Train2Game radio spoke to Phil Stevens today who is the Developer for Savage Seas Studios. You can find out more about the studio at their website here: http://www.savageseasstudios.com/

You can listen to the interview here: http://audioboo.fm/boos/1160831-train2game-radio-host-mark-talks-to-student-phil-stevens

Or read the transcript below:

Hello everyone, I’m Philip Stevens. I’m from Paignton and I am on the Game Development course with Train2Game.

Hi Phil, how you doing?
I’m fine thanks Mark and yourself?

I’m very well cheers buddy
Good, Good

So tell me what’s your story? What are the past experiences that have shaped your life?
Well, I have quite a few. It’s a fairly long story that I will divulge in to a shorter one. I didn’t exactly have a good Secondary school life, so I spent a lot of my time playing computer games. I kind of felt it was the direction I wanted to go in, nothing at school really felt right. I mean I.T felt more like an Admin course than it did anything proper. There was no coding involved. There wasn’t even mention of code when I was at school. It wasn’t really until I got to college that I discovered I liked coding and Visual Basic. So when my mate said there was a games course called Train2Game that he’d seen on TV, he recommended I should have a look into it. I called them up and they came around a couple of months later and here I am now.

Yeah I can definitely relate to how you feel about I.T at school. I felt the same way, it really wasn’t anything.
It’s terrible.

What started you off coding then, was it just something you were doing at college was it?
Yeah it was one of the 3 courses we were doing over the terms and I was doing HTML, Visual Basic and Databases. My programming teacher, who was called Lydia, was extremely helpful and she gave me a few extra bits of code on paper for me to do in my spare time really. I got so in to it by the end of it, I was able to produce a game, cheatingly using game maker at the time for the games course. I got so in to it that I just couldn’t stop. I think it was during my second year at college that I started Train2Game as well and I was able to breeze through the advanced programming lessons thanks to the combination of College and Train2Game.

Ah that’s good.  You’re happy that you’ve got in to something you have a proper passion for then.
Yeah, Yeah definitely.

So what do you think is the most dramatic or exciting thing you have done in your life?
Um, in my life, not really much. Joining the course was definitely a leap obviously with so many people saying it’s a scam and all the problems that come with that and you realise oh I have just become part of a scam which thankfully, Train2Game isn’t. That was quite a relief when you do the research and you find out it’s not and you can calm down not worry about it and get back on with your work.

The second thing is what Jo mentioned. Me and Joanna both co-created Savage Seas Studios which is a small indie game studio consisting of Myself, Joanna, Chris Straver, Kieron Baker and Luke Jackson. We currently have one project under way which we are doing in our spare time.

So how did you and Jo meet up and decide to start to do it?
Playing on the Minecraft server that I think Craig Moore started on the forums and that’s how I met Sam Welsh, otherwise known as Indie and Jo and a couple of others. We got talking and we played Xbox a lot together, me Jo and Indie. That’s when we decided to create a texture pack for Gears Of War for Minecraft and whilst me and Jo were working on that we decided to take it one step further than a texture pack and start a studio since we worked quite well together.

Excellent, so Minecraft brings you together to make games together.
Yeah!

Very nice, well I think that’s all we have time for today Phil so thank you very much for your time.
That’s alright, thank you very much for interviewing me.

My pleasure!