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Game Development Geek / Technical Personal Development

Interview with Scott Anderson of Sledgehammer Games

Scott “Impossible” Anderson is an engineer at Sledgehammer Games, having worked on Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and was recently interviewed at We Are Game Devs, a site that highlights the various unsung and underrepresented talent who help create some of the fastest growing interactive entertainment on the planet.

Aside from his day-to-day responsibilities and advice for people who want to learn how to be programmers, he talked about his time as an indie game developer.

He touched on being part of Chicago’s early indie game development scene before his time as co-founder of Enemy Airship, working with Steve Swink on Shadow Physics.

And did that bring back memories!

I remember going to the Chicago Indie Game Dev meetings and Chicago-chapter IGDA meetings starting back in 2005. Reading my blog posts from that time is kind of embarrassing, but I guess that means I have grown.

Back then, Anderson was part of the duo that was Maw!soft, and I remember him as one of the key fixtures in the scene. If there was a game developer event in town, he was likely to be there.

During those years, he always had advice to share, a lot of which I ignored at my own peril, such as his comments on my goal for trying to use the IGF submission deadline as my project’s deadline or that I should release early and often with quick prototypes to find the fun.

I always enjoyed our meet-ups because if there was a fun idea to discuss, it was probably his, such as what a casual FPS would look like.

I hadn’t been keeping track of what the members of the old indie scene have been doing, but every so often I’d see Anderson’s name pop up in industry news, usually with me thinking, “Oh, I didn’t know he was doing that now.”

And now it sounds like Anderson will be working for Funomena soon?

Good luck, Impossible!