Gaming Blog – The Shockwave Spark

Welcome to the very first edition of Inside Shockwave on The Scoop.  Every day the team here at Shockwave is working on how to make the website, games and overall experience the most fun and functional they can be for you.  We’d like to invite you to get to know us, and what goes into making Shockwave the place where you’re free to play!

Today we’ll lift the curtain to shine the light on the mastermind behind our great online content… Cam Daly, Director of the Shockwave Games Studio - and a man of many talents.  In between thinking about and playing games all day, programming Klingon ships and impersonating Sean Connery, Cam found some time to chat with The Scoop.

The Scoop: Thank you so much for talking the time to talk to Scoop readers today!

Cam: My pleasure!

TS: Can you please de-mystify what it is that you and your team of producers do out here at Shockwave?

Cam: I work with a wonderful team of producers, sharing the hard job of making fun and playing games all day! I know, it’s tough, but someone has to do it.  That someone is a “producer,” who is really a jack of all trades (and hopefully a master of a few).  To be a producer, you need to have a thorough understanding of the design and creation of games so it helps to be a gamer. Producers deal with almost all the different departments in the company - sales, finance, engineering, legal, marketing and of course the site team - so they need to be good communicators as well.

TS: So how long have you been masterminding content here at Shockwave?

Cam: I’ve been with the company for almost five and a half years, but didn’t start “masterminding” it until a couple of years ago.  I first started as a Producer and worked up to my current position as Games Studio Director.

TS: That is quite a climb! Can you share with us some of the most memorable experiences along the way?

Cam: Definitely.  In our first office space back in the “old days” where we had fewer people in less space, the Engineering and Operations guys used to blast music on Friday afternoons when things were all under control and set up for next week.  There was more than one spontaneous sing-along to Journey or Boston.  I’ve never experienced that at any prior job!  On the business side, the first time we had a single game get 500,000 plays in one day (Drift n Burn in June ‘07) was amazing. The realization that we have had some games that are played just as much as $20 million console titles is crazy and great.

TS: Wow, that is quite amazing!  Did any of the Friday sing-alongs ever inspire any Shockwave content now or concepts for the future? 

Cam: We actually considered making some karaoke type content but it has never done well on the web so we decided to invest elsewhere.  We’ve been discussing ideas about party time management but haven’t made any decisions yet.  There is a whole field there of common experiences which are relatively untapped in the game industry.

TS: Well, I hope that Shockwave will tap into it soon!  So did the dream of being Games Studio Director make your heart sing as a little boy?

Cam: I’ve been a gamer for my entire life and started making simple games in junior high… The first one I made with a friend was the Enterprise against a Klingon ship. The whole game was written in BASIC (a programming language) and just consisted of these two blocky outlines of ships moving past each other.  You had to hit the space bar at the right moment when you were lined up to shoot them before they shot you but it became very predictable. Over the years since then, I have made quite a few games while at different companies but have discovered that you can only do so much as a single programmer.  I made the transition to being a producer when I came to Shockwave and have found that I prefer working on games from a higher level. Now that I am a Director, I can influence the development of dozens of games in different phases of development and help plan the next generation of content. So to answer your question, when I was a little boy I didn’t know enough about the possible career choices in game development but have been happy to get to where I am now!

TS: Looks like you’ve been in games ever since the early days.  What has been the strangest job experience that you’ve had along the way?

Cam: That’s an easy one! At my second job out of college, I worked on games and multimedia pieces for museum exhibits.  The company that I worked for got a huge job at the new Petronas museum that was opening in the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I was the lead engineer and was sent to Malaysia for the final install, only to discover that the technology integration company which was doing work that connected to our exhibit Macs had made some terrible choices.  I ended up being stuck in Malaysia for 11 weeks during a series of political protests which showed up on CNN.  So each day I would turn on the T.V., see the images of the burning cars and water cannons being used on protestors, then look out my 20th floor hotel window and see the smoke rising from that same action a couple of miles away.  That was also when Sean Connery laughed at my Sean Connery accent.  But that’s another story.

TS: Oh, I love Sean Connery!  We will need to devote a whole other to that story to do it justice.  So you like to impersonate celebrities, but if you could actually be a video game celebrity, who (existing or yet to be created) would you be?

Cam: Technically, I’ve already been in a video game but I am fairly certain that nobody ever saw me.  When I worked on a NASCAR racing game a few years back, one of the artists put head shots of all of the staff member into the game as flaggers, pit crew or track side officials. I think I ended up being the guy who carries the spare tires…  For a while I used to do “collaborative story telling” with some friends (like playing Dungeons & Dragons except with no rules, dice, boards, etc) and one of them is now a successful Hollywood screen writer.  So when he gets around to writing the movie about the stories that we told, I’ll be in them.  At that point I’ll be the shadowy character who knows more than anyone else about what is going on, but can’t ever be contacted due to plot reasons.  It will, of course, be a mega hit and become a video game.

TS: That’s great; you are truly a man with a plan!  So speaking of plans, can you shed some light on the great content you have planned for Shockwave in the future?

Cam: I don’t want to promise anything which I can’t deliver on, but we are working on an incredible slate of games!  There will definitely be more of Sara and her Spa, Carrie will return and Blocky will be back!  On the action side we have a few racy surprises up our sleeves.  Before Bed (recently launched) is the first example of our “Family co-play gaming” strategy which allows a parent and child to play the game together with controls and interaction appropriate to their skills and maturity.  All of this is just to whet your gaming appetite… there are lots of games that I cannot talk about yet but they are really juicy!  We will keep releasing great games for our audience to play and enjoy but always love new ideas, so please let us know if the gaming creative genius strikes you!

TS: Do you have any final words that you would like to share with the readers of The Scoop?

Cam: Take time to get to know your fellow Shockwavers (Cam’s Shockwave profile), and be vocal - we want to hear what you like (or dislike) about our content as we strive to make more fun and games!

TS: Thank you for joining us today, we’ll let you get back to making games.