SIOBHAN REDDY
While it’s easy to admire the eccentric invention and imagination that forms the foundations of LittleBigPlanet, Tearaway and Dreams, none of these milestone games would exist if it wasn’t for Siobhan Reddy. One of Media Molecule’s five directors, she took the role of producer, marshalling wild thickets of ideas and technology into games which could actually be made, and then ensuring they actually were. And if that wasn’t enough, she also led the studio itself, building its corporate culture and team and steering its growth as not only one of the UK’s premier – and most distinctive – game developers, but also one of its most diverse. After 13 years, all five of its directors still work together, a testament to her ability to thread the needle of enabling sustainable and yet ambitious creation. Here, ahead of a keynote session at Develop: Brighton in July, she talks about how she’s helped to engineer a studio that’s been able to maintain that balance, how to herd cats, and why mucking in with everyone else is crucial to getting a game out of the door.
You both manage the studio and still actively produce games. Those are two very different roles, especially at a company as big as Media Molecule.
Actually all five of us directors are still hands-on. That’s been something that we have all wanted to maintain, because as people we all move between the high level and the granular. At the moment, I am producing the Dreamiverse part of Dreams because I’m down a producer, so I’m actually doing more production right now than I have done in quite some time. And I just love it! I was just saying yesterday, like, I really don’t really want to give it up, but I know I have to. In a normal world, I manage the production team, and I’m very involved in ensuring that we have a plan and that I’m talking through it with each of the producers. Then I always pick up stuff when they need support. If we need bugs to be assigned, I’m really happy to jump in there.
To me, that’s a slightly selfish thing, because it allows me to get into the granularity of the project, and that’s the way that I truly understand the state of it. I try to find ways get in their way sometimes, so looking after the Dreamiverse is brilliant. I’m enjoying it, and the timing of it is really good because we’re all working in this new way, where we’ve got ’ early access launched and we’re working towards regular updates. I feel like I need to understand all this in order to be able to advocate it, and also so I can ask other people to do that job. I don’t like asking anyone to do something that I would not be willing to do, so part of me liking to muck in with the production team is because I don’t want ever to be too far away from them and understanding the reality of their jobs. And it helps me understand the reality and the state of the project.
