CEO of Savage Sea Studios with Megan Marie of Crystal Dynamics.

Today, Train2Game radio Spoke to CEO of Savage Sea Studios, Joanna Janse van Vuuren. Joanna tells us how the studio came together and how an illness led her to the gaming industry.

You can learn more about Savage Sea Studios here.

You can listen to the interview here: http://audioboo.fm/boos/1122380-train2game-student-joanna-janse-van-vureen-talks-to-mark-t2g-radio

Or read the transcript below:

Hi my name’s Joanna Janse van Vuuren, I’m on the Art & Animation course and I live in Brighton.

Hi Joanna, how you doing?
I’m doing great thank you very much.

Excellent. So tell me, what’s your story? What are the past experiences that have shaped your life and made you who you are now?
Uh, well, I’ve got quite a few of them! I’ve always loved Video Games since I was really small. I remember me and my sister got a really ancient Commodore 64 when we were little, we played it on a little black and white TV and then from there we got a PC. We played games like Age Of Empires 2 and Half Life and that’s what really got me in to gaming. From there, in my teens I got more energetic and I found out about Tae-Kwon-Do, it’s a martial art and I really love to kick people! So from there I went to Uni and did a sport and leisure management degree but unfortunately a couple of years in to it I got quite ill. I couldn’t do Tae-Kwon-Do any more because of the physical aspect of it so I spent a lot of time in bed or on my sofa, playing on my Xbox and I could see myself maybe doing something like that. After that I had a few basic jobs when I was healthy again. Shop jobs and call centres, all the kind of basic jobs. I definitely knew it wasn’t something I wanted to do in the future and then the Train2Game advert popped up in the news paper and I applied immediately.

Do you think you would maybe want to make a game about the old Tae-Kwon-Do and stuff?
Yeah, I’ve been considering it yeah but it’s a very fast sport, I’m not sure how it would work so much. I’ve been thinking about it and comparing it to games like Street Fighter and all those types of games because I used to love them when I was little. I think it’s just the violence of those sorts of things I like!

So What would you say the most dramatic or exciting thing you have done in your life is?
I think this entire year has been quite busy for me! A lot of things have happened. I’ve now started my own Tae-Kwon-Do school which gives me a lot of flexibility to work on my own coursework and portfolio and earlier this year which is probably the biggest thing I’ve done so far is me and Philip Stevens, who is on the developer course, have been playing around with a game idea for a while so we decided we wanted to make this game in to a proper product. So we started recruiting for some other students to help us out and that’s when we created our own studio, Savage Sea Studios.

So what’s the game idea you have been playing around with if you can say much about it?
Well we haven’t got a name for it at the moment. It’s still got a jokey code name at the moment which is, Project Trolling. It does have Trolls in it and some other things in it which I can’t reveal too much at this stage but it’s kind of like the old 2D pixel art games but with bringing more of a 3D aspect to the way it looks.

What sort of platform are you aiming for then?
At the moment we are just going to boot it on to the internet and then hoping when that’s sorted, because it’s our first game we want to develop and kind of continue our education of the game making process. So we are just taking it to the internet on your PC and maybe taking it to iPhone or Android.

What are you using to make the game?
We are using Game Maker Pro

How are you finding that?
It’s quite good. We have two developers that’s, Philip Stevens and Luke Jackson and they obviously do all the codey stuff for it and then there is me and another Artist Chris Straver and a designer who is Kieron Baker. We all work together because it’s quite a simple programme for us all to understand and it’s not to heavy on any of the game making process so we find it quite easy to use.

Finally, What is your greatest ambition and where do you want to go with your career?
Well I would quite like to get this game finished! It’s taking us a long while but obviously we have to balance our own jobs and personal lives and our coursework with studio work as well. All of us want to create a studio together where we would all get money and develop it up quite big or work in a big studio ourselves.

That’s fair enough! Thank you very much Joanna
Thank you very much for interviewing me.