So what do we do here at Ludosity? What kind of skills would you need for this kind of prestigous, minimum wage job? Let’s find out!
Gustav, Mattias, Dan and Stefan are the coders, creating everything from gameplay features to file converters, and working out low-level memory managment. Let’s take a closer look at these people’s brains.
Daniel: Please describe in one sentence what’s it like developing for the 3DS. Gustav: Interesting but challenging. Stefan: It’s cool. Dan: Death tractor. Mattias: Is it my turn to have the devkit yet? Daniel: Explain with a metaphor what working at Ludosity is like. Everyone: (Long silence) Daniel: What’s the weirdest thing about one of the games we’re making? Gustav: The source code contains dialogues between us, and a reference to Office Space – not just a random comment, but a part describing the code.
Joel is part boss, project lead, economic department and public relations… a lot of executive things. He’d like to be more involved with the games though. Sometimes mysteriously disappears, and returns with either a publishing deal or bags of fruit.
Daniel: On a scale of having tea to wrestling giraffes, how difficult was it to start up a game company? Joel: Really easy. I didn’t do it myself, it was first started by Arcade and Jesper, and then the team has gradually changed, so it rather fell into my lap. It still doesn’t feel like a “real” company due to our low wages, help from the business incubator and loans. So it’s basically as easy as brewing coffee. Daniel: What have you done today? Joel: Gone to a meeting with a bank, bought snacks, worked on legal documents for our new LLC and put a game up on the website. Daniel: What’s the weirdest thing about one of the games we’re making? Joel: That Ittle Dew’s normal-sized breasts make people mistake her for a guy.
Anton is the artist and produces 2D and 3D graphics and animations, using Photoshop, Maya, and currently Nintendo’s development tools. All day, every day.
Daniel: What does an average workday look like? Anton: I sit here and make a lot of art. That’s all I do. Daniel: How many of our game characters are completely sane? Anton: Hmmm… none? Daniel: What’s the weirdest thing about one of the games we’re making? Anton: Our level editors contain minigames.
Fredrik is in charge of QA (Quality Assurance), and is incidentally also the entire QA staff. The 3DS’s 3D feature gives him motion sickness in ten seconds flat, and he’s currently going through 100 levels and writing down which ones crash, rebooting the console in between each one. Let’s make his life even worse for a bit.
Daniel: Please describe in one sentence how stable our games are right now. Fredrik: Haha… “Not.” Daniel: How fun is your job? Fredrik: Better than any other job I’ve had. QA is fun if you turn it into a challenge to find as many serious bugs as possible. Daniel: What’s the weirdest thing about one of the games we’re making? Fredrik: That the armadillo is impossible to kill. He’s gigantic and there is no escape. If you try to jump, he just follows behind you. He covers the entire screen. It’s impossible.
I (Daniel) am a designer, but it’s a fuzzy word – since I started working at Ludosity I’ve been coding some flash games and level editors (hence the inclusion of minigames in our editors, ed. note) for our games, but mostly doing levels, design documents, prototypes, gameplay ideas, particle effects, gameplay tweaking, menues and menu animation, 2D animation tweening, trailer recording, 2D graphics, some project lead duties and sound editing. And the weirdest thing is how doodles on the whiteboard turn into features and characters in Ittle Dew.
Remar here, ready to tell you about the joys of Nintendo 3DS development! Today Gustav found that the largest factor in our loading times was the loading screen itself, and our new QA guy has recovered from motion sickness after playing our game. Apparently a medical history of motion sickness and stereoscopic 3D don’t mix…
In the graphical department, Anton and I discussed the best way to set a rotating chainsaw on fire. We can’t have clusters of them flying through the air with the fire coming out the wrong end – that would just be embarrasing. For some reason there’s also been an increase of frogs in our concept art and games lately.
During lunchtime and after work, Anton, Mattias and I play assorted fighting games and argue over the superiority of MK9, SSBM, GG:AC, and MvC3, not to mention arcade sticks vs gamepads. It’s the nerdiest time of day, and I think the more “serious” companies in the corridor wonder if we ever work at all. Every time they walk by our room, I happen to be staring at the screen or stretching my arms (such as right now), which probably doesn’t help.
Anyway, developing for the 3DS means a fine balance between interesting use of graphics and plain gimmicks, and in some cases opinions differ. We don’t really “think in 3D” considering that both of our games are 2D, gameplay-wise, so we rather use it as an extra feature. Same with the stylus, it’s just another way to navigate the menues. I may be oldschool, but I think buttons often work best.
Why did we include an Xperia Play in a 3DS post?
That’s it for my introduction – next time I’d like to go more in-depth with one of our games. “Designer” is a fuzzy job title, so I might also just talk about what I do here at Ludosity, and what you can expect if you want to work at a small game studio.
As some of you might know, Ludosity Interactive has teamed up with Daniel Remar of Iji and Hero Core fame, to bring Garden Gnome Carnage to new platforms, starting with Flash.
Me and Daniel go back since we first met at uni 4-5 years ago, and we have worked on several games together. We entered Yoyo-Games winter competition with Garden Gnome Carnage and won 2′nd place! (Beaten by Frozzd by Jesse, who I later made Shoot Stop Lollipop with)
Now we have brought Daniel into our offices to build GGC for flash and it’s already progressed really well! Hopefully we’ll have some vids for you up soon. It’s super fun to work on these fun, small titles, and we hope that it’ll hit the interwebs very soon and blow your minds =)
We are currently working on some new projects that we can’t tell you so much about. When the time has come we will publish it for all you guys. But earlier I wrote about Global Game Jam and I can say that it was really fun! I had a blast reviewing the games here in Skövde and Joel said to me that he had a great time at the Nordic Game Jam in Copenhagen. Hopefully we can publish Joels and his friends game soon when it is more ready.
And for you guys who havn’t seen the Bytejacker show for a time now, let’s watch it! (Yes, we are innit )
Currently we are configuring our website to host a forum and a blog (that’s what you’re reading right now).
Here at the blog you will be able to read what we have to say about ongoing projects, events and happenings. From time to time, developers like me will voice out about stuff that we think are cool for you as a player and a fan to read about.
At the forum you can voice your own opinions, talk with other players and get to know the guys behind the scene better. We listen to requests from players, be it some awesome feature you’d like to see in our next game, or maybe you want to see something new on the website? You are in the center of our mindset, and our ambitious goal is to create the games that you want to play.
