Last year I wrote an article for videogame industry trade site Gamasutra entitled ‘The South African Game Development Scene: Past Present and Future,’ which attempted to look at the history of game development in the country and surmise how an industry may rise and move forward here.

The article was based on interviews conducted with a diverse, influential and talented group of developers both from and based in South Africa, but a lot of the responses were unfortunately not included due to the nature of the piece, so in an effort to share this potential goldmine of knowledge with aspiring game developers and gaming enthusiasts, I decided to start posting the interviews here on El33tonline, in full, continuing today with part five, and an interview with Damien Classen (you can read part one, part two, part three and part four at your leisure).

Damien Classen is (primarily) a graphics programmer currently working at ThoroughTec Simulation in Durban, South Africa, after having spent a year at Digital Extremes (co-developers of the Unreal franchise) in Canada working on Bioshock 2: specifically, Classen was a graphics programmer at the company working with the in-house Evolution Engine, while working with the part of the engine that handles rendering on the PlayStation 3.

In order to be working in the realm of graphics technology, Classen studied Computer Science in South Africa and received a Masters Degree specialising in graphics programming, and while tinkering with his own graphics engines and projects (like the brain-teasing puzzle game, Lyntheria), he entered into stints at Durban-based software developers Derivco and ThoroughTec, which lead to an opportunity at Digital Extremes in 2008.

Classen left Digital Extremes towards the end of 2009 and moved back to South Africa to be closer to family and friends, and has returned to work at ThoroughTec.

You can check out Classen’s impressive portfolio of personal work at his website.

Let’s begin the interview:

Continue reading The Lost South African Game Developer Interviews Part 5: Damien Classen