Paulie’s Perfunctory Game Dev Website

Video Game Development Since 1981

Hi there.... Well, you've come this far, I suppose I'd best tell you a little something about what I do. Sit back, relax, and prepare for a five minute potted autobiography... Who knows, it may just cure your insomnia! In a nutshell (a thinly veiled potted CV) Paul Hughes, or Paulie to anyone that knows me, popped up on this fair planet some 52 years ago in sunny Wigan, Lancashire. Little did anyone suspect that in less than 13 years time he would be bitten by the computer programming bug that would drag him, kicking and screaming, into the games industry for the next 38 years with no signs of ever growing up! I wrote my first commercially released game in 1981 (yup, I was 13 at the time), and in the ensuing thirty-seven years I've developed well over 50 titles (some of which can be seen HERE). Apart from pure "gameplay" programming I focus a good deal of my time developing and managing cross team, cross platform gaming technologies - the underlying tools and technologies "under the hood" that make the development of the games across multiple platforms so much easier. This enables the development teams to focus on gameplay rather than worrying about the quirks and tricks required to render the pretty graphics on the various consoles. During my Tt tenure, games that I have worked on have sold in excess of 120,000,000 units, and I am humbled and honoured to have worked on five LEGO titles that have had BAFTA awards bestowed upon them. My "big things" are Data Compression, Games System Architecture, Rendering Technologies, and Code & Data Optimisations (algorithmic, cycle counting SIMD and optimal data organisation). I've now got four pending patents, two in the field of data compression, two in the field of computer graphics. Back in the late eighties I found myself at the famous video game pioneer Ocean Software in Manchester working on 8 and 16 bit software. It was here that I serendipitously garnered my first claim to fame; what has now come to be known as the “Ocean Loader”. For my sins, the C64 turbo loader with the flashy loading bars, beautiful loading screens and stunning loading music was all my fault! You can read more about it on my FREELOAD page, where you can also get your hands on all the 6502 source code. For the last 12 years I was the Head of Technology at TT-Fusion, a wholly owned subsidiary of Travellers Tales (which is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Warner Brothers) and home to LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Indiana Jones, LEGO Batman, and a cornucopia of others. Initially for my own amusement, I developed a new high performance, low memory video codec, specifically designed for use in games called "Chroma". It slowly evolved into a bit of a beast having run on fifteen disparate gaming platforms (from Nintendo DS all the way up to High Definition PS4 and Switch) and still looking rather groovy if I do say so myself - one video format to rule them all! To date Chroma has been used on 267 SKUs. I'm still bursting with the same enthusiasm that I had back in the 80's. Suffice to say I don't think I will ever grow up! After three decades of non-stop game development, I’m currently dividing my time between semi-retirement, consulting on new technologies (very high-end VR utilising bleeding edge rendering and simulation technology pioneered in the games industry), and putting some of my code, thoughts, and anecdotes “out there” as a way of giving back to an Industry that has been my home for my entire working life. Hopefully it’ll help inspire the next generation of game developers. Prior to Travellers I was a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Warthog Games, a large independent game development studio that we founded from the ashes of Electronic Arts North West in 1997. When I'm not sat in front of a PC you'll most likely find me performing card tricks, designing big flashy illusions to saw the missus up in, or pretending to be Heston Blumenthal in the kitchen with dry ice! Recently I turned my hand to "impossible" puzzles - sealed decks of playing cards inside unaltered milk bottles and impossibly folded playing cards. Check out my Instagram Page for some of these little oddities.