First, a quick introduction. What’s your name, and what do you do?
I’m Andreas Rønning, and i’m a developer at Creuna Oslo, specializing heavily in Adobe Flash, something i’ve been doing professionally since 2001. Prior to that, i dabbled in Flash animation since 1998. You could say Flash is a pretty big part of my life.
And who are you off-duty?
I’m an electronic musician, rum & vodka enthusiast, obsessive cat lover and huge video game nerd.
What got you started doing what you do?
My dad returning from New York in 1989, bringing me my first personal video game console; The Nintendo Game Boy. It promptly made me skip piano and choir classes, obsessing about games like Super Mario Land, Gargoyle’s Quest, R-Type and Zelda. Very early on, i figured out what i wanted to do in life was make games. I would sit in class at school making cardboard cutouts of gameboys with scissored holes along the sides of the “screen” through which i could pull strips of paper to make “levels”. As i grew older, and my computer game experience grew, i got into the game modding communities for games like Marathon on the Mac, and Doom, Duke3D, Quake and Unreal on the PC. These let me change existing assets around, but the threshold for actually making something new and involved felt nearly insurmountable at the time. I discovered Flash in highschool during a misguided stint into webdesign, and saw that it let me produce content and interactivity rapidly with a fairly good result to effort ratio. I pushed on, and landed a job making kid’s games for an ill-fated 2001 dotcom, and i’ve been doing Flash fulltime ever since.
What have your greatest inspirations been, and why?
Video game developers. There is an absolute wealth of information out there to be found in online discussions, published whitepapers and interviews, covering every possible aspect; From physics to controller polling, 3d rendering, sound processing, real-time networking and university-level mathematics. If you want to broaden your horizons as an interactive developer, i can’t think of a better community to join.
Have there been any paradigm shifts in your career?
Having an object oriented epiphany. Understanding the fundamentals of OOP and applying them shifted my focus squarely away from design/animation and over to programming. When ActionScript3 came around and let me take that knowledge even further, doors were opened to other, similar languages, such as C# and Java. It’s been amazing.
If you could change one part of your industry, what would that be?
The Flash community is wonderful. The way Adobe responds to it has been less so. If i could change anything, i’d make Adobe more transparent and susceptible to suggestions. When platform agnostic Flash gurus like Joa Ebert throw presentations showing home-made SWF optimizers implementing techniques standard to other compilers that Adobe have omitted, and Adobe have no good response, you start to wonder. They have been much, much better in recent years however, and i’m fairly positive about the future.
What is a perfect day on the job?
A full night’s sleep, a warm cup of Earl Grey, good loud music through a closed headset and time to experiment.
What’s your favorite piece of music?
Currently? Tim Hecker’s entire ‘An Imaginary Country’ album. Of all time? Arvo Pärt’s ‘Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britton’
What’s your favorite book?
I’m a huge Lovecraft fan, but his novellas have been less awesome. I’d have to go with ‘Maldoror’, by Comte de Lautreamont.
Who is your daddy, and what does he do?
Any parting words?
The Scandinavian model of 5 days of misery at work and 2 days of fun is insane. It should be 7 days of fun, on and off work. More fun! If you’re not having fun, you need to identify that problem and do something about it. Life’s too short.
If you can stomach the occasional foulmouthed opinionated rant, my personal site and blog can be found at http://www.doomsday.no. You can also follow me on Twitter. Also IRC. But we don’t talk about IRC, do we :-(
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