“I’ve had this idea about using a voxel representation for destructive environments for quite some time, but it wasn’t until about a year and a half ago that I started tinkering with it,” said Gustafsson. Now, two years after sunsetting Mediocre, Gustafsson is getting back in the game design ring and is pushing physics engines and graphics rendering technology further than he ever has before. The title was a runaway success, and Mediocre went on to develop seven more projects, all of them physics-driven, non-violent games that rejected the unethical business models that are rampant in the mobile gaming sphere. Their first project was Sprinkle, a vehicle for Gustafsson’s experiments with fluid simulation.

In 2010, Gustafsson teamed up with artist and level designer Henrik Johansson to form Mediocre Games. When he was 23 he co-founded Meqon and began work on a middleware physics engine that would go on to be acquired by AGEIA Technologies and integrated into PhysX SDK. He’s been programming games since he was 12. For those, we increasingly need to look to the indie scene.ĭennis Gustafsson is a programmer and game developer based near Malmö, Sweden. Since a decade and a half ago, game engines haven’t exactly stagnated, but AAA games have rarely made those kinds of sudden, massive, era-defining advances either. Then in November, Half-Life 2 reshaped the games industry in its own image, partially on the strength of its unprecedented physics simulations. Doom 3, released in August, didn’t quite fit the Doom lineage, but it made for a dynamite tech demo of Id’s advanced new lighting engine. In 2004, two very different first-person shooters differentiated themselves from the crowd with their boundary-pushing technology.

3d demolition physics game