IO Interactive's mission to speed up game development | GI Sprint
When Ulas Karademir last worked at IO Interactive, it was a Square Enix-owned, Danish game developer that made Hitman.
He left in 2014, and has since held numerous senior roles at Unity, before joining Crytek co-founder Cevat Yerli to build an engine for distributed development (RealityOS).
Now he's back at IO as the firm's chief technology officer, and he's walked into a very different company. It's now independent, with studios in Malmo, Barcelona, Istanbul, Brighton and Copenhagen, and working on numerous projects, including Hitman, a fantasy game and a James Bond title.
Yet equally Karademir isn't the same. He has learnt a lot over the ten years since he was last at the studio, and is now tasked with looking at the developer's technology to help its teams be more efficient.
"What I am looking at is mostly around production-related things," he says. "Mostly around dev ops, trying to change some of that infrastructure and modernise our software development capabilities. This is currently my interest. And I am also looking at the tools we can make to make the production cheaper, faster and better."
'Cheaper, faster, better' is basically the tagline for our new GI Sprint editorial series. And for Karademir, a lot of this is about being able to iterate quickly, test it and try again.
"When you look at any kind of game development, we still have very classical pipelines that we've been using for the last 20 years," he explains. "We have digital content creation tools that we export to engine, we edit in composite and then we build for a platform. And that pipeline takes time, because iteration speeds can vary a lot depending on what you're working on. So I am looking at how can we bring the content quicker to the end, and how can we iterate faster in production so that we can get feedback.
"In games, you are just trying to build fun. And fun is kind of unmeasurable. It's telling a joke and you don't know if people will laugh. The best way to do it is to iterate faster, test
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