I joined Wooga (the second biggest social games developer by DAU as of this writing) as a project manager for mobile games and took over the development of Diamond Dash's iOS version. The game was released in December 2011 for both iPhone and iPad and featured cutting edge virality features like Facebook Connect to allow mobile and Facebook players to compete in tournaments and send requests to each other. Directly after launch Diamond Dash was featured by Apple as the Game of the Week in almost all countries and in total was featured in over 120 countries. The first major update (version 2.0) was launched in February 2012 with re-featuring by Apple and we still continue to develop the game further to increase both DAU and monetization.
As of this writing no official download or sales numbers have been published.
Play it for free: App Store
Launch trailer: YouTube
Villa Penguila is a mathematical puzzle game for kids. Originally I started to develop it for Microsoft's Imagine Cup with Antti Salomaa on the XNA platform. During the years we involved one graphical artist and one audio artist that had a smaller stake in the project. After completing the game on XNA we decided to port it to Unity for a wider reach and implemented some advanced data logging features and user testing to fine tune the balance. With the original goal of making the best mathematical game available to a wide audience (it has been localized to major European languages) met, we stopped developing the game further in favor of our day jobs.
My own role on the game development has been the main/only programmer on all platforms and a co-designer. I have also authored some of the final assets including the official website and community work. It is worth mentioning that this game has been developed (twice!) outside of any educational assignments and to date has been completely non-profit.
*edit: We took the public site down after a possible client was interested in buying the game. Negotiations ongoing.
MediEvil: Defence of the Damned was a game prototype first done for the PSP and then for the PS3 Move during my MProf in the University of Abertay Dundee. During the project we came up with our own concept to pitch for Sony (who owns the MediEvil IP) and got the green light to produce a prototype in roughly 11 weeks. This prototype was very well received and we grew the team to make a PS3 Move version in around 10 weeks. The PS3 version was playable in Protoplay 2011 event and got overwhelmingly positive reception from public, Sony and our mentors.
Video trailer for the PS3 version: Vimeo
Fingamers was an non-profit online service offering free hosting and technical support to Finnish game communities. It was founded by me and a small group of other people who wanted to provide a better user experience to zero-budget gaming communities and clans. Our biggest milestone was one million page views during our busiest week. The service was slowly phased out as we regularly overloaded our servers and had to take steps to spin our communities off on their own servers and our own ambitions moved on to other things (such as higher education and Score). Possibly the biggest and most well known community that was completely build over Fingamers was Runepoli, one of the biggest and highest quality Runescape communities alive today.
Score is an IGDA certified game development club that operates in the Tampere University of Applied Sciences and the surrounding areas. I founded the club in 2007 with the help of my class mates and led it for a few years until other people took over as I moved on to other related community positions. The club itself has been wildly successful with multiple overseas trips and other game development clubs being modeled after how Score was built.
Besides founding and running day-to-day activities within the club, my role has revolved around community development. During my years we tested out a lot of different ways to run the organization, it's projects and outside communication. One of my last actions in the club was founding a (hopefully permanent) network between different development clubs in Finland as well as the co-operative company HighScore. As of this writing Score serves as an excellent launchpad to more serious and professional game development.
HighScore is a co-operative non-profit company that I founded in 2010 with a lot of other people from the game development club Score. The company was joint planned with three other similar companies that were formed to serve as professional launchpads for their respective game communities. I worked as the CEO of HighScore for a few months before leaving to study in Scotland and as of this moment the company primarily serves as a community for serious side projects for it's members.
IGDA Finland is one of the most vibrant and successful IGDA chapters in the world. I served as a volunteer, webmaster and finally a coordinator for a bit over three years. It is hard to nail down what my exact contribution to the community was, but I'd like to believe that IGDA Finland grew to be a more mature and stable with various new internal systems and policies in place to make the daily maintenance less of a pain. For a long time my main role was to maintain and develop all IT systems for the chapter (various web-based softwares) because we were growing out of our old tech really fast. These years combined with my positions in Score, HighScore and Neogames have connected me very well with the Finnish game development scene.
Visit the site: igda.fi
Please consider these examples as a mere demonstration of the scope of all the different things I've been involved in during the past years. In addition to the projects above, I have done web graphics, print graphics, 3d modeling, community development, project facilitation, lecturing on various topics, training workshops, industry reviews, web development, random programming, databases, photography, and game projects including graphics, programming, audio, design and everything else. I've been building dozens of communities and events such as game development clubs, companies, IGDA chapters, LAN parties, game jams, etc.
Listing examples of all this would be pointless but if you are interested, please consider contacting me and we can talk about it the whole day!