Meet the Team — Pétur
For some reason, Directive Games has plenty of people who spent years working in the UK, and while their professional experience was wildly different, they all seem to have developed a common talent: sarcasm. One of these people in particular developed a sense of humor so dense to make the entire office praise his memes, to the point he himself is annoyed by his own creations.
Oh, and he’s also the Houdini Lead at Civitas, but I digress. Meet Pétur Breki Bjarnason!
— Giorgio “Error 404” Crosali
Hello Pétur, can you briefly tell our community about yourself and your professional experience?
I’ve been working at Directive Games for over three years now as a Houdini Lead TD where I’m responsible for all things related to Houdini, workflows, pipelines and so forth. Before that I lived in London where I worked as a VFX artist on major film projects, TV and advertising. My first wife who worked as a Producer at Industrial Light & Magic and I decided to relocate back to Iceland with our son because of Brexit issues and a lack of fermented shark. We are still married.
We often mention Houdini as a key tool for the production of Civitas, which is obviously your main area of expertise. Can you explain to us uneducated people what Houdini is and what makes it so important for Civitas?
Houdini is a fully fledged 3D production software which is most commonly used in the Visual Effects industry, if you’ve ever watched a Marvel movie and seen an explosion or a building being blown to smithereens, by Batman or whoever then the chances of it being created in Houdini are very high. However because Houdini is extremely flexible due to its procedural nature and how it handles data the software can be used for almost anything. We are currently utilising Houdini to assemble our collection of NFT characters and as production goes on Houdini will most likely become a substantial part of the development of the game.
How do you compare your experience working in gaming to the film industry? What do you feel the gaming industry, as a relatively younger industry, can learn from the other?
The major difference is the timescales involved and the lack of so called shot work. Instead of fighting the clock to produce shot after shot for a show where time is allocated usually in days, or weeks if you’re lucky; the development time for tools, assets and visual effects is usually longer and less stressful on the whole (at least here at Directive Games). I say usually because like all creative industries the time sometimes comes when it’s all hands on deck and turnaround time becomes more, let’s say demanding.
The parallels between the games industry and film are many and with each year the line between the two becomes more and more blurred. With the evolution of real-time rendering pipelines the asset work and production is quickly becoming very analogous. I think both industries would benefit from treating their artists and other staff better by addressing life-work-balance in a meaningful way. Thankfully the Icelandic industry is doing a better job of this than many other countries.
What’s your favourite game, and why?
I play a lot of Grand Strategy games especially by Paradox Interactive. I also like Stórfiskaleikur (The Game of Large Fish). In The Game of Large Fish a person (large fish) stands between a crowd of people (small fish) and their goal, the other side of the playing field. By touching the small fish as they run past the predatory large fish converts the smaller fish into big fish and so the game goes on until every last small fish has turned into a larger fish. This is of course very analogous to Nazi Germany who polluted the populace with their nationalist propaganda until the number of those converted reached a critical mass and disaster struck in the form of a World War. I also like Death Stranding.
Last but not least, will we ever see the Bendy Snake Man again?
Do you know the feeling when your mother says, “that’s lit” or “poggers!” and the phrase instantly becomes repugnant and massively uncool?
Do you know the feeling when a politician dabs when cutting the ceremonial ribbon for a new installation of portable toilets?
Do you know the feeling when your grandfather tries a plank challenge and ends up breaking his back, plummeting the whole family into massive debt and general misery?
I haven’t experienced any of these feelings, and yet I feel like this happened to the phenomenon of Bendy Snake Man fairly quickly.
Want to know more about the Civitas team? Check our previous Meet the Team issues on our publication page: https://medium.com/playcivitas/tagged/meet-the-team
