Next up in our developer spotlight is Marko who works with game design, programming and AI architecture!
Hello. My name is Marko Permanto. I intend to save the world by making video games.
What do you work with?
I mainly do game design and AI programming, but seeing as we are a small team most of us do all kinds of things to some extent. I also do some level design, some production, VFX, audio programming, and a lot of nitpicking to the detriment of my colleagues.
What got you into working with games?
I knew from the age of 6 I wanted to make video games. I finally figured out how to do some Qbasic programming and make mods and levels to games like Quake, Unreal and Starcraft at age 13, having a blast but never really finishing anything for many, many years. After growing up a bit and reading a lot about what it's like to work in the games industry, considering crunch and other sources of stress I figured I'd only keep making games on my free time. Eventually I grew too bored with "vanligt knegande" (Swedish expression that roughly translates to "regular labour") and figured the stress is worth it. Not sure yet if it is :D. Things I've made in the past include Unmechanical (adventure-puzzle game), and some kids toy apps at Toca Boca (such as Toca Cars, Toca Pet Doctor and Toca Life series).
What’s your all time favourite video game?
Usually the answer to this question is tied to nostalgia, so if I just go with that it's probably Quake, but not for the multiplayer as most people associate it with. For me it was the atmosphere in the single-player. A less nostalgia based answer would be Portal. It's too perfect in ways difficult to distill.
What does a normal day at work look like for you?
I come in to the office with the thought "today I will focus super hard on just doing thing X so it's finally done". It always ends with minimal progress on the thing I planned to do, and bouncing around between various admin-ish tasks, communication and bug fixes here and there. C:
What would you say is the hardest part of your job?
Tough one! I guess balancing what we have time to do versus what we want to do is among the most difficult. Another big challenge for me personally is keeping things coherent in the game, balancing everyone’s ideas and thoughts on how things should work or look. We are keeping things very open for everyone in the team to be as involved as they want in all aspects of the game, which sometimes leads to heated discussions until we reach agreement, which is exciting but obviously tough :)
What’s the best thing about working with games?
Seeing people play what I've made, easily. It's why I do this at all. No matter how enjoyable I find programming, I could never do programming for the sake of doing it, and be satisfied with that alone. It's always about seeing players' reaction in the end.
How can we spot the work you’ve done in-game?
All the behavior of the NPC's primarily, I've worked tightly with our animator Christoffer on making them feel as nice as possible. Gamedesign is harder to pinpoint, as it's like... how things work together with other parts of the game. To pick an example, we have had an inventory system for a long time which works well and people seem to enjoy using, so when it came to designing a system for mission objectives I wanted to use the inventory that everyone is used to and just have all mission related items use the same space, so it's as intuitive to use as possible without requiring any redesign of button layouts or anything. It required a couple re-thinks back and forth as it's quite different from mission objective systems in other games where they usually have dedicated buttons on the controller and/or space in the GUI, while we expect players to sacrifice space they could use for weapons for mission objective related objects. Luckily poking around with items in VR feels so natural and nice that this just fits great in our game. It's worked well in our tests so far, hopefully people like it once we release.
Where can we follow your work?
@UrrePolo on Twitter - I mostly just retweet silly things, with the occasional tweet of my own if I have something silly enough on store.
As always, thank you so much for all of your support! We will be back with another developer spotlight shortly.