I´ve been an employee at North Kingdom for close to 20 years, and on paper, that ends this month. I thought it would be good to do like a post mortem/look back on that as a way to get some closure.
The early years of flash
I joined back in late 2004/early 2005 as a flash developer and the first employee of the company. For the first 6-7 years we were almost exclusively doing flash websites. It was early days of video on the web, so it was a lot of experimenting with that, seamlessly blend video in to websites and make it interactive. Working a lot with smaller film production companies.
We did a lot of “awardwinning” sites back then, started with Vodafone future vision then sites like Get the Glass, Coke Zero, to name a few.
The flash community started pushing towards 3d at that time, with software rendering engines like Papervision, Away3d and so on. Adobe was really slow and late to catch on to that. But the last flash project I worked on was with their realtime tech called Stage3D, was a game called NetGuys for Vodafone Germany, a endless runner type of game.
Realtime is the way
At that time(around 2010) I had already started experimenting with WebGL and javascript on the side. Chrome was just coming out and started to push the performance forward. So I started pushing towards that.
It got us working on Ro.me – 3 dreams of black, which was like a interactive music video using webgl.
For the coming years we did a lot of webgl projects like Build with Chrome, The Hobbit, Google Interland and so on.
My favorites were Build with Chrome, where we did a simple lego building tool on top of google maps, was a really fun, challenging and rewarding project to work on.
Another one was Minecraft Classic, where I did a 1:1 replica of the 10 year old version 0.0.23a_01 of Minecraft running in the browser, including multiplayer via webrtc, for the 10th anniversary of the game.
Towards the end there was a lot of hype train jumping. VR was gonna be the next big thing, or AR. Then it was the Metaverse and then Web3, Nft’s and shit like that… Oh well..
Unreal is the name of the game
The last, probably 8 years or so I started moving towards game engines, first Unity for a few years and then Unreal Engine to be able to work with more highend 3d.
A couple of favorite projects there is the Cult of Luna music video experience, which was both a traditional music video rendered with Unreal and then also a playable game/experience published on Steam.
Another one was a fully functional UI/UX prototype of a “replay editor” for EA that will go in to their Frostbite Engine at some point. Was a lot of fun trying to get that right for both gamepad and mouse/keyboard. Was also made with Unreal.
Overall my favorite parts of this job have been the experimenting and prototyping parts, doing things that are unknown, trying things, failing, learning, trying again and so on.
Then also doing this in teams with great people who are passionate specialists in different fields, figuring things out together. It is such a rewarding feeling when things clicks together.
What’s next then?
For the last 9-10 months we have been messing with a game called Red Metal on the side, it´s a 3d vehicle combat rougelike with large hordes of enemies. Have done a first dev preview where we tested the concept. After that, a pre alpha version that we did some playtesting with. Then we did more of a vertical slice/demo that we showed at Nordic Game in May. Got some really good feedback there. Please wishlist it on Steam!!11!!
For this we are mostly looking for a publisher that can help fund the development and help out with marketing.
If that does not pan out, I might be looking for some work, preferably within tech art, creative coding, game dev, rnd, prototyping, visualizations, installations or similar. Feel free to reach out if you have something along those lines.
It´s been a lot of fun and cheers to the next 20 years!