What is your role at MachineGames?
I started out at MachineGames as a Combat Scripter/Designer, which meant I was in charge ofimplementing and making sure the combat experience throughout all the levels were up to the best quality. This involved actually placing and scripting all the enemies in the game’s levels.
I became the Lead Combat Designer during the making of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus where I led a team of combat designers who did all the stuff I had done in previous projects.
I’m currently working as a Senior Game Designer on Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Even though I am not officially titled as a Combat Designer anymore, that’s still a primary focus, workingmainly withenemies and their behaviors in combat and stealthand also still making sure the levels canhandle what we need them to.
When did you join the studio?
I have been at MachineGames since mid-2012, so I have been heavily involved with all ofthe studio’s games to date. It has been a really fun experience to be a part of such a well-loved franchise as Wolfenstein for so long, and now working on an IP of the magnitude of Indiana Jones is something I would never have believed in my early career.
Did you have any past career experiences outside of MachineGames that you’d like to share?
I started my career at Starbreeze Studios where I joined as a Scripter/Gameplay Designer before kind of randomly falling into the field of specialization I have today. I was asked by a producer if I wanted to temporarily put a little extra focus on the combat side of things during the making of Syndicate 2012 by moving my desk over next to the AI programmers, and I agreed to that even though I really didn’t have any aspirations to have that as a focus area. That “temporarily” became a permanent thing when I realized that it was really funand that I was also pretty good at it, and I have no regrets about taking that path today.
Working at Starbreeze also meant that I already knew a lot of the people at MachineGames before I started there, as it was founded by Starbreeze veterans, and also a lot of the other staff also came from Starbreeze before joining MG.
What does your day-to-day look like? Can you speak to something specific about your work on Indiana Jones and the Great Circle that you’re particularly proud of?
My main focus on The Great Circle is AI, enemies and combat, but it’smore of a broad design role rather than focusing on just the implementation side of things. This means that any time you get killed by the enemies in the game, I am at the very least, partially responsible for it, so apologies in advance!
I’ve been on the project since very early on, so a lot of my earlier days working on The Great Circle were spent writing designs for the enemies we were going to have in the game and the specific systems they needed to behave as we want them to. These days when the project is farther along, I spend a lot of my time playing the game and testing stuff out, making notes about what works and what doesn’t work as well as we want it to and also getting my hands dirty in the editor by tweaking behaviors of the enemies and NPCs or going into the levels and making adjustments that are needed.
Something I’m really proud and excited about it how much personality we have managed to inject into the enemies to make them really feel like they would belong in Indiana Jones.They taunt you, they talk to and interact with each other, they end up in slapstick situations during fights, etc.All the things you would expect from the antagonists in an Indiana Jones experience. I think players will be very happy with beating these guys up while feeling like Indy himself in the process!
What is your favorite part of the job?
My favorite part of a project is the beginning when no idea is off the table! It’s a lot of fun to come up withideas and work on them to turn them into something that will make it into the game. Sure, a lot of what gets made during that process never ends up in the finished game, but the things that do are very good, and even the rejected ideas can have pieces of designthat can be brought into other designs to enhance them, so nothing is really wasted during this process – knowing what not to do is as important as knowing what you should do!
Another favorite part of the process is when you get closer to the end stage of a project and all the pieces start clicking together and you start to see what the finished game is going to be and not just a bunch of loosely connected design documents. This is also the time when getting your hands dirty with tweaks really pays off, and even fairly minor tweaks to behaviors or durations can have a huge effect on how enjoyable the game is to play.
Working at MG is really liberating; it’s not a huge studio and everyoneis really approachable and open about what’sgoing on at all times. It makes us as employees feel very trustedand valued, which is very important to keep the morale and motivation up.We’re also given quite a lot of freedom to try out and explore different ideas, and that breeds innovation in the long run.If you aren’t afraid to “go a little crazy” sometimes, then really cool stuff can materialize.
What is something that inspires you about your role?
As a designer, I get to be a driving force behind a lot of features and designs that are going into the games we make.That means that I have tointeract a lot with the other disciplines directly to get their buy-in and hear their feedback on things, and that’s something I love to do! I see the job of designer as less “designing the game for others to make” and more “curating the ideas of the studio to something cohesive.”Designing is a collaborative effort, and that is how you get the best results in my opinion.
What other games or studios inspired you to get into the gaming industry?
Sothere’s this little game called The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (if you know your MachineGames history you might know where this is going). I had never heard of it nor the movies it was based on at the time, but for whatever reason I decided to try it out. Then, during the intro, I quickly noticed that almost all the names in the credit sequence sounded extremely Swedish: Jerk, Jens, Fredrik, Anders, etc. This made me do a doubletake and go “hang on, there are Swedish game developers??!” This jumpstarted my interest in finding out more, and I quickly found that Sweden had a big and very successful game dev scene already back then.
Starbreeze was the company who made that Riddick game that got me on the path to where I am today, and I even started my career working for them. I have worked and am still working with a lot of the people behind those Swedish names today at MachineGames.
What do you think audiences will love most about Indiana Jones and the Great Circle when they get their hands on it later this year?
I think people will be surprised by how much it feels like you are really playing as Indy himself; that has been our goal from the start, of course, but I still think we have achieved it better than we could have ever expected when we began working on the game. This goes for the whole game, and not just the action scenes. It’s there in the exploration parts where you interact with people and puzzles and the story scenes that take place too.
What has been your most memorable adventure in real life?
One of my most memorable “adventures” was when me and my sister hiked along the Vasaloppet trail. Vasaloppet is a very big and famous ski trail that hosts an international competition each year with thousands of people joining in from all over the world. It starts in Sälen and ends in Mora and is over 90 kilometers long. It has a hiking trail that follows adjacent to it, which is what we walked over 3 days. It was more of a personal accomplishment for me as I have never done anything like that before, but I am really proud of having done it!
Is there anything you’ve learned that you want to share with prospective game developers?
Do not be afraid to start out your career in a discipline that isn’t the exact one you have as your future goal! Some disciplines can be really hard to get into without a lot of or any industry experience. One example of those harder disciplines is Game Design as there generally aren’t that many of those working on any given project, so there is going to be a lot of competition to get the roles that do exist. That’s why starting out as something with less harsh requirements to begin might be a good idea. For example, consider going into QA or Level Design, and then learn and grow from there. That way you can perform extremely valuable work while still learning a lot and gaining experience. When I was working as Lead Combat Designer, all of my team except myself came from a background in QA, and there’sa very good reason for that: who else knows a game better than they do, and what works and what doesn’t?
You may even find that you love the discipline you started in to be such a good fit for you that you no longer want to leave it, which could be a great thing for your career and enjoyment of your work going forward!
