What is your name and what is your role at Lavapotion, in your own words?
My name is Marcus, I work as a software engineer here at Lavapotion.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up working with games?
I grew up in a small town about 40 minutes driving distance from Gothenburg in Sweden. When I was 7 years old I got to play Boulderdash on my older cousins Commodore 64 and I fell in love immediately, both in the machine itself and the games I played on it. A year or two later I got my own C64 and since that moment games have always been a central part of my life. Computer games, console games, pen-and-paper RPGs, board games, you name it I’ve played it. One of my first life goals was to get a job working with games, in my head I would get to play my favorite games all day and in retrospect I would say that I was wrong on that specific point.. Other than that it’s great!
I started to study computer science in 2006 and my university had a game design master track, that choice wasn’t hard at all and here I am 14 years later.
Except for games, I really enjoy music. I feel naked without my headphones playing something for me while I code/commute/.. Also, I fulfill a lot of programmer clichés. I can juggle, I like funny t-shirts, I like memes & my body is basically coffee.
Can you tell us about some of the earlier games you have worked on?
Before starting at Lavapotion, I worked at Ghost Games in Gothenburg where I was part of making Need for Speed Payback and Need for Speed Heat.
How’s a typical day of work at Lavapotion?
I started in the midst of the covid-19 outbreak so I’m trying to keep focus while working from home, drinking a lot of coffee.
Is the any code or features that you are particularly proud of?
I have created a way for us to visualize what decisions our AI takes over the course of a lot of games. We can also break down the decisions, i.e look at early/late game specifically and what resources it had in the bank at the time of the decision etc. You can also drill into a specific game or calculate averages/deviances over a lot of games. This is something that will help us validate that the AI makes decent choices over the course of a game, which is very complicated and time consuming to keep track of manually while playing against the AI.
What is your current focus right now?
Code and tech. I have focused a bit on audio implementation and recently I got responsibility for the AI Implementation.
Which other games are you inspired by when working on SoC?
I get inspired by a lot of games. Recently I’ve been playing a lot of Terraria. The exploration and progression is great, challenging boss fights. It sucked me in quite fast. Other recent games I played a lot recently are Disco Elysium, Faster than Light and Sea of Thieves. All great games in different ways.
Of course Civilisation plays in when it comes to turn based strategy which I’ve played in different shapes since the 90s. How to visualize data in complex systems like that is a very interesting challenge.
We have a lot of people reading our blogposts, commenting on Twitter and discussing the game on Discord. Has our fairly transparent development and open communications with the fanbase affected your work in any way?
Not more than that I get really happy and inspired when I read about people waiting for the game to be released!