Neil Duffield - Senior Programmer
Neil began work for Microprose in 1992 and was quickly offered the Lead Programmer position on F-117A, released on the Amiga. He left to co-found the Psygnosis Studio based in Stonehouse, and created much of the core technology used in several popular Playstation titles: Assault Rigs, G-Police, Overboard & G-police 2. He was the Head programmer at Psygnosis Stonehouse and was asked to run the studio for the final few months of its operation. Neil was then involved in founding the Acclaim office based in Cheltenham, involving many ex-Psygnosis staff, where he worked as the Technical Director and created core technology which was used for the release of the studios first title, RC Revenge.
Neil spent the next few years learning the low level secrets of the Psx2 which resulted in some highly optimised engines. He worked for Microprose again while developing a state of the art animation and rendering engine for the Psx2 for Grand Prix 4. He then worked for LT studios (an Argonaut owned Studio) as Head of Technology, where he created yet another suite of technology for the Psx2, Xbox and PC.
Neil then joined Climax where he met Gary Liddon and worked on Psx2 technology demos for product pitches involving EA and Sony. He then left Climax to pursue contract programming, working with Kuju on Terror Strike.
He joined up with Gary Liddon again in July 2005 to be part of the Xen group and work on Crackdown, resulting in an optimal character animation, rendering and behaviour engine, which allowed the game to process and render around 2,000 in game characters. Since then Neil has worked with Xen on optimising other Microsoft games: Too Human and Fable 2, where he provided multiple low level optimisation solutions.
Neil also helped Xen with pitching the technology for their current project to prospective publishers. Xen has now become Ruffian Games and Neil is looking forward to completing their first project.