, sound and visual effects staff and draw them together. An artist working on a new part of a game may need help from the software programmer who wrote the code for it.
Then I sit down to resolve design issues in a game. I look at everything from the racing speed of the enemy to the color of the car. We cook up different properties, like top speed, acceleration, armor and turbo capacity of each vehicle. This past week I even had the fun job of naming the different types of tires to put on racing cars in the game.
Under my desk I have a Sony tool that has the Play Station hardware and memory connected to my hard drive. I type in commands as I watch the game on a TV screen. I can make different parts of the game appear and disappear, make doors open and close or make the enemy come into sight. I add content to the game this way.
If I discover something that I thought would be fun but is actually not, I remove it. A big part of the job is to be flexible and responsive.
Then we go to yoga lessons at lunchtime. This is relatively new, but it’s like a small vacation in the middle of the day. About half a dozen to a dozen employees attend. There are a number of places around here for lunch. Depending on how much time I have, I go somewhere and grab a little food.
After lunch I do the documentation work for the project. Since the projects are small, it is important to be detail-oriented. I work with spreadsheets and word documents and save any changes to the character profiles in the network. The database can be edited any time by anyone using a Web browser.
I also ensure that no links are broken, information is up-to-date and all documents are bookmarked, so it is easy to locate them. I do this straight after lunch until about 4.30.
After this I walk around the office to see how the jobs we assigned in the morning are coming along. What I usually do is play a piece of the game the person is working on to review any issues like part of the race track being tough or a bad graphic effect.
At 6 in the evening, I go through the list of bugs found in the game and try to fix them. If I can’t, I pass it on to a programmer. Sometimes I am knocking off at 8 or 9 and other times I’m at work until midnight.
My wife and I don’t own a car and so we bike or walk to dinner. We both enjoy Vietnamese food. Echito, a sushi restaurant, is also a favorite. After dinner I hang out with my wife. We read together at night.
”
Richard Lemarchand
Lead Designer
Naughty Dog Studios
Youth:
In the United Kingdom
Education:
Balliot College at Oxford, with degrees in physics and philosophy
Wheels:
Only two a bicycle. Other times uses Flexcar car-sharing service
Daily Commute:
By bicycle to his Santa Monica office
Off Hours:
A passionate photographer who makes music using computer software
