MARTIN MAGNI

I grew up in Nybro, Sweden. There's not much to do there. That never bothered me. I stayed home, playing and making computer games.

After surviving high school I studied Computer Science in Linköping. One book was about artificial intelligence. I was captivated and decided to do a PhD. After seven years of writing incomprehensible logic papers I still hadn't finished my thesis.

Somewhat frustrated I figured there must be something more practical one could do with AI. I dropped out of school to found the startup Boldai. Two friends joined and we set out to build AI tools for games. That didn't go too well either.

Instead we came up with an interesting game concept called Blocksworld. Finally some success! We ended up selling the company to Linden Lab, and working there helped me save up some more money, with the dream of being free to work on my very own projects.

At some point I realized it's faster to spend less than to save more. So I quit the job, moved to a cheap apartment in a small town called Åtvidaberg, and became a full-time indie game developer! Odd Bot Out, Mekorama, and Fancade are all from this period of my life, depicted in the above video.

Fancade and its many spin-offs like Drive Mad grew big enough to require a team! To my knowledge, I was theonlygame developer in all of Åtvidaberg, so I moved back to Linköping to recruit and lead some developers. As it turns out, recruiting and leading are not my strong suits! But with some fortunate help from others, Fancade now has its much-needed team and is still going strong.

Meanwhile I'm working on my first multiplayer thing. A new technical challenge! How hard can it be? (Spoiler: very hard.) Anyway, to find out more, follow me on X, or send me an email!