Your name:
Kristofer Björnson
Twitter Handle/ Other Social Media:
@SecondTec on twitter and SecondTech on Facebook
One interesting and random fact about you that people would not necessarily guess:
I once used a Rasperry PI, a battery pack, a webcam, and a little bit of C++/OpenCV programming to build a timelapse camera that I called The Ent. I used it to take time-lapses of, among other things, a plant (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeVlWs3ziBY), a snail (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjzkKCDfxec), and a failed Cavendish experiment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5H1EgVzFMDo).
What country you live/work in:
Sweden/Denmark
The video game company producing the project:
Second Tech
The name of the project:
Polarity Puzzles
Estimated release date:
Autumn 2019
link to website/blog/steam page/Youtube/other:
Website – http://second-tech.com/wordpress/index.php/polarity-puzzles/
Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/dafer45
How did you get into making video games?
I played a lot of video games when I was young. As I grew older, this was successively replaced by an interest in programming. In high school, I wrote my first game, which was a simple snake game for the terminal. I liked both physics and programming, and as I entered the university, I went for physics since I thought the programming would be easier to pick up from the internet.
For the first two years, I did a fair amount of both. In particular, I had an interest in understanding programming from a perspective that was close to the hardware. I, therefore, followed a group of people online as they reverse-engineered the Nintendo DS. Once they succeeded to get custom code to run on the Nintendo DS, I took the opportunity to port my snake game so that it could run on the console. It was a very interesting experience to me at that time, since reading off input buttons and writing graphics to the screen was a matter of setting up pointers to the correct memory locations and reading and writing to those addresses.
I also took a course in Java at the university in 2005, and this was just around the time that the first Java (J2ME) enabled mobile phones came out. As I got hold of my first such phone that Christmas, I immediately began working on Polarity Puzzles. I had an almost complete game already then. The engine, levels, etc. were all there. But it needed to be polished, and at that time it was not so clear how to get it distributed. Eventually, it proved too difficult to combine this with my physics studies etc., and the game was put aside for a long time. This past Christmas, I decided to finally port it to Unity and push it through. (The game was actually already ported once to Android in 2010 and released on the SlideMe market. But the port was quick and dirty and mainly a way to teach me android development. It was therefore not released on any of the main markets.)
What is your background in?
I am a researcher in condensed matter physics, specializing in superconductivity. I am also developing a C++ library intended to simplify setting up quantum mechanical calculations.
Blurb about game:
Magnetic monopoles have for the first time in history been discovered in a scientific experiment. Unfortunately, the particle accelerator used to create them exploded. As a consequence, the monopoles, as well as the quadrupole traps intended to store them, got scattered across the world. Your task is to navigate a remote-controlled robot to collect all the quadrupole traps and restore order to the natural laws.
What inspired this game?
One night late 2005 or early 2006, after having experimented with J2Me on my new phone, I had trouble falling asleep. A game I had played about a decade earlier on NES was on my mind. It is known as Salomon’s Key 2 in Europe and Fire ‘n Ice elsewhere. Somehow, in combination with the electromagnetism course I had just begun taking at the university, I suddenly imagined a similar kind of puzzle as those in Solomon’s Key 2. This is now level 2-13 in Polarity Puzzles. All that remained after this evening was to implement the game engine, create 74 more levels, make graphics, port it twice, …
What makes it unique?
The ability to switch the polarity of things creates unique gameplay where things can fall both upward and downward. This leads to interesting puzzles that sets it apart from other puzzle games out there.
What will make it a success?
The levels are short enough to be played in the queue, on the commute, etc. It also combines visually pleasing graphics with references to electromagnetic concepts and devices that attract those that are curious about science and technology. In short, it’s the game I would have liked to play when I was young. In fact, the game is partly meant to inspire younger players to get an interest in science and technology.
Who do you think it will appeal to?
A logically inclined audience that is interested in classic puzzle games with well-defined solutions.
Number of people working on the project and skillsets:
I have made most of the work myself. Some of the 2D graphics are done by my girlfriend, who has also provided plenty of useful feedback in general. A class-mate from junior high is working on the music.
How are you handling art?
I have made all the 3D graphics myself. Anna Sinelnikova has drawn the 2D images in the main menu (see more of her work at https://www.artstation.com/annasinelnikova).
What tech/stack do you use?
Unity, with Blender, Gimp, and Inkscape for graphics. git for version control and visual studio as IDE for C#.
Are you full-time? If so how did you make the switch to working full-time in game development?
No, I have a full-time job as a researcher.
Is this your first game? If not how many and what other sorts of projects have you worked on?
This is my first game other than games such as snake etc. that were meant as learning experiences.
What’s been the hardest thing about making this game?
When I began working on the game, I mainly saw it as a programming task. But successively I realized that I had to think about graphics, level design, and so many other things that I had no previous experience with. I’m still not really sure how I managed to do all these other tasks. But somehow it was possible to learn to do all these things as they became necessary. However, not being proficient in any of these other areas certainly contributed to the long time between the initial idea and the release. I still realize that there are more things I need to learn, and right now I am reading up on how to do marketing. All the things I have learned are invaluable though, so creating a game has definitely been worth it even if it never had been released.
Anything else you would like people to know about you or the game?
The profit from the game is intended to provide seed funding for a quantum technology project. In parallel with my research, I am working on a library for quantum mechanical simulations (https://github.com/dafer45/TBTK). If the project is successful enough, I hope to be able to use the money to fund further development.
If interested in Beta Testing please email kristofer.bjornson@second-tech.com
The post Interview with a Quantum Mechanics Researcher who is Also a #GameDev and is looking for Beta Testers! appeared first on Gilded Octopus.
