Widunder

Alright, first post. This is going to be a big one probably. But please bare with me.
Album of choice while typing this post: The Project Hate – In Hora Mortis Nostrae

Widunder

First of all, let me introduce myself.
My name is Markus Hammarstedt, and I’m an animator. I currently work at a game studio called “People Can Fly”, also called Epic Games Poland,  in Warsaw. I am currently 23 years old and is in my second year as a professional game developer.
The purpose of this blog is to share my stories and thoughts about my life as a game developer and as an animator. I will talk about my life in general, showing wip’s of stuff that I’ve done and also my thoughts on different subjects withing the game industry.  Hopefully it will be worth a read.

To begin with, I want to talk about how I got into the industry to begin with. Let’s start from the point where I actually began studying something that is related to the industry.

The year was 2005 and I had just graduated from “Upper Secondary School” (as it is called in Sweden) and I didn’t really know what to do. I was 18 years old and I knew I wanted to develop games in the end, but I didn’t know how I should approach my dreams. Then I heard about a College called “GameMaker”, located in Arvika, Sweden. A school that teaches students about game developing. One could learn to be a programmer, artist or producer. I knew right away I wanted to be an artist of some sort since my interest for graphics and art was very big. So I applied and luckily got accepted.

Once there, we got to try out basically everything that had something to do with game related graphics. Modeling (building stuff), texturing (painting the models), animation (making stuff move), designing games, etc. I instantly fell in love with animation. For me it was the most satisfying part of doing art for games. Mostly because I felt that I got a result almost instantly, and also it just felt good making things move the way I wanted them to.

Before the second year, we were asked what we wanted to do. The school believed in students specializing in specific subjects to be as good as they could at what they do. This was entirely correct since this is the way the game industry works. Me and 5 others choose Animation as our subject of expertise. We got to study under an extremely talented Animator that has worked with animation practically before I was even born. Some of his resumé reads Darkwing Duck, Goof Troops, Might & Magic – Dark Messiah, Prince of Persia for the Wii. I learned a very lot from him.

One part of the education was to do internship in the industry. All of the students (of which there were about 40) had to create our own portfolios and send it out game companies along with our resumé and cover letter. It was very difficult to even get an answer from the studios since the application often just gets stuck in a massive inbox with thousands of other applications from other people looking for jobs and internships. And since we didn’t have any experience from before our applications wasn’t exactly the ones the studios looked at first.

In the end I got to do my internship at a smaller studio called Coldwood Interactive. It’s located in the northern parts of Sweden in the city of Umeå. We were 5 people from my education coming there to do our internship, and there was about 9 people working there already. I did my internship as an animator of course. I think I learned as much working there for 5 months as I did during the entire education. It was really fun seeing what it was like working with making games for real.

Coldwood Interactive

During my internship (year 2007) I worked on my portfolio on my spare time, and applied for jobs at different game studios. I didn’t know for sure if I would be offered a job at Coldwood since it was a small company and they had not given me any promises of getting a job after my internship.
I got responses from both FunCom in Oslo, Norway and also from Massive Entertainment in Malmö, Sweden. FunCom is famous for titles such as Age of Conan, Anarchy Online, The Longest Journey and Dreamfall. Massive Entertainment is famous for Ground Control and World in Conflict.

I was invited for an interview over at Massive. So I traveled down south of Sweden to Malmö. I have relatives there and I could stay at their place wich was fortunate. On the day of the interview I was extremely nervous. I didn’t know what to expect. I had never been to an interview before. When I arrived I got to meet the Lead Artist and the person responsible for Human Resources. We sat down in a big meeting room and they asked me alot about me and my time at Coldwood and about the education at GameMaker. At the end of the interview the told me they would be in touch. I was really eager to get a response but I understood I had to wait for them to look things over.

When I got back to Umeå from my interview I noticed that FunCom had mailed me. They wanted me to do an animation for them. It consisted of making an animation of a guy who’re walking and getting hit by a ball in the back of the head. Confused and dazed he stands up and picks the ball up. Looking around looking for the thrower and finding nothing. Furious over this, he throws the ball to the ground and walks away. I got 3 weeks and I could use any rig I wished.

After I was done with this, I got another mail from Massive. They also wanted me to do an animation test for them. Their test was to rig and to animate a marine model with weapon that they had sent me.
I had one week to do it.

Soon after I had sent this in, Massive invited me for another interview. They said I had to meet the producer.
This interview was basically the same as the previous one, except that there was one more person present at the interview, asking the questions.
I was also invited for an interview at FunCom, soon after this one. I was excited about that one as well.

After about one week, I got a phone call from Massive. It was the Human Resources-person. She began talking about that they had looked at the different people they had there for interviews. I instantly thought she was going to say something like “…and we’ve decided to go with someone else….”. But she didn’t! She continued to say that they had decided to give me the job! I almost jumped to the roof of excitement.
So, this was it! I had gotten a job at Massive Entertainment. Finally all of my hard work had given me something back. I was really satisfied.
As I really wanted the job at Massive, I turned FunCom down and didn’t go to the interview. Which I actually regret to this day. I should have looked at what they had to offer as well.

End of Part 1
Part 2 will be about me working at Massive, loosing my job, and getting another one.