I’m a 35 year old level designer living in Stockholm. For the past couple of years I’ve been working at Doctor Entertainment with responsibility for the games’ level design. Being only a handful of people have given me the possibility to double up as quality assurance, game designer and community manager as well.
I’m a married, tea drinking dad trying to find as much time as possible to be with my family and to play floorball.
Level design aspirations
Video games have interested me since I first encountered the Intellivision in the basement of my childminder. A couple of consoles and computers later I was overwhelmed when I first played Doom and came into contact with modification programs such as the Doom Editing Utilities. Fighting against friends over a null modem cable in my own levels, with modified sprites and sound effects were simply fantastic!
Since then games have always been more than just entertainment. Cheating by hex-editing savegames, fooling the AI or creating entirely new stuff from editors were often just as fun as playing the games as they were originally intended.
Creating worlds
In 2008 I finally did something about my level design hobby and began studying Level Design at The Garden Xenter. The studies focused on theoretical and practical level design of single- and multiplayer games. The studies ended with 20 weeks of internship – I spent mine at Doctor Entertainment, creating levels for their first game, Puzzle Dimension.
When the Level Design studies were finished I remained at Doctor Entertainment and continued working on the game. When it was released on Steam in the summer of 2010 I had created all of the 100 puzzles and written a great deal of bug reports. A year later the PlayStation Network version of the game was released, all of them gained favourable reception.
Gearing up
Next in line was the multiplayer vehicle shooter Gear Up. The idea with customizable vehicles that fight in online matches was a major step up in complexity. Gear Up has taught me a lot about developing a multiplayer game.
Revisiting the puzzles
During the autumn of 2014 Doctor Entertainment made an iPhone/iPad port of Puzzle Dimension retitled Unpixelate. The development was done in cooperation with DeNA and the game was released on the iOS App Store in January 2015.
Links
Doctor Entertainment Homepage
Puzzle Dimension Steam Store
Gear Up Steam Store
Unpixelate iTunes
The Garden Xenter