Hi, I’m Ville Lundberg,

a guy who’s been wanting to be a game developer since he got his first Olivetti M20 personal computer around the age of 10. There was no way to buy games for it due to its eccentricity of being based on a Zilog Z8000 processor which was not Intel-86 compatible. My friends naturally had Commodore 64’s, 128’s, Spectrums, Ataris, and Amigas, so my knowledge of computers included only “they’re for playing” at that time. Alas, I had to learn Basic from my uncle who knew some from his work. I started writing various games with circles and lines (it was more about the game itself, not the graphics at that time) on the marvellous 512×256-resolution black-and-white monitor. Regrettably I had no-one around who would have introduced me to assembler – I would probably have gotten more out of the Olivetti, as well as my future career in computing, in that case.

Still, I’ve got to boast that at the age of 12, while coding a drawing application and optimizing the way of saving those ugly pixellated B&W images to 5.25″ floppies, I seemed to have come up with a format which I recognized only about ten years later as GIF. This was in the end of the 1980’s. I never got a patent or any money out of it. 🙂

The last 7 years I’ve worked in Switzerland as a project manager, business analyst, solutions architect, and quality manager for a company which does software for the financial industry. Sounds fancy, eh, (because handling money, wow, sounds important) but frankly speaking, doing IT in the financial industry is pretty awkward – with some exceptions. I’ll probably return to this subject in some blog posts. I’m not bitter or anything. 🙂

Even though it was the most interesting time of my life, I got bored with the lack of creativity in that field, so I quit. Well, the work situation was certainly not the only driver, far from it – I saw a possibility to make the jump to become an entrepreneur this time for real (I’ve tried it twice already), and simultaneously we – me, my wife, and our two daughters (then 4 and 2 yo) – had an opportunity to buy an awesome 150 year old house  back in Finland. (Yes, that’s old in Finnish terms). We did a pit stop in Spain for two months when moving back up to the north – loved the sun and siesta!

Wednesday 14th of August, 2013. First day when I officially did something for my game development career in my own company.

I’m still on this journey. The master plan is, and has been all the time, to make this a full-time job which both pays my bills and brings joy to me and all the players of my games. Welcome on board – you can follow the story in the blog and on Twitter: follow me (@iFundox) and my company (@sneeweisgames)!