Blog Post #2 Meet the Devs: Juha
A Colorful Square and a Dark Vortex: Part 2
This is the second part of our blog on introducing the devs of DOOMBLADE.
[h3]For this post, you will be meeting Juha the Artist!
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[h3]JUHA:
[/h3] I do all sorts of stuff for DOOMBLADE in design and development but my bread and butter is art and animation.
Back home, we always had some sort of computer with games on it. The first we had was Commodore 64. I have a photo of me as a tiny toddler messing around with the C64 while my older brothers were trying to play some game on it - annoying little brother haha! (I have three older brothers and one younger brother.)
I remember that sometimes almost all the kids from the neighborhood (it’s a tiny farmside village in Finland) were at our place gathered around that magic machine competing in Summer Games 2, Hat Trick, Barbarian and other hardcore 1vs1 joystick killer games. I was also fortunate to have access to all the important consoles (nes, snes, megadrive, ps1) as well since always some of the neighbors had bought the latest gaming machine. I think the common interest of my brothers and the neighbor kids towards these machines and the games made me think really early on that it would be super awesome to be able to make a game of my own - some day.
As a kid, I always enjoyed a lot if any game had a level editor or anything similar. Some of my most fond memories is from the time when we were having LAN-parties where we played some of my multiplayer levels for Descent 2 and other amazing multiplayer games.
The very first “game development” experience I had was with a software on C64 called S.E.U.C.K. (Shoot Em Up Construction Kit). It was pretty awesome, as you could draw your own backgrounds and even animated sprites for the characters, though sometimes I did steal some other games’ sprites with a magic device called Action Replay 2.0. The games you could make with S.E.U.C.K. were pretty simple. All you make were shooters where you moved upwards - still, it was amazing fun back then!
So this has really been a life long dream to get to the point where we are at with DOOMBLADE.
I am a 90’s kid who grew up happily surrounded by mindblowing games from the 80’s, 90’s, and 2000’s while watching some sweet cartoons on TV such as Ren & Stimpy and Samurai Jack. I often had the experience that I was good in drawing so it was somewhat natural path to try learn more on game graphics and level design when I was considering my career towards my dream of making games. I think what drives me the most in game development is building the game world that can immerse the player with intuitive gameplay and fascinating environments and characters.
Eventually I graduated with bachelor’s degree in Computer Arts which landed me a job as a Level Designer in a game company here in Finland. I was there for a few years until I saw this opportunity to learn more about game design at Aalto University. I applied there and was fortunate to get in.
There, I met with Kim for the first time. I think it wasn’t until the second year at Aalto when we ended up making a game project together. Somehow the motivation towards making our own games and our skillset met pretty fantastically together. Also, our mindsets complement each other in an amazing way as a team. I think Kim is a colorful square and I’m a dark vortex - a perfect fit!
I can’t remember what could be my first project that I could even call a game. I have pretty much always been working on some never-ending little hobby projects with some game-maker type of software. The first project where I was professionally involved was called Ridge Racer Unbounded. It was pretty amazing to experience such a large scale game project. Our first serious game project with Kim and Muro Studios was Shadow Bug. I think from all the previous work, and especially the ones at Muro Studios, I have learned how important it is to try to prioritize the tasks we still want to make - and most importantly what we still have the time for.
[h3]Please wishlist DOOMBLADE on Steam and give this blog a thumbs up if you liked this blog, and if you have any questions you would like to see answered in later blogs leave us a comment below!
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/922050/DOOMBLADE/
[h3]Stay tuned for this coming Thursday, where we will explore the origins of the world of DOOMBLADE and the inspirations behind it.
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DOOMBLADE Iceberg Interactive