James Vigor
Ground Shatter
James Vigor has worked as a programmer at Bristol-based game studio Ground Shatter for five years and has been part of the development team for the door-kicking first person shooter RICO: London, the BAFTA-nominated roguelike deck builder Fights in Tight Spaces, and its new spin-off Knights in Tight Spaces.
James is also active outside of the gaming industry as an author and is working on a sequel to his 2020 science fiction novel, The Reality Exchange. He loves orchestral music, roleplaying games and capybaras.
James Vigor is speaking at the following session/s
Now Do it Again, But Better – Building on the Success of Fights in Tight Spaces
Fights in Tight Spaces is the high-octane action movie of the roguelike genre, combining a striking visual style with deep, strategic deck building. The small team at Ground Shatter were blown away by its success and felt a great responsibility to deliver an incredible sequel to match it. Or to borrow a phrase: Do it again, but better!
Join Senior Programmer James Vigor as he explores some of the challenges the team faced in bringing their flagship game to life, and how they built upon its success for its medieval fantasy spin-off, Knights in Tight Spaces.
In this talk, James will guide you through the process of dissecting the codebase, reviewing its strengths and flaws, and deciding which bits to keep and which to rebuild from the ground up. It will appeal to developers who are working on turn-based strategy games, those about to embark on a sequel to an existing game and anyone interested in more general programming architecture advice. James will share his open and honest examination of his experiences, having been through a full development cycle of both of these popular games.
Session Takeaway
- The importance of having a post-mortem and how to contribute as a programmer
- The pros and cons of rebuilding architecture from scratch
- The lessons we learned from our games that can be applied to other turn-based games
- The importance of putting the power in the hands of the content providers
Session speakers
