„It’s like counting to a million in your head“

Self-taught multitalent Ulf shares some of the intricacies of game development and talks about the importance of modding.

Thomas aka Ulf is a Norwegian game developer with experience in modding and community management and one of the very first and core Solarbots team members. In the fourth round of our team interview series, he shares his thoughts on the good and bad of Discord server communities, explains the first steps that need to be taken when designing a brand new game – and rummages for his first ever NFT.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background – how did you get your start in your field?

It’s difficult to pinpoint an exact moment. I’d just say I’ve always been a computer nerd, always fascinated with creating and modifying games. When I was 10 or 11, Ir started messing around with RPG Maker. Of course in the beginning it was all terrible, I was a kid, didn’t really know what I was doing. But when I started playing Minecraft at 11 or 12, I took up coding more seriously, I started making plugins and mods. Just twisting things into your own direction. This ended up with me running and maintaining some communities, maintaining servers, plugins, features. Eventually my passion and interest in games led to me studying game development, but I discontinued my “formal” game education after some time. I was never a big fan of doing things the way they’re taught in school. 

I see a pattern there – you just like doing, learning and making things on your own terms.

Exactly. But I kept working and coding and making small games, I kept practicing on my own. I’ve just been making a bunch of small games, smaller projects over the years, some of them overly ambitious (laughs). Eventually, it all adds up to quite some experience. 

What are you working on this week? Can you explain some of the details/challenges that you’re facing?

These days I’m working on the implementation of capital city gameplay. This is a huge task, there are a lot of things to be added before we can have the full experience. And also now – and this is something that is not a necessity for this step, but we have to do it anyway – I’m working on the multiple language support for the game. In game design terms, this falls under “localization”, because it’s a possibility to change the game according to your location. And localization is not that easy, for example, you can’t just automatically translate every button or download language packages. You have to create the language libraries yourself according to your own source material. Even though we’re far from releasing and it’s not an urgent priority, we have to create the general framework now in order to save ourselves work down the line.

I can imagine that that happens a lot in game development – that you have to really carefully think and plan out a part that will only be implemented much later.

Absolutely, it’s like constantly juggling a million things in your head. I always tell people that it’s like solving multiple math equations in your head – and remembering the values of all of them at the same time! Or sometimes I tell people around me that the type of focus you need is like when you’re counting to a million. And when you get to 356 238 and someone disturbs you … it’s a nightmare (laughs).

Can you explain to someone who has absolutely no knowledge: How do you go about developing a completely new game? What are some of the first steps or decisions you have to make?


This is a very difficult question. Let’s start with modding: When you’re modding, you already have your basics; modding is basically like hacking the game. But when making a game from scratch, it all depends a lot on your personal approach. One of the first things you need to decide is the game engine, which will give you the building blocks, and the ways of how to put them together. Some well-known engines are Unity, which is the one we’re using, Unreal Engine, GameMaker, RPG Maker which I already mentioned … or you can also make your own, which I don’t recommend (laughs) because I tried and it’s just so much work. In order to decide on the game engine, you need to have a base understanding of what kind of game you are making, and then you pick the one you find most suitable. Solarbots is obviously a 2D game, which is one of the reasons we went with Unity.  But this is also a little subjective, some people will argue that Unreal Engine will give you just as nice a 2D game …

Ah! I have a feeling this is getting into the territory of classic tech rivalries…

Yes, Team Unreal vs. Team Unity can sometimes be like Team Console vs. PC or similar feuds. 

And then after you’ve made your  – hopefully uncontroversial – pick?

Then you cut your game up into manageable pieces, so to say. For example, the character portfolio is a piece of code that defines the moves of your character. Can your character jump, crouch? Run? Next might be camera movement: Where is the camera, the main perspective of the game? Are we seeing everything from the character’s eyes, or does the camera show the character from behind? Does the view change when aiming? Game design is puzzle piecing these things together. And the complexity of all those smaller pieces means that game design is carrying the tasks of multiple professions. On one side, game designers need to be programmers, but we also need to have a narrative and artistic understanding of the game or else we won’t be able to make informed decisions. Sometimes we are also artists, because it does happen that we have to draw things, for example when there is a time crunch or when something isn’t specified. Then we also need to decide how to implement the artistic parts and make it all work together. 

I want to come back to the topic of modding for a second. Modding has always struck me as an immensely creative way to engage with games, allowing for surprising and almost endless possibilities in creative experimentation.

Modding culture is very underappreciated. It takes a lot of time, thousands of hours even, mods are truly works of passion and dedication. So Minecraft is the most modded game in the world, probably, right? I’m sure I would have stopped playing Minecraft had there not been modding  – the content mostly just ends at some point. But with mods, a game gets a life of its own. There are some mods that are just crazy and change the entire game, then others open up so many new options, it's almost like downloading an expansion.

I do also think that in the sense of ownership over a product and user involvement, mods and NFTs have some similarties.

It's important for games to accept modding and not fight it. We haven't discussed it in detail yet, but for Solarbots, there are plans for players to be able to design furniture and houses and similar parts of the game, for example. I think that's all of that is a huge part of community building, and it expands the game.

Speaking of community building: You’ve also managed some larger-scale communities in the past. What is something you learned from pivotal, tricky – or maybe even beautiful – moments in community management? 

Oh wow, I’m getting so many flashbacks right now, this is really opening a can of worms! Let’s see, it's been a few years, there's so much worth mentioning. So to explain the background: I founded and ran the largest English-Norwegian exchange community on Discord. The inspiration came from me wanting to learn Japanese and encountering channels where you learn in language tandems or just by chatting, daily exchange … So I started a similar channel for Norwegian. The idea being: I teach you Norwegian, you help me improve my English and vice versa. After a couple of months we hit 5000 members, but it only grew from there, and at our peak we had 800-900 active users at any time. My main takeaways are that when you're in the position in leading a community, you have to manage expectations and deal with the fact that not all of your decisions will be appreciated by everyone. You always need to stay humble. It is a tough balance, finding out where you really need to put your feet down because you see your original vision violated, and when to listen and compromise. I made a couple decisions, unpopular decisions, and the reactions helped me learn to be more understanding with members and the community. I remember at one point I was called Mr. Banhammer! (laughs)

But to get to the nice things: It was great to see many people become more and more proficient with the language. A bunch of them got so good that they moved to Norway, worked and studied there. One person even took up a full time job as a developer in Norway. And to think that this was all thanks to the the Discord server!

The one question I ask everyone: Lacrean Empire, Illskagaard or –

Illskagaard of course. It’s more or less based on nordic culture, so there’s no question in my mind!

What was the first NFT you ever owned?

Can I just check my wallet? I don’t know off the top of my head. It’s probably something weird; I’ve been in crypto for a long time and messing around with a lot of different things. (browses for a minute in silence) So one of the earliest things I found is CryptoKitty. A very old project, released during the previous bull cycle of crypto. It was one of the first blockchain games ever made, very basic: You take an NFT and you breed them, then you get a new NFT. Basic blockchain gaming, if you can even call it that. It was from a proof of concept, and I was like: Yeah, why not, let’s try this thing! But I was also early into Axie Infinity, and I have Dreamloops, those are cool – audio NFTs of randomly generated and assorted sounds.

Which future Solarbots development are you most looking forward to?

I can’t say that it will happen very soon because we still have a lot of work to do, but unsurprisingly I am excited for my own work: Capital city gameplay!