It’s time for our second part in the developer spotlight interviews. This time around we talk to David Hamilton.His title on the contract says programmer, but since we’re a small studio you get to work with many different disciplines. David works a lot with UI and UX as well. He also reminds everyone at the office about new craft beer releases at the swedish alcohol monopoly Systembolaget, at least I think that’s part of his job (he takes beer very seriously!).
Tell us a little bit about you. How come you work with games?
Gamer since forever. My father was very interested in computers so we always were up to date with current hardware in the late 80s and early 90s so I played a lot of PC and we had an Amiga as well. I have never owned a Nintendo console though.
At the time when I started my studies at the university there were not many game studios here in Gothenburg so ended up studying software engineering followed by working with IT in some form at large companies but I always kept the idea of working in the gaming industry. I started learning Flash on my spare time and eventually moved to Unity and built some small game prototypes. Eventually more and more studios popped up in Gothenburg, I applied, got a job and haven’t looked back since.
Dragging and dropping spells into the allmighty Quickbar™, the handy combat companion of every successful Wielder. David obsesses about stuff like this and that is why we love having him on the team!
Tell us about a day of work at Lavapotion
I usually walk to the office. Read up on slack messages. Get coffee. Join the daily pow wow with the coders. Often my days are split up between programming and discussing UI solutions and assets with our UI designer Christian. During lunch some of us usually go to the gym across the street.
Splitting troop stacks wisely is important if you want to optimize the amount of essence you bring into battle. David is making sure that stuff like this works as smoothly as possible.
Do you have any favorite parts of the game that you are particularly proud of?
Effects and UX are key areas I find very interesting and at the development stage we are in right now there is not a lot of that. But I think me and Patrik did an awesome job on the Breath of the Phoenix spell effect. (Magnus note: This spell is a part of the game that hasn’t been shown publicly yet, unfortunately, but I promise we will show it sooner or later!)
What games are you inspired by when working on SoC?
There are many titles that inspire me in different ways. Ori and the will of the wisps and Red Dead Redemption 2 are two recent games that really inspired me by their atmosphere. For technology and effects I really like games such as Dead Cells, Diablo and Doom. Then there are also a lot of games that inspire the UX in SoC such as Total War, Warcraft, Frostpunk, Dota2 and many more.
Part of Davids UX work is to make sure we can tell a compelling story. Here’s an example of how we can stop the gameplay to show story highlights, like certain objects and text.
We get a lot of feedback from fans across Twitter, Discord and this Blog, has the comments and suggestions affected your work in any way?
Yes! There are many good suggestions coming in. The last one I can remember was about hotkeys for transferring troops. Also there are a lot of kind words coming in which is really inspiring.
Thank you David for taking the time :)