A Colorful Square and a Dark Vortex: Part 1
For this blog we are going to tell you who exactly is behind DOOMBLADE:
Juha the Artist and Kim the Coder.
We will be breaking the blog into two parts, the second part of which will be released early next week!
For the first part, we will be focusing on Kim.
KIM:
I’m the coder / lead designer of DOOMBLADE. I’ve been working with Juha the Artist for quite awhile now. I think our ten year anniversary of making games together is quite close, though I’m totally lost on the exact date. I hope Juha won’t be upset!
But to get back on track, in this blog post I’m supposed to write about myself, not anniversaries. My path in making games started in the nineties when I was in elementary school, but it sort of took a detour after that. When I was in first grade, my dad bought us the 8-bit Nintendo. I was immediately hooked. In third grade, we got a PC and my video game universe greatly expanded.
Soon enough, I was able to make my own video game! I got into programming with Microsoft QuickBASIC and made some text adventure games. I don’t remember many of them at this point, but one was called Mortal Wombat. In it, you played as a wombat challenging other animals to fights. It even had some “art” I did with Deluxe Paint II. So I guess technically it was a visual novel?
Anyway, making games and in particular coding was put on hold for a long time after that. I picked up a nasty on-and-off Magic: the Gathering addiction (that I still haven’t been able to break) right before middle school. After growing up with that and all sorts of video games, I ended up enrolling in university to study Computer Science. There I really learned how to code.
By the time I got my bachelor’s degree it finally hit me - I should try to make video games for a living. For all of my life before then, for some reason it never even entered my mind as an option. But now I was at a point where I knew how to code and all I did was play games, so it just felt obvious that I should try game development.
Luckily for me, there was a master’s degree program for game design in another nearby university. And even more luckily, I was able to get in. This is where I met Juha. It didn’t take long for us to start making games together. And, all of a sudden, we had set up a company and had even managed to release some games!
DOOMBLADE is by far our biggest and most ambitious project to date. In our earlier games, we had started experimenting with new mechanics of combat and movement in platformer games. DOOMBLADE is where all that experimentation culminates.
I’m really happy with the way we are changing the way you play a metroidvania with DOOMBLADE. I think this is what drives me most as a game developer - finding entirely new ways of playing, even if the game genre is quite established. I can’t wait to be able to share DOOMBLADE in its entirety with you! We have been making this game for so long and we are almost there!
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.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/922050/DOOMBLADE/
Stay tuned for early next week, where we will dive further into getting to know Juha the Artist in the second part of this blog!
DOOMBLADE
Iceberg Interactive