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Speaker Spotlight: Game art lead Juuso Mattila reveals how Wargaming Helsinki built 100 tanks with three people

Juuso Mattila will be giving a talk at Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki about building 100 tanks with three people

Speaker Spotlight: Game art lead Juuso Mattila reveals how Wargaming Helsinki built 100 tanks with three people

Juuso Mattila is game art lead at Wargaming Helsinki. At Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki on September 11th to 12th he'll be talking about how to build 100 tanks with about three people. The talk goes through the tools and pipeline developed to make this possible, from concept to animated in-game models.

Click here to get more info on the show and to buy your tickets.

Juuso got his first games job offer at 22, immediately dropped out of university and he's been making games since.

His first job was as a programmer but he quickly realised he wanted to live a simpler life so started 3D modelling instead.

He's worked for a whole bunch of small game companies as a freelancer, and made some games of his own before joining Wargaming a year and a half ago to see what working in a big company is like.

PocketGamer.biz: What does your role at the company entail?

Juuso Mattila: Besides regular art lead stuff, a lot of my time goes into technical art: building pipelines and figuring out workflows to make artists' lives a little easier, as well as writing shaders, optimising graphical performance and making special effects for our games.

What do you think have been the most exciting developments in gaming since the last Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki?

Seeing versions of games like PUBG and Fortnite on mobile is really interesting, both from a technical and design standpoint. Technically it's pretty cool that those games can run on a phone now, and they look really, really nice.

Also, bringing such 1:1 experiences from desktop to mobile goes against how a lot of studios think about phone games. It's gonna be interesting to see if companies can make an original IP with the same type of controls and gameplay.

What are your thoughts on the way the industry has grown in the last 12 months?

At least in Helsinki, the current employment situation is great! People seem to be finding game jobs quite nicely, and the barrier to entry isn't as steep as it once was. It also puts pressure on companies to build good reputations and treat employees right in order to get the best people.

What do you think the next 12 months in mobile gaming are going to look like?

I'm not a game design prophet so I'll stick to graphical things: I think mobile games are gonna keep looking better and better, and it's gonna happen fast.

If you think about it, the Nintendo Switch is a good place to look: it has hardware in it that's essentially phone hardware, and it has some fantastic looking game coming out all the time.

For mostly battery consumption reasons, you can't harness quite the same levels of power from a phone as you can a console yet, but it's a good indication of things to come!

Which part of Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki are you most looking forward to and why?

I've never been before, so just looking forward to seeing what it's about! I always try to look for the nerdiest, most technical talks possible.

About Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki

In a few short weeks the whole mobile gaming industry is set to descend on Helsinki for Pocket Gamer Connects. The event, which runs from September 11th to September 12th, is packed full of talks, tracks, networking opportunities, and more. You can read about the full conference schedule here.

There are still tickets available for the show, and if you click this link right here you'll get all the information you need on how to buy them, and what's going to be happening in Helsinki over the two days.


Contributing Editor

Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.