People Make Games just got bigger!

Hey, it’s Chris here off of People Make Games. We’ve got some pretty massive news to share today: the team has now officially doubled in size! Please give a warm welcome to Anni Sayers, PMG’s full-time illustrator and animator.

You’ll have seen Anni’s work already in each of the three episodes we’ve published (as well as all of the artwork on this Patreon page), but up until now she’s needed to work on this project around her other job as a designer at Gamer Network, the parent company of Eurogamer.

Although I suppose I’ve been the face of People Make Games so far, this has always been a two-person operation. Anni and I have been dreaming of working together on a YouTube channel that values both journalism and design in equal measure for more than a year now. Finally, that dream is being realised!

We’ve got big, big plans for People Make Games and we can’t wait to show you what we can do with two full-time staff.

But for now, let’s ask Anni some questions!

Hello Anni! Hang on, shouldn’t that be ‘Annie’?

Oh god, I thought this might come up. I wish I had an elaborate story about how ‘Anni’ actually is the name of some Norse god or something. In actual fact Anni is not my name, my name is Annalie, but when I was a child my older sister found my name hard to pronounce and so shortened it to Annie (sorry this is already an underwhelming start). I am also quite dyslexic which means that things aren’t always spelt the same way when I write them. It ended up being spelt without the ‘e’ because after wanting to spell my name ‘Ani’ as a child, my nana explained to me that it can’t be ‘Ani’ because the pronunciation would be wrong.

So the long and boring story is, that it is the most ergonomic way of saying/spelling the name people call me.

So how does your new job work?

I don’t know yet. I know how my old job worked and I know that I like making animations but I think there is a lot about this job that I will find out. Here is a quick summary of how it has worked so far: I am the design side of PMG, so things like the logo and branding are the stuff I’ve worked on. The animated elements in the videos are what I will be doing more of now that I am full-time. This means more time spent chatting to you about an over-elaborate idea for an animation that we only have a day to complete and you then trying to kindly tell me that I might be being a bit ambitious. That seems to be the running theme so far.

My new job also involves hanging out with you more which is nice. Working as a team just helps generally for both the research and the design side. Having someone to share/explain ideas to is a great way of progressing a project. We have taken to the habit of writing script ideas on coloured cards (in that way you might imagine people do in movies or TV shows when they need to pretend they are being creative).

How did we meet? It’s not that I’ve forgotten, I promise.

If I remember correctly you ignored me as I was being given the tour of the Gamer Network offices in Brighton on my first day. You were probably playing XCOM or something. It’s fine. So yes, I started at Gamer Network three years ago as a graphic designer. One of the first in-depth conversations we had was at the pub: you gave me the big pitch on why One Piece is the best TV show ever made.

Can you remember the first project we worked on together?

Yes! You asked me for some help creating a graphic for a developer talk at EGX. You were doing a session where you interviewed Jake Solomon and Julian Gallop, about the past present and future of XCOM (of course). You needed an image that somehow captured that theme and had the title of the talk encorporated. It was really fun!

We recreated the poses of the original XCom characters from the game art, but with the up-to-date character creation tools, managing to find that weird cone hairstyle! The end graphic was the original set of characters and the new set mirroring one another with the same look and equipment. It was a nice moment when I realised that we actually work very well together. We both come from different areas of expertise that has continued across all of the projects we work on which is nice!

Where do you look for your inspiration?

In terms of styling, I am always looking at other designers/illustrators/animators for new and interesting things to create. That sounds very generic but I think it really is the best way of coming up with visual ideas. I can never start a project without a nice reference folder.

I should probably say something more inspiring really… long walks on the beach? Actually I really do like long walks on the beach. Now this sounds like a dating profile. But genuinely, Brighton is good for beach walks. I think I wish I knew what inspired me. I like work and I have good and bad moments of feeling inspired or not. I worry that if I found out what inspires me it would then stop inspiring me, kind of like the fable where a dog thinks that its reflection is its best friend and it makes it very happy knowing it always has a buddy until the day the dog realised it is just a reflection and then that knowledge means the dog is less joyful. I dunno, I don’t think that’s a fable, I think I may have mixed up a few different things there. Also really that dog should hang out with other dogs. That was a terrible example. But basically I don’t want to know where I find inspiration because then I’ll be a lonely dog.

Oh, erm, okay. Favourite episode of PMG so far?

I think mine has to be the Star Fox episode because I loved the game as a kid and also it had a fun animated section in it. In fact that was the first video with a specific section that was entirely animated.

Do you know anything about bookkeeping? Because apparently we run a business now.

You can expense loo roll. I think?