About
My name is Lukas! I am a programmer from Sweden with a passion for games. I love being creative and when Visual Studio is off I spend my time drawing, playing Nintendo games or reviewing Kanji in Anki.
I realised that I wanted to build games for a living when I was little and tried to make my own rom hack for Pokémon Fire Red. A few crappy websites later, an introduction course to Java and 2.5 years studying Game Programming at The Game Assembly in Malmö my dream finally became a reality!
I recently finished an internship at Akribian as part of my education at The Game Assembly, a post-secondary school working closely with the game industry in Sweden. My internship lasted for about 7 months and I got to work with gameplay related systems ranging from AI to quest flows. If you are interested in reading more about my time at Akribian head over to this article.
My education prepared me more than I could imagine for working with a real game. Having built over 8 games from the ground up in larger teams at The Game Assembly I came prepared with a broad understanding of the problems that usually arise when building new experiences. With good tools to tackle unseen challenges I not only got to learn lots from working with Akribian, but I also felt like I could contribute with new knowledge to the team. I have found that being open and putting work into good planning and structure can make or break a project.
Showing your work and being open about struggles helps the team build new ideas and support one another. I find a lot of inspiration and motivation in my team. As an outgoing person I highly value cross disciplinary work because it does not only shed light on sometimes overlooked problems. It provides fresh perspectives on how my code interacts with the team and creates stronger relationships.
If you want to get in touch you can always reach me at contact@lukaslenander.com.
How I got into game development
My dad introduced me to gaming when I was little. He had an original Playstation and I would play Wipeout Racing, Tekken 3 and Digimon World 2003 with my little brother. Years later I got my first computer and tried to figure out how to make rom hack maps for Pokemon.
I wrote my first lines of code after a friend had showed me his first website. He said he had found tutorials on the internet. Like many others I played Minecraft and someone had said it was made using Java. It was nothing like the code I had seen before.
I got my first smartphone and quickly became interested in Jailbreaking and tweaking it to my liking. It was exciting to experiment and to show what I had learned to my friends. I started helping others with jailbreaking and customizing.
I took my first real programming class in gymnasium and quickly realised that making games was more advanced than what my teacher was going to teach me. Through YouTube and other online tutorials I built my first game loop and was building a small 2D RPG. I didn’t understand all of it, but it reminded me of the nights I would spend trying to make sense of building my Pokémon game.
My mom brought me the newspaper and showed me an article about an award winning school for game development. It was located surprisingly close to where I lived. And so I applied to The Game Assembly.
I quickly realised how much bigger programming and game development was than I had imagined. Two years later and with eight game projects completed I was eat, sleep and breathing c++.
After my education I got a 7 month internship at a game company in Lund. My education had prepared me well. To summarize it took two months until everyone at the office had figured out that I was an intern and not an ordinary team member. I truly felt like member of the team.
And so game development was no longer just a distant dream. Today I have the tools at hand to create new experiences and continue learning in a field that is quickly evolving.