Spotlight On: Arkadium's Julia Detar

"Spotlight On!" is going to be a new regular feature on the site that will allow all of us to get to know the passionate students, talented developers and professional companies which make up the New York game industry even better. Spearheaded by NYCGI's core feature writer, Matt Waldron, we hope you'll enjoy these unique insights into the world of your peers.

For now we're going to leave the format pretty open-ended and have decided to kick things off by interviewing one of the quirkiest and most creative developers in the city, Julia Detar. Originally hailing from Cleveland Ohio, Julia is currently resident artist and programmer at one of the city's premier studios, Arkadium, Inc.

NYCGI: What's it like working in gaming in NYC?

JD: We have it pretty great!  There are a lot of small gaming companies and we all seem to work together. We have drink nights, board game nights... we're all competitive, but at the same time it's as though everybody can still hang out with everybody else. It's a very co-operative environment.

NYCGI: Can you tell us a bit about your typical day at work?

JD: I don't really have one for me in particular, because at Arkadium, I'm both an artist and a programmer... so I never know if I'm going to be doing art-related tasks or programming-related tasks... most of the time I'm switching back and forth between them. I work on a lot of projects at the same time.

NYCGI: What do you like best about working at Arkadium?

JD: I love my co-workers a lot! The whole environment is pretty cool. Everybody is super-nice and we all cooperate and work really well together. Even as we've been growing like crazy, everybody that comes in is really well incorporated into the whole environment. We don't really have "groups" of people.

NYCGI: Groups? Like cliques? How do you think you've been able to avoid that?

JD: Yes and I don't really know! I think it's both people trying to mingle with other people all the time, and the fact that we have really happy employees. It's also nice at Arkadium because we have a lot of creative freedom over the things we get to work on.

NYCGI: Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean by creative freedom?

JD: With a lot of the internal stuff, we have a whole process of pitching a game, and coming up with an idea. Even if we don't come up with the process entirely, the artist will still have a lot of creative freedom over it.

NYCGI: Who pitches the idea?

JD: Anybody! It can be anybody - it could be a salesperson, marketing, an artist, a designer. You have to write it up and present it of course, but the option is always on the table.

NYCGI: Can you tell us a bit about working on the last game you published?

JD: The last game we put out was a Yahtzee-like matching game for AARP called 5Roll. I was the programmer. It was my first Actionscript 3 game. It was kind of frustrating at first (at the time I was trained more as an artist than a programmer). The big difference between Actionscript 2 and Actionscript 3 is that Actionscript 3 is a much more object-oriented programming language. But using it was definitely for the better.

NYCGI:  So, what was your favorite game growing up?

JD: My parents thought videogames were evil, so I didn't really have them growing up. I didn't really get into video games until I got to college and my roommates had an N64. And at that time, I wasn't even thinking about it as a gamer; I was thinking "This is really cool art!" in this whole post-modern art context. But actually, I did have one computer game - Myst. And the whole time I was playing it, I wanted to make Myst. I just kept thinking how cool it would be to make my own world!

NYCGI:  What are some of the tools/skills you use in your current role?

JD: We're primarily a Flash-based game company, so most of our developers work in Adobe Flash. We use Flash-develop as our IDE and of course we use 3Dstudio Max and Photoshop for art. These are mostly the tools of our trade.

NYCGI: So, what do Arkadium guys and gals do for fun?

JD: Every time we launch a game, we play crazy songs and blast them in the office as we dance. And then of course we have Starcraft tournaments... I'm pretty bad at being the zerg, but they are cute! We also have lots of whiteboards - our whole office is covered with whiteboards - and we'll have a theme for the week. For mine it was "Julia's quest to find the unicorns" so people would draw this whole story of me trying to find the unicorns... this week we have "Draw Jack Bauer as the Bachelor."

NYCGI: Sounds like freeform game design! What advice do you have to give for anyone looking to break into the industry?

JD: Network - definitely. It's a very good way to meet people and figure out what kind of skills you need and what you should hone in on when looking for a job.  I was very lucky to get a GDC scholarship in my last year of school, which allowed me to have a mentor who introduced me to everyone in the industry.

NYCGI: Did you always know that you wanted to do this?

JD: Actually, I always wanted to be a farmer! *Laughs* But after art school, I knew I wanted to make Flash games, so I taught myself Flash and presented a game I had created.  I'm very interested in doing serious games. Those are really important, especially for people with learning disabilities.

NYCGI: Are there any major developments in the industry that excite you?

JD: Going to GDC last year was really exciting, because a lot of the games that won awards were very indie style games. A lot of small Flash games are really breakthroughs in game design, being a lot more experimental, and seeing that they are able to be profitable is very exciting. The environment is right for a lot of indie people!