I’m Mikko Tahtinen and I live together with my girlfriend Kirsi in Norrkoping Sweden. I’ve been working with Game Development as 3D artist and environmental artist since 1993, which has given me opportunity to work with various companies.

This has also given me the privilege working in Los Angeles USA for 1.5 years, between 1995 – 1996, which provided a rich experience that I have had great advantage of.

My main concern itself has been to work as 3D artist, where I had an input on design and the look of some parts of the game. My work has also included often testing, evaluating and pursuing knowledge and methods on to colleagues.

Hobbies

I also like to train martial arts especially Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which gives me a lot of pleasure and fun, where I’m also involved as one of MMA coaches. Our martial arts academy is called Primate Lounge where i’ve met some of my best friends and interesting people.

About game development in short

Game development and games in general are developing fast, which mean you need to be alert and follow the fast development with in games. Games are developed with cutting edge technology, where a game has an approximate development time between 1 to 3 years – sometimes more.

The length of development depends on a number of factors, such as genre, scale, development platform and amount of assets.

This requires ability to co-operate but also the ability to work independently. Usually your responsibility is to follow development, be active searching for information and methods for your own professional development.

Games are also a lot of ‘research and development’, which is testing the new ideas and methods. You have to be quick to make an assessment of the methods you work with, and make sure that they are sufficiently fast and efficient.

One way to stay ahead of others is to develop your own tools, which are custom made just for the various projects you work with. This may get you deeply involved in development of tools and methods the studio is using.

Other studios may choose to buy or license a third party toolset or game engine that will suit for their purposes.

A project may consist up to 150 or even more full-time, depending the nature of the product. This means that you must be willing to cooperate, especially when new employees may be introduced, as this could lead to be asked to train or show new employees the procedures by which the project requires.

Mikko Tahtinen